MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SuboptimalEng | 2026-01-11 00:08:42+00:00
That's a fair point. Model prices can increase. This raises the next question.

Doesn't this mean that any company that depends on headcount growth (every SaaS), loses?

100 SWE -> 10 SWE, 100 slack/gmail/notion/zoom/etc. subscriptions become 10.

And now let's recurse.

These SaaS companies that use AI and dropped 90% of engineering headcount lose revenue because their customers also drop headcount.

Let's say AI costs 89% more than it did before, so the SaaS companies still get 10x productivity from the 10 engineers, but now all their customers headcount is 90% smaller too. So what now? Does every company make a pact to grow headcount ;)
by rvz | 2026-01-11 00:10:49+00:00
There are times where is just makes sense to read, measure and really understand why leaks, bugs and performance issues happen and vibe-coders will get stuck on this very quickly.

This excellent write-up from michellh explains the issue in depth and all his blogs in building Ghostty are a recommended read on the Ghostty's internals.

Similarly, these write-ups are a great read. Here is another one that documents a goroutine leak and how it was detected, fixed without restarting production. [0]

This is what most vibe-coders will NOT do when faced with a non-trivial issue, with a serious software product.

[0] https://skoredin.pro/blog/golang/goroutine-leak-debugging
by rgbrgb | 2026-01-11 00:11:00+00:00
A lot of commenters seem to think this is purely a DEI thing, but doesn't it match how the best companies hire? Couldn't it be that the colleges are genuinely trying to select who they think will end up at the top of their fields? Common hiring advice for startups (my game) is to look for slope and drive, not deep expertise or experience. The top kid at a bad high school seems like a better bet to me than the median kid from a stellar high school, even if they've done 3x more AP classes. There have been "revelatory" articles like every year for decades about how google doesn't just hire ivy leaguers.

[0]: https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...
by palata | 2026-01-11 00:11:27+00:00
I am a Linux fanboy and I totally agree that I am almost always near a plug and don't need that kind of battery life.

But when I can go for days on my work Macbook without charging (and I am a developer, so I do compile stuff), I kinda wish I could have that on Linux, too.

And again, I don't need it. Just like I don't need a fast Internet connection, but well... :-).
by acomjean | 2026-01-11 00:11:31+00:00
I’ve noticed on my work machine, it really really really wants me to save my new document to one drive. It was about three clicks in the save dialog to get back to a local drive.

They were sneaky about it, with a switch to “turn on autosave” only working when you save to the cloud.

I miss my Linux work machine with Libre office..

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-office/mi...
by alberto-m | 2026-01-11 00:11:47+00:00
> in Switzerland they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers

Putting UK and Switzerland in the same pot is wrong, the pay scales are totally different. 100k$ is 80k CHF which is entry level salary for a SWE. The difference between Switzerland and US is at senior level (reaching 160k CHF is much more difficult than reaching 200k$).
by xorvoid | 2026-01-11 00:12:01+00:00
I feel like the comments are taking away the wrong message from this. He used it to do the part of the project that he has poor knowledge/experience/capacity for. He needs a visualization but the project isn't about visualization. He's spent a lifetime coding in C, not writing python-based visualizations.

There's a big difference between vibe-coding an entire project and having an AI build a component that you lack competency for. That is what is happening here.

It's the same principle as a startup that builds it core functionality itself in-house and then uses off-the-shelf libraries for all the other uninteresting details.
by techspecs | 2026-01-11 00:12:04+00:00
YouTube’s auto-generated and auto-translated subtitles are notoriously unreliable. For many videos, captions are missing, delayed, or inconsistent across browsers.

I built a Chrome extension to generate subtitles directly from the audio, with features like:

- Real-time transcription of video audio
- Translation into 100+ languages
- Multiple subtitles at once (useful for language learners)
- Search inside video subtitles (like CTRL+F)
- Drag-and-drop subtitle placement for optimal viewing
- Optional: dictionary lookup, summarization, and Q&A based on video content

Here are short demo videos showing the extension generating subtitles from YouTube audio: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1I_z6HjGCVUwgYs1UXlB7...

I’d love feedback from anyone interested in real-time transcription, accessibility, or YouTube workflow automation. How would you approach a problem like this?
by gchamonlive | 2026-01-11 00:12:26+00:00
I don't doubt there is a difference in the mechanism of arriving at a given connection. What I think it's not possible to distinguish is the connection that someone made intuitively after reading many sources and the one that the AI makes, because both will have to undergo scrutiny before being accepted as relevant. We can argue there could be a difference in quality, depth and search space, maybe, but I don't think there is an ontological difference.
by tptacek | 2026-01-11 00:12:31+00:00
Yes, plus:

* Near-instant creation

* Automatic spin-down scale-to-zero, so you're not paying for it when it's not in use.

