MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aidenn0 | 2025-11-26 16:59:53+00:00
Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it.

The redesign also reflects their priorities. The best analogy I can come up with is imagine a small group of people maintaining an old car frame and mechanical workings. They work hard to keep the engine running, but it's in a chassis with leaf springs and direct steering. It also has lots of vestigial things like a hand-crank even though most people have been using an electric starter for years. Other people use this as a platform to make complete cars with body &c. but this is both too much and too old for the small group to maintain themselves.

So they build a new, more modern engine and wait for other people to build a car around it, which is more sustainable amount of work for them. Lots of other people complain that the engine isn't a car, and when they use the engine with one brand of car, the brakes don't work and when they use it with another brand of car, the steering doesn't work. This makes sense, since previously the underlying platform implemented much of those, but now it doesn't and everyone is figuring out how to build those and couple them to the new engine.

Eventually you reach the point where each brand has created its own brakes, suspension &c. that mostly work about the same, but the only actual common component is the engine now. That's about where we are today.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-11-26 17:00:33+00:00
The price of clean water is at least an order of magnitude less than the price of electricity, but the cost of creating a water grid is probably more expensive than the electricity grid.

You will notice that many of the countries with unsafe tap water also have electricity reliability problems. If the economics of electricity don't work, then the economics of safe water don't work at all.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-26 17:00:37+00:00
If someone shows up with a testosterone level of 700 you can (and should) explain that low testosterone is not the explanation for whatever they’re suffering from.

The TRT clinics are ignoring levels or even not testing at all. They’ll find an excuse to prescribe to someone even who has clinically high levels because they want the monthly recurring revenue from keeping that customer for life.
by gruez | 2025-11-26 17:00:37+00:00
>The difference is that’s an open market. When rents change off market, going up at the end of the year for example, that information isn’t available to market participants.

1. How is this any different than other sorts of transactions that occur on a recurring basis? For instance dog walking services or personal trainers? Such vendors are also presumably pricing their services based on what everyone else's pricing is, but any subsequent price changes aren't public.

2. Under current competition law, whether something is an "open market" is irrelevant to whether a given pricing strategy is illegal or not. Collusion doesn't magically become legal because it's done on the open market.
by carlosjobim | 2025-11-26 17:00:47+00:00
There's a whole bunch of apps for invoicing, but if you try them, you'll see that they are excessively complicated. Probably because they want to cover all bases of all use cases. Meaning they aren't great for any use case. Like you say.

The invoicing app in particular I was referring to is Cakedesk. Made by a solo developer who sells it for a fair price. Easy to use and has all the necessary functions. Probably the name and the icon is holding him back, though. As far as I understand, the app is mostly a database and an Electron/Chromium front-end, all local on your computer. Probably very simple and uninteresting for a programmer, but extremely interesting for customers who have a problem to solve.
by idiotsecant | 2025-11-26 17:00:52+00:00
Your point is that the hacker ethos involved ... Fewer people being excited about programming? I don't think we experienced this on the same planet.

Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI. The wrong turn we took was letting business overtake joy. That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-26 17:01:35+00:00
Nuclear power plants usually only cost about twice as much as projected in phase II planning. IT projects are sort of open-ended. Interestingly, the simulator I was involved with (many decades ago) at a nuclear power plant came within about 10% of initial projections. The last "scan uploads for viruses" project I worked on was about 20x - 40x more expensive than projected. (Unfortunately the person who suggested we just pay a third party for this service was fired.) The bit with projecting cost and schedules for nuke plants is to ignore any initial costing and multiply the phase II planning estimate by 2 or 4.
by joestrouth1 | 2025-11-26 17:01:50+00:00
Put me on a C++/asm project and I'd have a hard time making heads or tails of it. So what? Your comment comes off as very angry without any meaningful critique of the article's central topic other than you had a hard time understanding it.

1rem is equal to the same number of pixels anywhere on a given page and, generally speaking, across pages on a given site. If you don't know what the value is it only takes a minute to find out. If you're writing CSS that'll be used on unknown pages, you either a) shouldn't care and just scale relative to whatever root font size the consumer set or b) should set your own size/scale, at build time or with custom properties. REMs have been around and standard practice for 10 years.
by ragequittah | 2025-11-26 17:02:09+00:00
I set up opnsense and xcp-ng. The idea thay I now don't understand those front ends is absurd. I'd already learned the underlying networking and Linux stuff years ago I just needed to know where the right nibs are.

