MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by with | 2026-02-02 02:17:49+00:00
The metaphor is broken. The snowball grows passively over time naturally, but being a founder requires you to actively create value in your startup. Snow doesn't choose to stick to your ball based on PMF, and the entire piece romanticizes grinding without once mentioning customers, revenue, or whether you're solving a real problem people will pay for.

I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. Some might say "duh, of course", but I still think a lot of people don't understand this.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-02 02:17:59+00:00
> It is possible for the human species to exist without cigarette smoke

Yeah, and it's possible for it to exist without whatever pleasures you enjoy too that I don't approve of. I'm sure I can invent some twisted, self serving reasoning to justify why your activity should be banned, as I don't like it, and my judgment is better than yours.

> It is not possible for the human species (or any form of mortal biological life) to exist without children.

No, but some people's kids we could do without. Especially the ones who want to ban everything.
by chadcmulligan | 2026-02-02 02:18:01+00:00
It's always the same, for a field that has so much money the amount of facts or examples is strange. I can't help but think there's a lot of something going on. Business guys converting excel into python scripts doesn't seem like a good idea to me, the room for error is huge.

I would love to see just one example from one of these companies of - Here's an application we want to build, here's the prompts we use, here's the output, here's the application. You'd think this would exist.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-02 02:18:43+00:00
Fixed wireless would offer more consistency than 5G residential service, as the 5G service is lowest priority on the tower and a way to squeeze more revenue out of the network and spectrum.

Due to how few units there are, your options are fairly limited unfortunately. You might try bonding together ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile 5G Home service with a compatible router if there are no other options. It’ll cost ~$120-$140/month, but you’d have diversity that might improve the overall experience. When done natively vs using their 5G home devices, this is referred to as “cellular carrier aggregation.”

https://www.openmptcprouter.com/
by decafninja | 2026-02-02 02:19:12+00:00
There are a few topics that illicit this kind of response. I've lived in apartments/condos ever since I moved out of my parents' home, and living through Covid in an apartment was the nail in the coffin. My wife and I decided we would not live in a shared building again - at minimum, we'd only look for places that have a private entrance.

Based on the behavior of real estate in our area (high density suburbs of NYC), I don't think we're the only ones? Condo prices have either fallen or remained static while SFH have skyrocketed.
by stavros | 2026-02-02 02:19:26+00:00
I generally agree with you, but I tried to get it to modernize a fairly old SaaS codebase, and it couldn't. It had all the code right there, all it had to do was change a few lines, upgrade a few libraries, etc, but it kept getting lots of things wrong. The HTML was wrong, the CSS was completely missing, basic views wouldn't work, things like that.

I have no idea why it had so much trouble with this generally easy task. Bizarre.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-02 02:20:05+00:00
Yet Australia’s obesity rate is around or worse than that of most of the Western states, Minnesota, Missouri and Illinois [1][2].

I don’t think land-use policies are the main cause.

[1] https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data-and-statistics/adult-obesit...
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-02 02:20:20+00:00
> I don’t know, I’m not the one smoking. That’s their problem to solve.

And this is exactly the problem. YOU are the problem. Your attitude is completely selfish and obnoxious, like your own concerns and value judgments should be the center of the universe. You are completely incapable of compromise, which is a necessary part of getting along with others.
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-02 02:20:46+00:00
The clearest example is the state of California preventing insurance companies from increasing annual premium when risks increase. Please understand I have no political opinion about this. As a result, a lot of insurers have completely withdrawn and now its not possible to insure houses properly for many people.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/27/state-farm-h...

With no government intervention, the price of all fire insurance in California would increase materially to reflect the genuine risk of wildfire damage.
by rayiner | 2026-02-02 02:22:39+00:00
You shouldn’t make an assumption in either direction. There’s clearly a racial aspect to life expectancy—east asian countries tend to have higher life expectancy than other countries with similar GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-un-vs-gdp....