If you're using these like we are internally, you've got like 2 dozen of them sitting around in the background sleeping. They're BIC disposable computers. "When in doubt just make another one."
by clhodapp | 2026-01-11 00:13:43+00:00
I think it's definitely a clear definition of what you're doing, but I still take some issue with the framing of "UI pixels". I would argue that it's more like abstract "UI distance units."

Most UI's are designed to be "right-sized" for humans with a "distance unit" being about 1/96th of an inch (when the display is the designer-expected distance from the user). If you deviate too far from this, things end up being really big or really small and the display is harder to use. What you're effectively doing when you enable "2x scaling" is setting the "abstract distance unit" that gets applied to UIs to be the size of two display pixels, rather than one display pixel. Whether this is a good thing to do and is more or less "native", IMO, depends on the DPI of the display.
by andy99 | 2026-01-11 00:14:37+00:00
I don’t buy it. Obviously LLMs have a role and are powerful, but they (and more importantly the people that think they know something because they can prompt an LLM) are more like the kid in 2008 that thinks he knows something because he has Wikipedia. Fact lookup isn’t intelligence, it’s not even idiot savant intelligence which I think is the point of the article.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-11 00:15:46+00:00
Holland is a stupid lap dog of the US. They didn't even want to issue a statement condemning the Venezuela operation. It's the most strongly neoliberal country left in the EU since the British left. Also always falling over themselves to apologise for Israeli war crimes. This is why Rutte became SG of NATO, his neoliberal oligarch party was always an American lapdog.

I don't expect any kind of action from them about Greenland. Denmark maybe, they're also pretty right-wing but it affects them directly. And Spain which have much less of an issue giving a middle finger to Trump.
by 3form | 2026-01-11 00:17:23+00:00
Understandable.

I think I just wanted to vent an old personal frustration here. And perhaps to give a bit more substantiated subtle hint about how things are in GNOME. I feel like anyone using it will run into quite bad issues eventually.

Just now I remembered a second straw - the issue where scrolling down in a big folder with thumbnails on would repeatedly scroll you back to the top. I am not confident this has been solved until now either.

I vaguely recall the desperate feeling of "this DE does so little, and yet in the few things it does, it's still borderline unusable".
by machomaster | 2026-01-11 00:17:30+00:00
I wasn't suggesting using willpower to power through the problems. I was suggesting setting up a system, that would fit you and would enable you to live a better and more efficient life. Willpower is useful in setting up the system, to learn it. Not to operate it.

Please watch this fundamental video:
https://youtu.be/bcKthx5LTbI

On a surface it is about dieting, but the lessons can be applied to the rest of the life.

Cheers! :-)
by emporas | 2026-01-11 00:18:41+00:00
I use Linux exclusively for almost 20 years. I can tackle any tinkering of almost anything in a Linux environment, alongside of heavy use of Vim and Emacs.

Nowadays every time I want to run a non-trivial command of a program, configure a file somewhere, customize using code Emacs or anything else, I always put the LLMs to do it. I do almost nothing by myself, except check if said file is indeed there, open the file and copy paste the new configuration, restart the program, copy paste code here and there and so on.

No need to be a nerd to use Linux, that's so 2021. LLMs are the ultimate nerds when it comes to digging into manuals, scour the internet and github for workarounds, or tips and tricks and so on.
by Sabinus | 2026-01-11 00:19:04+00:00
I don't want them unknowingly consuming foreign propaganda campaign content and maximally politically divisive conversation.
Having spaces where identities are confirmed is really important for honest and open debate. Screaming at each other in Reddit and Facebook comments amongst society-fracturing influence campaigns isn't free speech.
And if someone wants to leave the identity confirmed space and go yell in the anonymous sea of voices they can but we need other options.
by drakeballew | 2026-01-11 00:20:11+00:00
This is a beautiful piece of work. The actual data or outputs seem to be more or less...trash? Maybe too strong a word. But perhaps you are outsourcing too much critical thought to a statistical model. We are all guilty of it. But some of these are egregious, obviously referential LLM dog. The world has more going on than whatever these models seem to believe.

Edit/update: if you are looking for the phantom thread between texts, believe me that an LLM cannot achieve it. I have interrogated the most advanced models for hours, and they cannot do the task to any sort of satisfactory end that a smoked-out half-asleep college freshman could. The models don't have sufficient capacity...yet.
by Madmallard | 2026-01-11 00:20:31+00:00
Are Universities still good? They're good socially but for education in the age of AI I can't imagine university even being worth it anymore outside of the absolutely most prestigious ones there are.

Certainly not your run-of-the-mill UC school except maybe UCLA or Berkeley and only then for very specific majors.