And you can easily learn deeply with AI just ask it deeper questions. I do this all the time. I did this several times in this network setup when I did encounter something I didn't understand. If you aren't curious you won't learn, if you are you'll learn faster than any other method out there.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-26 17:02:27+00:00
No, they wouldn't. On Youtube, for example, videos were consistently trending longer over time, and you used to see frequent explainers (https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-video-extra-long/) on why this was happening and how Youtube benefits from it. Short-form videos are harder to monetize and reduce retention, but users demand them so strongly that most platforms have built a dedicated experience for them to compete with TikTok.
by pixl97 | 2025-11-26 17:02:52+00:00
Why are we crafting code?

Simply put most industries started moving away from craftsmanship starting in the late 1700s to the mid 1900s. Craftsmanship does make a few nice things but it doesn't scale. Mass production lead to most people actually having stuff and the general condition of humanity improving greatly.

Software did kind of get a cheat code here though, we can 'craft' software and then endlessly copy it without the restrictions of physical objects. With all that said, software is rarely crafted well anyway. HN has an air about it that software developers are the craftsman of their gilded age, but most software projects fail terribly and waste huge amounts of money.
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-11-26 17:03:00+00:00
Right now its just a tool you can use or not and if you are smart enough, you figure out very quickly when to use a tool for efficency and when not.

I do not vibe code my core architecture because i control it and know it very well. I vibe code some webui i don't care about or a hobby idea in 1-4h on a weekend because otherwise it would take me 2 full weekends.

I fix emails, i get feedback etc.

When I do experiemnts with vibe coding, i'm very aware what i'm doing.

Nonetheless, its 2025. Alone 2026 we will add so much more compute and the progress we see is just crazy fast. In a few month there will be the next version of claude, gpt, gemini and co.

And this progress will not stop tomorrow. We don't know yet how fast it will progress and when it will be suddenly a lot better then we are.

Additionally you do need to learn how to use these tools. I learned through vibe coding that i have to specify specific things i just assume the smart LLM will do right without me telling for example.

Now i'm thinking about doing an experiemnt were i record everything about a small project i want to do, to then subscribe it into text and then feeding it into an llm to strucuture it and then build me that thing. I could walk around outside with a headset to do so and it would be a fun experiemnt how it would feel like.

I can imagine myself having some non intrusive AR Google and the ai sometimes shows me results and i basically just give feedback .
Show HN: MightyGrep
by zeeeeeebo | 2025-11-26 17:03:00+00:00
A program I used stopped getting updates, so I made my own version of it. It's a fast plaintext search utility in a GUI. It's great for finding text in code projects, log files, configs, anything plaintext! Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Free version limitations are a splash screen and limited history entries.
by bArray | 2025-11-26 17:03:05+00:00
The ESP32-P4 [1] could be interesting for running native Linux [2], but as the article suggests it was supposed to be released in January 2023. We're now approaching January 2026 without a final design [3].

I believe there is a strong market out there for a low-level Linux capable controller with WiFi, Ethernet, USB host, etc, capabilities. The USB itself would be especially killer - imagine being able to just load the appropriate kernel driver for a USB device and being able to communicate with it directly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32#ESP32-P4_-_January_2023

[2] https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=45499

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1ilyjpe/when_will_th...
by mothballed | 2025-11-26 17:03:11+00:00
I see you've disregarded I used past tense in regard to his 'railroading' and then changed the tense, which I find underhanded. To bring it to a more plain level, he , at a prior time, under his more notable POTUS bids, ran on the Democratic ticket.

What's also worth pointing out is that the person Democratic upper echelon nominated, without even a primary, the last election was someone who did so abysmally in the popular primaries that she was at single digit percents yet magically got installed as the POTUS contendor without even a a vote. When you consider our voting system is set up that writing a candidate in is essentially throwing your vote away, a popular primary does not even happen (imperfect as it may be), in practice the two parties are operating as bureaucrats of in-party members who are giving you a choice of two people that represent the in-party elite albeit with some different kinds and volumes of scraps tossed to the general populace.

And for the most part, our founding fathers warned us of exactly this.
by bootlooped | 2025-11-26 17:03:33+00:00
When I'm selling something used, and I look at prices for other listings, I'm competing with them. I want to have a price that is attractive, given the landscape. I'm not messaging all the other sellers and suggesting we all raise prices by 10%, or having an algorithm run by a third party service do that indirectly.

RealPage made it so that landlords were less competitive and more cooperative. Landlords would share proprietary information and then RealPage would help them all set prices collectively. It's just old fashioned price fixing with a SaaS and an algorithm.

So the difference is using pricing info to beat your competitors vs using pricing info to collude with your competitors.
by noisem4ker | 2025-11-26 17:03:36+00:00
For RDP, you've got KRDP and gnome-remote-desktop.

