MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by heresie-dabord | 2026-01-18 02:59:24+00:00
Cubicle, you say? LUXURY! We had to code 12 of us to a desk inside a cardboard box in the middle of the road. At the end of every day, Pointed-Haired Boss would replace us with A.I. and fire us, only to re-hire us the next day at half the salary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Yorkshiremen
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-18 02:59:55+00:00
> I thought there might be a chance that the bare infinitive in e.g. the conditional mood is derived from an older true mood...

CGEL says this:

Given that the three constructions in [24] always select identical verb-forms, it is inappropriate to take imperative, subjunctive, and infinitival as inflectional categories. That, however, is what the traditional grammar does, again retaining distinctions that were valid at an earlier stage of the language but have since been lost

[I'm taking a position that disagrees with this one, but it does address the use of mood in earlier stages of English.]

I feel that that may not directly address your specific question, but it's hard to know what that question is, since English conditional clauses do not use the form you identify as 'bare infinitive'.

> ...an older true mood (in the linguistic sense, i.e. a verb form that is sufficient to signify the mode)

This doesn't make sense. A verb form is never sufficient to signify the semantic mode of a sentence. Nobody ever argues that Latin didn't have inflectional mood, but good luck identifying why a verb appears in the subjunctive if you can't see the rest of the sentence around it.

(There is a whole traditional taxonomy of different Latin subjunctives; the most common cases are conditional clauses, which use subjunctive mood to indicate counterfactuality, commands ("jussive subjunctive"), and wishes ("optative subjunctive"). Another case is "the verb is part of an indirect question". [Do indirect statements use subjunctive verbs? Nooooooooo...])

So, for English, we have a distinction in semantic modality that obligates us to use an exotically-conjugated verb. Why is this not an example of grammatical mood?
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-18 03:00:12+00:00
>Surely "howdy" derives from "how do you do?" and not "hello."

It seems most likely but the OED (at least in the second edition) says:

>[Note. The conjectured derivation from the phrase how d'ye? is impossible, since the Sc. form would then have been (huːdɪ). On the analogy of Sc. gowdie = goldy, howdy might go back to holdie, an appellative (like brownie, etc.) from hold, friendly, benevolent, kind: cf. F. sage-femme.]

But the OED has many oddities regarding American vernacular and I personally take it with a grain of salt when it comes to this area.
by resonious | 2026-01-18 03:02:05+00:00
Honestly if I exercised and ate perfectly from 20-29 I would've had a miserable 20s. Doing high-discipline stuff like that is way easier when you have a material reason (i.e. you've actually felt the consequences of not being fit or healthy) compared to when people just tell you "do it! you'll really thank yourself for it 20 years later!". Being in perfect physical condition at the cost of the psychological stress of forcing myself to do stuff I don't want to do every day does not sound worth it.
by Spivak | 2026-01-18 03:03:10+00:00
And that frustration makes sense in the context of the article. Devs don't care about any of that stuff because they're customer facing, it's a distraction from their primary responsibility.

It would be like asking an Amazon delivery drivers to care about oil changes and tire rotations. It's much easier to have a team of mechanics whose primary responsibility is enabling drivers to just drive and focus on delivering packages.
by eru | 2026-01-18 03:04:43+00:00
> Having no such thing as an uncommitted change seems like it would be a nightmare, but perhaps I'm just too git-oriented.

Why? What's the problem you see? The only problem I see is when you let these extra commits pollute the history reachable from any branch you care about.

Let's look at the following:

Internally, 'git stash' consists of two operations: one that makes an 'anonymous' commit of your files, and another that resets those files to whatever they were in HEAD. (That commit is anonymous in the sense that no branch points at it.)

The git libraries expose the two operations separately. And you can build something yourself that works similarly.

You can use these capabilities to build an undo/redo log in git, but without polluting any of the history you care about.

To be honest, I have no clue how Jujutsu does it. They might be using a totally different design.
by alexpham14 | 2026-01-18 03:05:24+00:00
Short answer: yes, but the “moat” has changed.

A lot of people still think moats are about features. They’re not anymore. Features are cheap now. Execution and distribution are the real bottlenecks.

Big companies can copy your product, but they usually won’t copy:
– your speed early on
– your willingness to serve a tiny, unsexy niche
– your ability to change direction without internal politics

In practice, most startups don’t die because a big company copied them. They die because they never found real users who cared enough to pay.

The moat today often looks like:
– deep understanding of a specific workflow or pain point
– trust with a narrow audience
– compounding advantages (data, habits, integrations, community)

If your plan is “build something cool and hope it sticks”, it’s probably not worth it.
If your plan is “solve a painful problem for a very specific group, then expand”, it still is.