Your argument about access to healthcare based on race doesn’t make sense either. Hispanics in the U.S. live longer than white people, despite having the highest rate of lacking health insurance.
by overgard | 2026-02-02 02:22:52+00:00
I guess that's one reason. If I'm perfectly honest I always turn Siri off because I don't trust Siri either; but that's less of a "malicious actors" thing and more of a "it doesn't work well thing". Although to be honest, outside of driving in a car I don't really want a voice interface. With a lot of things I feel like I need to overspecify it if I have to do it verbally. Like "play this song, but play it from my spotify Liked playlist so that when the song is over it transitions to something I want" (I've never tried that since I figure siri can't do it -- just an example)
by dangus | 2026-02-02 02:23:01+00:00
Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine.

Look, face it, Time Machine is not really what Apple wants you to do. They want you to buy cloud storage and just store your documents (desktop and documents in iCloud Drive) there. Photos are in the photos app. Etc.

Maybe they should make a Time Machine cloud service to help them justify putting time into it just like iOS has cloud backups, which work incredibly smoothly. But it’s also possible macOS has too much baggage for that to work (then again, migration assistant also seems to work great.

Long story short, if you want this you probably should be working with a third party, something like tossing $5 a month at backblaze backup.

I’ve moved away from Mac and I’ve been having a great user experience with Pika backup, although it’s not quite analogous to Time Machine. Still, my Linux distribution is immutable, so backing up my home directory is pretty much the whole thing.
by troad | 2026-02-02 02:23:04+00:00
Contrapoint to the naysayers: building infrastructure is good actually, and in this specific case, has had the added side benefit of unearthing these cool artifacts that would otherwise still be decaying in some peat bog.

British NIMBYs seem unusually strong, even in a world of NIMBYism. Best wishes to the British in defeating the Midsomer Historical Society of Bat-Loving Cranks, which apparently controls the deep state over there.
by johnrob | 2026-02-02 02:24:39+00:00
I’ve done this in pure Python for a long time. Single file prototype that can mostly function from the command line. The process helps me understand all the sub problems and how they relate to each other. Best example is when you realize behaviors X, Y, and Z have so much in common that it makes sense to have a single component that takes a parameter to specify which behavior to perform.
It’s possible that already practicing this is why I feel slightly “meh” compared to others regarding GenAI.
by Soerensen | 2026-02-02 02:24:39+00:00
I'm a non-technical founder who built an entire SaaS frontend using v0 and Cursor over the past year. My experience might be useful here since I'm on the extreme end of "vibe coding" - I genuinely don't understand most of the code I'm shipping.

What surprised me:

1. The "you don't understand the code" criticism is real but misses context. I don't understand the implementation details, but I understand the system architecture, user flows, and business logic. That's enough to make good decisions about what to build next.

2. The iteration speed unlocks something new. I can try three different approaches to a feature in the time it would have taken to spec out one. This changes how you think about product development - you learn through building rather than planning.

3. The bottleneck moved from "writing code" to "understanding what you actually want." The conversations I have with the AI force me to be precise about requirements in a way I never had to be when just thinking about features.

Where it breaks down: anything that requires deep technical judgment about performance, security, or scale. I can build the feature, but I can't tell you if it will hold up under load or if there's a subtle security issue. I need technical people for that.

The "20k LOC weekend" stories are selection bias, but the productivity gains are real for certain types of work. The key is knowing which type you're in.

Source: non-technical founder who built a production SaaS frontend this way
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-02 02:25:09+00:00
> Depends on what your definition of "hard" is - I routinely come across engineers who are frustrated that "AI" hallucinates. Humans can detect hallucinations and I have specific process to detect and address them. I wouldn't call those processes easy - I would say it's as hard as learning how to do integration by summing.

My students don't seem to have a problem using AI: it's quite adequate to the task of completing their homework for them. I therefore don't feel a need to complete my buzzword bingo by promoting an "AI-first classroom." The concern is what they'll do when they find problems more challenging than their homework.

> I have stumbled across very few software engineers who even know what unicode codepoints are and why legacy ASCII string comparison fails.