That "with a running session" bit greatly helps here. While GDM allows you to have remote login and headless sessions [1], with SDDM you're locked out for the moment. There's plans to turn SDDM into a KDE-powered, more featured plasma-login-manager with KRDP integration, but no concrete development yet [2].

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop

[2]: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-login-manager
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-26 17:03:41+00:00
We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs.

I'm tempted to say "You're not helping," as my eyes roll back in their sockets far enough to hurt. But I can also understand how threatening LLMs must appear to programmers, writers, and artists who aren't very good at their jobs.

What I don't get is why I should care.
by thunky | 2025-11-26 17:03:53+00:00
> Once the visual model is good enough to look at the screen pixels and understand, it will instantly replace junior devs

Curious if you gave Antigravity a try yet? It auto-launches a browser and you can watch it move the mouse and click around. It's able to review what it sees and iterate or report success according to your specs. It takes screen recordings and saves them as an artifact for you to verify.

I only tried some simple things with it so far but it worked well.
by hermitcrab | 2025-11-26 17:03:58+00:00
>Frustratingly, the IT community stubbornly fails to learn from prior failures.

So far I believe that there has been too much emphasis in education on coding and algorithms (small scale/tactical stuff) and not enough emphasis on the engineering side of things like version control, QA, system design, management etc. I think the situation has changed (40 years ago most professional programmers didn't even know what version control was, let alone use vc systems) but the scope of the projects has increased faster than our skills and tools.
by lunar_mycroft | 2025-11-26 17:04:05+00:00
> Right...so you fix it from the safe code, because the safe code is in charge of using from_raw_parts correctly.

No, you fix it from the unsafe code (just not your unsafe code, since the API you're trying to expose is not possible to make safe). You encapsulate the arguments to from_raw_parts, provide a safe interface, and only manipulate the encapsulated data inside other unsafe blocks.

> This might just be a difference of semantics between us, but I really don't see how you can arrive at that conclusion. Just remove the function entirely and let's use from_raw_parts directly. The bug is literally not in unsafe, it's when we drop the vec after making a slice from it.

I think you're correct that semantics are at the core of our disagreement. Specifically, there are three different possible ways to answer the question of where a bug is:

1. Where the bug manifests a problem (produces an incorrect value, segfaults, etc).

2. Where the bug is directly caused.

3. Where the incorrect code is.

In the code you provided, 1 happens at the println, 2 happens at the drop, but 3 happens in the unsafe block. All your safe code is correct according to rust's memory safety rules rules (which is why it would pass the borrow checker), the problem is that by using an unsafe block you promised to uphold those rules yourself, and have failed to do so.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-11-26 17:04:09+00:00
It's not forced if you were getting it all for free anyway and can walk away at any time. "They've stopped giving away old thing for free and are now only doing new thing" doesn't put you in the position of a captive who has no freedom. You can complain, you can develop your own solutions, you can leave, but I find it over the line the number of people in the X11/Wayland conversation whose position amounts to looking at people who are working for free, and demanding that they do a specific kind of free work without compensation or help. It's all people working on their free time, or companies sponsoring the developments they need. It's hard to make demands as an end user who isn't paying or even helping.
by Sesse__ | 2025-11-26 17:04:49+00:00
At the time when the Slashdot effect was at its peak, the limiting factors were probably RAM or bandwidth (third-party services was not as much a thing, and CPUs were generally able to push 10 Mbit/sec without much of a problem -- but 10 Mbit/sec Internet lines would be a luxury). Like, you could reasonably host Apache on 16 MB of RAM on a 2 Mbit/sec line for your hobby site with a couple of photos of your car or whatever, and then ten thousand people would come along at once and find it interesting, and your site would be dead for a while.
by fatbird | 2025-11-26 17:04:54+00:00
I keep thinking about how, 20 years, 3D printers became accessible for tech/price, and there was a lot of talk about how we'd all just print what we need (pretty much like in Stephenson's book Diamond Age), and you'd get rich selling digital patterns for material goods.

Instead, we got the elevation of the handmade, the verifiably human created, typified by the rise of Etsy. The last 20 years have been a boom time for artists and craftspeople.

I keep seeing AI slop and thinking that all this will do is make verifiably human created content more valuable by comparison, while generative AI content will seem lowbrow and not worth the cost to make it.
by signatoremo | 2025-11-26 17:04:58+00:00
I think it’s a textbook example of HN skimming through the paper and the summary.

The paper basically said:

1) AI may affect 2.2% of tech adoption, in terms of wage values,

2) but that’s only the surface. The rippled impact may be as much as 11.7% wage values.