I went to a UC and graduated 14 years ago. I basically had to teach myself everything with the other students once I got into my major. And this school has done notable research in my field. But the quality of education was just terrible. Nobody could teach us multi-threading, compilers, theory of computation, networking, or algorithms properly. Like not at all. The students had to help each other the best they can and the most experienced or smartest individuals were just the ones that actually were able to do those subjects competently. But everyone else was pretty much shorted on their education, just like the poor math education throughout the country. It's pretty irritating how much it costs versus the quality you get. No way is it worth it.

And since I've graduated I learned that none of these topics is IQ-limited at all whatsoever. Math is completely intuitively if taught properly. ANYONE can learn it to a high level with good analogies and demonstrations and applicative knowledge. I developed competence with linear algebra and vector math not in school but doing game programming after I graduated. That's what actually made it "make sense".

I tutored several students since I graduated and I think I helped them for $30 an hour learning fundamentals and how to program and I think I did a significantly better job one-on-one for these students at a way cheaper rate than they would have to pay in school. It's sad.

I imagine LLMs could do a better job for many things than research professors that just throw slides on the board and barely elaborate on anything. The only way you learn in those courses is by really struggling on your own and going to as many office hours and TA hours as possible.
by anigbrowl | 2026-01-11 00:20:36+00:00
Within the bounds of the platform the operators have unlimited authority, they can start pinging users about their streak and the users have no input into how the streak is measured and can't reason witht he 'streakbot' if they want to establish a different arrangement.

I'm sure you understand the concept of platform operators having unilateral authority over what users do there.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-11 00:20:53+00:00
Part of democracy is that the people of that country get to criticize their own government. It is anti-democratic for a wealthy and powerful individual of a foreign country to undermine a democratically instituted governmental organization. Italians get to have a voice in the governance of Italy and criticize their own government, that's democracy. We just had our democracy destroyed by another billionaire, quite frankly people like Musk are the biggest dangers to democracy right now, powerful individuals wielding unequal influence over democracies, where they use that influence to use democracy as a proxy for their oligarchy.
by bsder | 2026-01-11 00:21:29+00:00
> fentanyl powder and pills were losing potency just as overdose deaths were falling

Combined with the already dead, does this not explain things?

Illegal drug suppliers don't make money by killing their customers. Consequently, they finally got control over the potency throughout their supply chain.

Although, I'm more interested in the standard deviation of the potency than the absolute value of the potency. I suspect that is much more correlated with OD deaths.
by ben_w | 2026-01-11 00:22:03+00:00
> “Better at preventing” \neq “can’t”. The hoopla you are seeing here is textbook selective enforcement.

When the prevention is sufficient that the politicians and law enforcement don't realise a crime has occurred, it's no more selective than policing being limited to where the police and CCTV cameras actually are.

Given both (1) the scale of the web means it can only be searched by the same kind of AI that would also be used by a more respectable GenAI supplier to prevent unlawful output in the first place; and also given that (2) Gemini and ChatGPT image generation are not as heavily tied to a social network as Grok is to Twitter, it may simply be that nobody has any evidence of wrongdoing by other specifically identifiable GenAI image providers, at most it will be "we know this image was GenAI, but don't know if this was an online service or local, nor if money changed hands for this".
by kyboren | 2026-01-11 00:22:27+00:00
Like I said: It's only useful to have location in your model's domain if you have side-channel information embedded in the model function itself about what those location data mean for the correct premium price. What we're talking about here is just a way to embed much more information in your model function than a human reasonably could.

Given the magnificent ability of DNN models to serve as obfuscatory black boxes and the general techno-ignorance of legislators and regulators, I suspect that "AI laundering" your violations actually a very effective way to juke all sorts of laws and regulations.

But both of us are just speculating. If you have insider industry knowledge or can point to regulatory guidance and/or enforcement actions in this area that corrects or confirms my understanding, I would love to read about it.
by dang | 2026-01-11 00:22:49+00:00
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/national/etc. battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which side of which battle you are or aren't on.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-11 00:23:01+00:00
That independence is ready for them when they want it, they just wanted a slow transition. It's going according to their plan.

Obviously a huge superpower threatening them is a reason to want less independence not more, due to the military support possibilities.

Also, do you really think they will have independence under American flag? They will be a second-rate US state just like Puerto Rico is. People with no rights to vote, that are just considered good enough by the Americans to throw them a few toilet rolls for a photo-op when their country is ruined by natural disaster.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-helps-suffering-...
by dang | 2026-01-11 00:23:32+00:00
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/national/etc. battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which side of which battle you are or aren't on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
by palata | 2026-01-11 00:24:25+00:00
That's kind of what I was trying to say: it comes from a good place.

But the "service" is more likely to be "invading another country" than "defending the US territory from an invasion", so when you are not a US citizen, it may feel odd.

Again, the US have threatened to invade quite a few democracies in the last year. Not sure how happy the people living there are about that "service"...
by jamesponddotco | 2026-01-11 00:24:38+00:00
Hardcover and ISBNDB have a good amount of data, with Hardcover being excellent for getting good covers and genres.