Curious how people here think about moats post-AI. Are we underestimating distribution, or overestimating defensibility?
by resonious | 2026-01-18 03:06:53+00:00
And what's interesting here (and likely in other cases) is that the expectations aren't even real. The author's investors don't even put pressure on him. Not to put too many words into the author's mouth here, but it seems like he got possessed by the "tech founder" persona. It's like he started doing things not because of his own volition but because it's the more tech foundery thing to do.
by greggsy | 2026-01-18 03:07:01+00:00
I find dark mode incredibly straining in most daytime and office situations, particularly with glossy screens. Do use it exclusively in dark environments though.

The ‘anti light-mode’ sentiment has been around for more than a decade, but the reason why it’s not default is because it doesn’t suit the majority of users’ needs or use cases.

Anecdotally, I’ve found that the strongest proponent of dark mode in my professional career tended to be people who worked exclusively at night, or those who aspired to emulate the ‘late night hacker’ trope.
by weslleyskah | 2026-01-18 03:07:07+00:00
Serious question, why watch this movie by Kubrick when you have way more interesting guys like Pier Paolo Pasolini?

If you want to see weird sexual pictures, might as well go all the way with "120 days of Sodom".

Or just go and see one of those documentaries of serial killers from the 70's, like Ted Bundy.
by tzs | 2026-01-18 03:08:04+00:00
> Ford actually makes vehicles in Europe. Does BYD?

Not yet. They are in the process of opening a factory in Hungary. The production line equipment arrived in December, with trial production scheduled for Q1 2026, and mass production in Q2, with capacity ramping up over two years.

They are also doing a factory in Turkey.

Their plan is for all of the EVs they sell in Europe to be made in the EU by 2028.

They aren't the only Chinese car maker interested in producing in Europe. Chery is building a big plant in Spain. Geely is looking at options in Poland or Hungary but hasn't decided on a site yet. SAIC is planning to make cars in Hungary.
by wesleyd | 2026-01-18 03:09:06+00:00
> What is NG good for?

The biggest advantage of NG is that we can store months of it. (Currently we can store only seconds of electricity, if that. Citation needed!)

I have a dream that some day we will come up with an efficient process for generating methane from atmospheric CO2, water, and electricity, and we’ll be able to take advantage of our extensive natural gas grid. (Natural gas is essentially methane.)
by muyuu | 2026-01-18 03:10:37+00:00
I specifically avoided making the claim because you really cannot prove either way

I remember when it was released, I graduated that year, and I remember the reactions at the time

it would still be anecdotal and it's hard to know how many people did in fact resign as a result of the impact from this film, and if it's something that would make any difference in the grand scheme of things
by Bad_Initialism | 2026-01-18 03:10:37+00:00
As the icons progress to the left, identification increasingly depends on colour and shape. Since there are a limited number of colours and shapes, they tend to get reused. This increasingly leads to mis-identification of icons.

This is particularly true for the visually impaired and some elderly and neuro-atypical people.

What matters in an icon is uniqueness. Only the skeuomorphic icons to the right can be unique enough for proper identification.

Trendiness of visual appearance has no place in the functionality of a complex machine. If you think it does, I submit the following for your consideration: you. are. a. monster.

Yes, I said that and I mean it. You followers of Jony Ive and his ilk are assholes. The rest of us don't give a shit about your design schools. We just want to be able to click on the right thing.

Hate me, but it's true.
Ask HN: is it's ok to do engagement farming here?
by Sayyidalijufri | 2026-01-18 03:11:10+00:00
Today I just see this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714

It's say share your websites and get bunch of upvotes and comment

and not flagged

my question is then it's ok for me to post something similar like "Share your startup link" like that?
by kirubakaran | 2026-01-18 03:12:33+00:00
Of course you could commercialize it!

You've already done the "building v1" part, and have started to do the "talking about it" part.

Next step is to write up how one could use it, how it is better than the alternatives, and put it up on a website.

I'm happy to chat about it if you like. My email is in my profile.

Once you have real users, they will pull the v2 out of you, and that will be what you'll sell.

What I've written above sounds like a business proposition, but I want to clarify that I'm just offering to share what I know for free :-)
by RunningDroid | 2026-01-18 03:13:15+00:00
> I think I could live with all the other components being metric, if they just had a way to work with standard U.S./Imperial containers as well.

As far as I know mason jars (of that size) are the same everywhere so it should work with whatever containers decided to use that standard

> Oh, and they need a 120VAC design for the motor and all the electronics inside.

After reading the BOM it looks like the only electrical components are the limit switch, rotary switch, motor, and the support components soldered to the motor, so a 120VAC design would only need to replace those with equivalent 120VAC components.

> Or, a design that can handle both 120VAC and 240VAC, as well as both 50hz and 60hz.

AFAIK that would either be a 120VAC model with a PCB to compensate in 240VAC areas or a DC motor with PCB
by resonious | 2026-01-18 03:13:58+00:00
This may sound weird but this was a very interesting read for me as a father of 2 small kids.

A somewhat common (yet often not followed (because it's hard)) piece of parenting advice is to not praise kids too much. Especially character judgements like "you're so smart" or "you're so creative". Reason being it makes them do things that seem smart or seem creative just to get the praise. Then it comes crashing down when they're faced with a challenge that contests the idea that they're "a smart kid".