That’s it. That’s all the index that they came up with measures, nothing else. They didn’t say there would be no displacement outcome, only that the index doesn’t quantify it. In other words, it’s the worst case scenario.

Give it a read and come back with better critics.
by naasking | 2025-11-26 17:05:18+00:00
I think your closing paragraph holds the key. 5 doesn't really exist, it's a constructor that parameterizes over something that does exist, eg. you never have "5", you have "5(something)". Saying 5 is prime is then saying that "for all x, 5(x) has the same structural properties as all other primes".
by JustExAWS | 2025-11-26 17:05:18+00:00
Well I have personally tested it on the green field projects I mostly work on and it does the grunt work of IAC (Terraform) and even did a decently complicated API with some detailed instructions like I would give another developer.

I’ve done literally dozens of short term quick turn around POCs from doing the full stack from an empty AWS account to “DevOps” to the software development -> training customers how to fish and showing them the concepts -> move on to next projects between working at AWS ProServe and now a third party consulting company. I’m familiar with the level of effort for these types of projects. I know how many fewer man hours it takes me now.

I have avoided front end work for well over a decade. I had to modify the front end part of the project we released to the customer that another developer did to remove all of the company specific stuff to make it generic so I could put it in our internal repo. I didn’t touch one line of front end code to make the decently extensive modifications, honestly I didn’t even look at the front end changes. I just made sure it worked as expected.
by danillonunes | 2025-11-26 17:05:26+00:00
> My rate of thinking is faster than typing, so the bottleneck has switched from typing to thinking!

Unless you're neuralinking to AI, you're still typing.

What changed is what you type. You type less words to solve your problem. The machine does the conversion from less words to more words. At the expense of less precision: the machine can do the conversion to the incorrect sequence of more words.
by hermitcrab | 2025-11-26 17:05:48+00:00
>It's a great article, until the end where they say what the solution would be. I'm afraid that the solution is: build something small, and use it in production before you add more features.

I think that is true for a lot of projects. But I'm not sure it is realistic to incrementally develop a control system for a nuclear reactor or an air traffic control system.
by mikece | 2025-11-26 17:06:07+00:00
Yes, pretty basic looking mistakes that, from the outside, make many wonder how this got through. Though analyzing the post-mortem makes me think of the MV Dali crashing into the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore: the whole thing started with a single loose wire which set off a cascading failure. CF's situation was similar in a few ways though finding a bad query (and .unwrap() in production code rather than test code) should have been a lot easier to spot.

Have any of the post-mortems addressed if any of the code that led to CloudFlare's outage was generated by AI?
by a-dub | 2025-11-26 17:06:13+00:00
termux is actually a pretty good little linux distro. i still keep wondering if the vm/container thing they shipped in recent versions of android for pixel will subsume it.

i was really hoping that with the display port over usb-c out that appeared in pixel 9 that there would be a useful desktop that could potentially support laptop replacement, but it seems all the desktop mode, termux and termux with x over vnc (or whatever it is) seem not quite mature. could be cool though, although, maybe better if there were a wireless link for the display and a way to have it not interfere with the phone being a phone.
by joha4270 | 2025-11-26 17:06:28+00:00
And the fact that superman can fly is evidence that people are lighter than air. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.

The costs (in money and energy) of the infrastructure to mine another solar system would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever it is here in our solar system.

Unlike the other poster, I don't think interstellar mining needs finding, I'm perfectly happy to lean back and enjoy the show. But whatever they mine would have to be very magical indeed to not be cheaper from any other process.
by lucastech | 2025-11-26 17:06:53+00:00
pretty crazy to see these sorts of worms, I think it's probably a good thing that we start to examine the "supply chain" of open source software and figure out ways to prevent this sort of attack.

Timing was definitely smart on the part of the attacker, heading into Thanksgiving in the US means a lot of people in vacation mode, probably not even realizing this is happening right now.

This should really be front page here
by aidenn0 | 2025-11-26 17:06:57+00:00
I will build or buy an IP-based kvm that plugs into my hdmi port and has passthrough for the local monitor before I use GNOME.

I used GNOME for many years, but nearly every UX decision they have made in the past 20 years has been the polar opposite of my desires. I have come to the conclusion that the developers in the GNOME project don't want me using their software and I'm happy to oblige them.
by jacobgkau | 2025-11-26 17:07:27+00:00
If I understand correctly, you're just basing that statement on climate change or war destroying us before we can do any better than Voyager, right? Because if we don't assume the destruction of humanity or the complete removal of our ability to make things leave Earth, then just based on "finite past vs. infinite future," it seems incredibly unlikely that we'd never be able to beat an extremely old project operating far beyond its designed scope.