You are proving my point. If the programmer doesn't know what Unicode is, then the AI's helpful suggestion is likely to be ignored. You need to know enough to be able to make sense of the AI beyond a superficial measure.

> That's a very large logical jump. If we went back 20 years, you might come across professors and practising engineers who were losing sleep that languages like C/C++ were abstracting the hardware so much that you could just write for loops and be helpless to understand how those for loops were causing needless CPU wait cycles by blocking the cache line.

We still teach that stuff. Being an engineer requires understand the whole machine. I'm not talking about mid-level marketroids who are excited that Claude can turn their Excel sheets into PowerPoints. I'm talking about actual engineers who take responsibility for their code. For every helpful suggestion that AI makes, it botches something else. When the AI gives up, where do you turn?
by Soerensen | 2026-02-02 02:26:16+00:00
The honest answer: 90% of marketing is consistency, not brilliance.

What's worked for me:

1. Be genuinely helpful first. Before you promote anything, spend a month just answering questions in communities where your users hang out. Not pitching, just helping. This builds credibility and teaches you what people actually struggle with.

2. Build in public. Share your process, not just the finished product. People love following a journey. Weekly updates on LinkedIn, a Show HN when you hit a milestone, short posts about what you learned.

3. Email still works if you do it right. Collect emails from day one. A simple "get notified when we launch" form captures people who are actually interested. Then nurture them with value, not spam.

4. The 100-user challenge. Instead of trying to reach everyone, focus on getting 100 people to really use and love your product. Those 100 become your advocates and do the marketing for you.

5. Don't spend money on ads until you can articulate exactly who converts and why. Ads amplify what's already working. They don't create product-market fit.

The pessimistic comment about marketing being dead is half-right. Lazy promotion is dead. But genuinely helping people in the right places, over time, still works.

Source: former Head of Growth at a fintech company
Show HN: VOR – A verified runtime with 0% hallucination via observations
by CULPRITCHAOS | 2026-02-02 02:26:24+00:00
Hi HN — sharing a system I’ve been building that takes a hard line on hallucinations.
VOR (Verified Observation Runtime) is a minimal, auditable runtime for QA and tool-based reasoning that refuses to answer unless the answer is provably grounded in observed evidence.
Key properties:
0% hallucination (enforced, not tuned)
Explicit ABSTAIN / CONFLICT / ANSWER outcomes
Deterministic evidence chains (hashable, replayable)
Strict parity: baselines and verifier see identical observations
Witness-green: anyone can reproduce results from a clean clone
What this is not:
Not AGI / not alignment theory
Not probabilistic “confidence scoring”
Not a chatbot replacement
What it is:
A runtime you can put under LLMs, agents, or retrieval systems
A way to turn “trust me” outputs into “prove it or abstain”
The public repo is intentionally small: kernel + CLI + demo packs.
Private components (corpus builders, generators) are explicitly excluded.
Repo: https://github.com/CULPRITCHAOS/VOR
Witness instructions: in docs/WITNESS_RUN_MESSAGE.txt
I’m specifically looking for:
Repro attempts on other machines
Adversarial inputs I missed
Critiques of the proof/abstention model
Happy to answer technical questions.
by kalleboo | 2026-02-02 02:26:45+00:00
I think there's definitely something with that specific setup. For me, pinging between two cheap Realtek 2.5 GbE USB dongles (one is on a Mac one is on a 7 year old Intel Atom Synology) is still sub-ms (hovering around 0.7-0.8ms) so it's not an inherent problem to USB dongles.

USB itself can have a lot of issues anywhere in the chain. I have a Thunderbolt dock where half of the USB ports adds latency and reduced throughput just because the USB chipset that powers them is terrible (it has two separate USB chipsets from different brands). Switch to a different port on the exact same dock and it's fine.
by frankensteins | 2026-02-02 02:27:10+00:00
This is an open source chrome extension to evaluate ingredient on Amazon, Kroger and other online stores using LLAM3.2

BYOK - You can improve the evaluation using your own LLM API key.