I'm hoping Goodreads and Anna's Archive will help fill in the gaps, especially since Anna's Archive have gigantic database dumps available[1].

[1]: https://todo.sr.ht/~pagina394/librario/12
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-11 00:24:38+00:00
If we’re going to stick with private ownership of our healthcare infrastructure, patient-facing providers should at least be required to be B Corps, with one Board seat set to represent the doctors’ and nurses’ interests and a second patients’ interests. (Not sure how you’d elect the latter.)

There should also be strict leverage, related-party transaction and dividend limits. In exchange, we might provide a public lender of last resort for healthcare providers who need a lifeline.

Banning private equity from healthcare is a good headline. And if I were a candidate, I’d probably run on it. But it’s a band-aid to a broader incentive problem.
by kcplate | 2026-01-11 00:24:40+00:00
I think there is definitely evidence now that makes it pretty clear that those two women were specifically in that situation and area to intentionally interfere and antagonize ICE. The driver ignored direct orders to exit the vehicle and chose to flee instead. Her act of fleeing created a dangerous situation where a law enforcement officer had to make a split second decision and still was physically struck by the vehicle. I think it’s up to investigators, prosecutors, judge, and jury to decide if action against the agent is appropriate understanding all of the evidence surrounding the incident. We have had the benefit of days of analysis with slowed down video from multiple vantage points. That officer had 2 seconds mere moments after being directly antagonized by one of the people from the vehicle.

The inconvenient truth here is that the constitution EXPECTS the executive branch to enforce the laws that congress passes. ICE is enforcing laws that America wanted and passed in a bipartisan manner many years ago. If we the people don’t like a law, we the people should undo it the way we originally “did” it…via congress.

I have never voted for Trump. I don’t like many of the things he does and says. I can be critical of the Trump messaging and rhetoric (including around this situation, which like the outraged—-is filled with excessive emotion and a rush to judgement). At the same time I can be supportive of the constitutional requirement to enforce our laws, because I don’t want to live in a lawless anarchy.
by andy99 | 2026-01-11 00:25:33+00:00
These should be useful signals to regulators. Regulation is imperfect but somehow we blame companies that take advantage, either of immature or nonexistent regulation (which might be the case here) or of poorly written regulation (e.g. circa 2000 California energy regulation that let Enron and company run wild).

These companies, in finding essentially arbitrage opportunities, are, perversely, helping strengthen regulation, but only if regulators pay attention to what is going on and do something about it, instead of just watching it happen.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-11 00:26:15+00:00
I really dislike this, especially because it ultimately results in worse care for the kids.

I think the place I take my kid to for therapy is likely private equity owned, but it's also about the only place available in my area.

I know they are charging around $80 per season, and I also know that the salaries for their therapists are around $25 to $30 per hour.

That leaves a very healthy margin for everything from employee benefits to building rental to admin (which I think is probably where the majority of margin goes).
by trueno | 2026-01-11 00:27:11+00:00
as a dude who uses all three heavily for work & personal (windows/linux/macos) macos doesnt even come close to windows in the "trying to sell me on the cloud services" front. microsoft ddos's my brain with sign in with an o365 account at every corner of computing now. microsoft products are actually insane now.

i have quite a few mac vms for development things and ive had no issue just disabling all the icloud pieces & my usage in these environments seems to be pretty damn quiet the way i like it. windows has gone completely bonkers damn file explore has network service call stacks summoning bing wtf is going on there.

feel like i have to shower after using windows now it's crazy. reminds me of early 2000s when HP laptops were just filled with bloatware when you bought them, except microsoft has now baked this unforgettable experience into their operating system.

i will remain on macos for my personal device until other hardware manufs make great hardware. i have the pleasure (or displeasure) of using lots of different devices for work so ive got a stack of thinkpads and surfaces and a couple frameworks even and apple is still leading the charge on the bonkers hardware that fits in my backpack. im loyal to no one in the end and have no dog in this fight, but i would really enjoy if someone could catch up to apples chip developments for mobile desktop computing. id love something that is as refined and performant+efficient as my m4max pro but runs linux.

all in all i think device/manuf tribalism is the lamest part of computing and it's always been in my best interests to try them all myself and switch on a whim to whatever feels like it meets my needs. im in a unique position to use a lot of diff devices and os's with what i do and there's undoubtedly frustrations with all of them. there's always going to be a free spirit inside me that champions linux to the ends of the horizons though, but apple is undeniably in a unique position to r&d bankroll tsmc, design their own soc, develop hardware and software and marry all of those things together. it's cool shit, and they'd score a lot of goodwill if they just documented their damn stuff so linux distributions could just work on these devices rather than requiring some crazy reverse engineering effort and all the associated mailing list drama that came with asahi.