You can host it yourself. I used Opus 4.5 for most of the implementation.
It’s local first and privacy first.
MIT licensed.

Let me know what you think
by maccard | 2026-02-02 02:27:15+00:00
> If you see something of extreme value it is not your job to allocate time and resources to it?

Have you ever had the situation where a kid is good at something, and the parent latches onto it and stifles whatever good was coming out of it in the first place? IME with these people, the freedom _is_ the key to the success. The minute you start to bring other people in to help, they lose their baby, and their interest.

Also; The best person is already spending time and resources on it, and they did so without me needing to tell them to do so. They're doing fine without me.

> Is is that unexpected that you would "get in the way" of bad ideas? And let me get this straight, a bad idea comes your way, you do something, a good idea, you do nothing?

I dunno, I guess it depends on how you would expect me to respond to bad ideas. Even a bad idea can have some merit, and I always want my team to talk to me. Flat-out rejecting their misses isn't how I operate, as there's a reason they suggested the thing they did. Maybe they read about a new build tool, and we don't need a new build tool. Next week they might read about a new test approach, or a new game mechanic and we _do_ need one of those. The most important thing is that they talk to me next week, and the next week.

> So at the end of all of that, what it boils down to is that you would do something? We're going to call it "making space" but I feel like that means it's at the top of a list of things you are making sure happen yes?

I'm not really sure what your point is here, sorry. If you're trying to pin down "what exact action would you take in the hypothetical situation that a high performing engineer comes to you with an unspecified item of extreme value" from me, I think I'm destined to miss the mark for what you're looking for. I think I've been clear - my job is to let high/excellent performers do excellent things, and if they're already doing that then my job is to just let them keep doing it. The real hard part is getting everyone else to _not_ go on tangents because they think they're a wolf.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-02 02:27:28+00:00
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/11/...

https://cancer.osu.edu/news/a-new-face-of-lung-cancer-is-eme...

https://www.mskcc.org/news/lung-cancer-in-women-and-nonsmoke...

https://www.dukehealth.org/blog/lung-cancer-young-and-middle...

https://pressroom.cancer.org/releases?item=1262

https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/well/prevention/young-wom...
by oceanplexian | 2026-02-02 02:27:49+00:00
I have an AMD Epyc machine with 512GB of RAM and a humble NVIDIA 3090. You will have to run a quantized version but you can get a couple tokens per second out of it since these models are optimized to split across the GPU/RAM and it's about as good as Claude was 12 months ago.

Full disclosure, I use OpenRouter and pay for models most of the time since it's more practical than 5-10 tokens per second, but the option to run it "If I had to, worst case" is good enough for me. We're also in a rapidly developing technology space and the models are getting smaller and better by the day, ever year the smaller models get better
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-02 02:29:36+00:00
> Conversely, on tasks requiring strict sequential reasoning (like planning in PlanCraft), every multi-agent variant we tested degraded performance by 39-70%. In these scenarios, the overhead of communication fragmented the reasoning process, leaving insufficient "cognitive budget" for the actual task.

> As tasks require more tools (e.g., a coding agent with access to 16+ tools), the "tax" of coordinating multiple agents increases disproportionately.

This aligns well the principle of highly cohesive, loosely coupled design for software components. If you instruct the AI to design this way, it should result in components that're simpler to reason about, and require fewer sequential steps to work on. You can think of cohesion in many different ways, but one is common functions, and another is tool/library dependency.
by exidy | 2026-02-02 02:30:31+00:00
Partly it was an anti-Wobbler thing. Someone in America or somewhere thought it was real clever to make the game ask you little questions, like “What’s the first word on line 23 on page 19 of the manual?" and then reset the machine if you didn’t answer them right, so they’d obviously never heard of Wobbler’s dad’s oﬃce’s photocopier.

-- Only You Can Save Mankind, Terry Pratchett, 1992
by m463 | 2026-02-02 02:31:15+00:00
this reminds me of steve wozniak's TV Jammer prank:

About 50 people were watching a basketball game on a big set with a rabbit ears antenna.

Or were trying to. Every few minutes the picture broke up. It was so bad that a tall guy was permanently stationed next to the set, endlessly fiddling with the knobs and the antenna.

Especially the antenna.

...

https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2011/03/01/jammin-woz
by prodigycorp | 2026-02-02 02:32:10+00:00
I'm extremely wary about any application pushing politics.

I subscribe to MacPaw, who makes excellent apps like Setapp, Gemini, and CleanMyMac, all of which I use.

At some point, CleanMyMac started putting the Ukranian flag on the app icon and flagging utilities by any Russian developer as untrustworthy (because they are russian), and recommended that I uninstall them.

I am not pro russia/anti-ukraine independence by any means, but CleanMyMac is one of those apps that require elevated system permissions. Seeing them engage in software maccarythism makes me very, very hesitant to provide them.
by gruez | 2026-02-02 02:32:10+00:00
>This is also why update signatures should be validated against a different server; it would require hackers to control bother servers to go undetected

No, it should be a hardcoded key held by the developer, preferably using a HSM, and maybe with some sort of notification capability in case the key was lost. Adding a second server adds marginal security. For instance if the developer's mail was hacked, an attacker would likely be able to reset passwords for both hosting providers.
Show HN: Distillmed – NotebookLM for Expert Witnesses
by hkxer | 2026-02-02 02:32:24+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Haneef. A former SWE and current med student.

I build Distill to automate the process of doctors generating expert witness statements. I know this sounds insane, but hear me out.

When doctors are asked for second opinions on cases (like for insurance, workers comp, etc) they have to read 1000s of pages of text. Often this takes weeks and the files are barely legible documents from multiple different offices and claims companies.

We're HIPAA compliant and we hyperlink all claims to the original source doc. We also pull in info from state specific laws (of course, every state is different because America) and reference those.

It's a little more than RAG, since we have to add some specialized domain knowledge like taking into account specific insurance coverage data and medications/PT treatments to create disability scores.

My founding partner is a doctor who uses this really often and we've gotten out to a couple other doctor's office now, and they're loving it.

Hoping to expand to larger healthcare complexes as we go.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-02 02:32:31+00:00
> I don't drink coffee. And even if I did, caffeine is not a drug that spreads to others in the air they breathe.

No, it's much more insidious. It amps people up like crack cocaine or methamphetamine. It's a real killer--people have died from it. That's why the U.S. military absolutely bans caffeine use during basic training, for example. It's a really dangerous drug that should be controlled. The people pushing this poison should be behind bars. Think of the children.
by mmooss | 2026-02-02 02:32:42+00:00
I'm not talking about skills at all and wasn't thinking of H1B. I'm talking about low-skilled people who come here with nothing and to build a life. They don't have much to cover indigent nephews, especially if they are undocumented.

I have no reason to think nephews are any different. The 'welfare queen' narrative has long been used by those opposing public benefits (one source dates it to 1974 and says Ronald Reagan used it) but they never substantiate it. IMHO it's blaming the victim - is there any data saying poverty is caused by laziness? The data I remember atm says, 1) (from decades ago) people move in and out of the welfare system; they don't tend to stay in it, and 2) (much more recently) the leading cause of homelessness is medical bills.

> NYC ... Canada

Some of the most economicly dynamic places on earth. New Yorkers credit immigrants for a lot of that, as has much of America (until very recently).
by vunderba | 2026-02-02 02:32:57+00:00
Nice job. Very strongly reminds me of Aseprite [1] (an offline pixel editor) which also takes a similar approach of layers of frames that can be animated.

The onion skin approach to toggling the number of +/- frames was a nice touch as well.

Recommendations:

- Quickly play/pause the animation with the spacebar

- A separately detachable thumbnail preview to get a high-level view of your current work.

- Overriding the delay on specific frames

[1] - https://www.aseprite.org