It kind of looks like this is happening to the author. He became a founder, and started doing things that seem like what a founder would do, then got hit hard when he was unable to fulfill the "founder" role (i.e. didn't grow fast enough).

I'm not totally sure what to conclude here. I guess humans are susceptible to this kind of thing regardless of age.
by lazypenguin | 2026-01-18 03:14:56+00:00
Yes! I love this framing and it’s spot on. The successful projects that I’ve been involved in someone either cares deeply and resolves the details in real time or we figured out the details before we started. I’ve seen it outside software as well, someone says “I want a new kitchen” but unless you know exactly where you want your outlets, counter depths, size of fridge, type of cabinets, location of lighting, etc. ad infinitum your project is going to balloon in time and cost and likely frustration.
by silverquiet | 2026-01-18 03:15:44+00:00
I think my favorite interaction with a dev around this was when I was explaining how his java program looked like a big juicy target for the OOM killer and it had killed it in order to keep the system working. His response was, "I don't care about the system, I care about my program!" And he understood the irony of that, but it was a good reminder that we have somewhat different views and priorities.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-18 03:16:52+00:00
GUIs' beneficial "skeuomorphism" probably peaked around the mid-'90s, where controls and their states were clearly demarcated but not absurdly photo-realistic. The bevel on a button told you if it was depressed or not, but that amounted to flipping the brightness on a couple of pixel-wide outlines.

Apple did contribute to the backlash (and the over-correction to no design at all, AKA "flat") with their brain-dead skeuomorphic UI. One example hobbled iTunes for years: Apple depicted the current-track display at the top of the iTunes window as an "LCD" with a glass window over it; obviously you wouldn't try to interact or press on a glass-covered LCD. But in iTunes, there were controls hidden in there. WTF? Why would you ever even attempt to click in it?

Equally stupid was Game Center, where Apple depicted controls as painted onto the felt of a Blackjack table. Who the hell would attempt to "operate" the paint on a felt gambling-table surface?
by 201984 | 2026-01-18 03:17:09+00:00
I played around with it, and it's very neat. This is the first time I've seen an assembly REPL and I wish I had something like this that ran native for playing with unfamiliar instructions.

I did find a couple minor issues with the simulator: MVN is supposed to be a bitwise NOT but the simulator does a two's-complement negation instead (https://github.com/rtybanana/irisc-web/blob/main/src/interpr...), and it seems negative immediate offsets aren't supported, e.g.

ldr r0, [r1, #-4]
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-01-18 03:17:14+00:00
> I love this, it resonates so deeply with me. Code is, for me, joy.

A credo I have held for some time is:

When making software, remember that it is a snapshot of
your understanding of the problem. It states to all,
including your future-self, your approach, clarity, and
appropriateness of the solution for the problem at hand.
Choose your statements wisely.

HTH
by wesleyd | 2026-01-18 03:18:50+00:00
The radius is too big. This monitor is R4200, 4.2m. I have a Samsung odyssey something 49” monitor and it is glorious. It is R1000, and since my head is about a meter from the screen, it works: even the edges are usable.

I used to use two 27” 1440p monitors, which together are about the same size as the Samsung 49”, and also the same resolution, but the edges were further enough away from my head that they were annoying to use. Not to mention the bezels in the middle. While this dell wouldn’t have the bezels, the edges would still be too far away.

The only drawback of my giant R1000 monitor is that I can’t easily use my laptop’s camera. So I don’t; I use an iPad for video conferencing, it sits happily below this monitor.

My only regret is not getting the 57” 2x4k variant!
by chii | 2026-01-18 03:19:16+00:00
Yep, exactly this.

The cost of CO2 capture, and conversion into usable fuels, is in the cost of the setup of the infrastructure etc (as well as cost to run the pumps once setup).

The return on such an investment is likely negative, because the synthesized fuel does not sell for much (compared to the same fuel that is extracted off the ground and refined - look at natural gas as prime example). Therefore, even if electricity is negative (ala, free), you cannot make money from doing it.

Either the cost of the carbon emissions is captured as part of the cost of fossil fuel extraction (and returned to this carbon capture/conversion system) to make it break even, or something else has to happen (like massive efficiency increase in doing such conversions) in order to make it economical.
by MengerSponge | 2026-01-18 03:19:16+00:00
You can no true Scotsman it, but that study is a structured task. It's possible to generate an ever-more structured tutorial, but that's asking ever more more from teachers. And to what end? Why should they do that? Where's the data suggesting it's worth the trouble? And cui bono?

Students have had access to modern LLMs for years now, which is plenty long to spin up and read out a study...
by dsr_ | 2026-01-18 03:21:03+00:00
DevOps is the practice of using modern software methods to automate the tasks of operations work. That includes using version control, templating languages and various forms of role-based configuration automation.

Anyone who thinks they can hire a devop or declare that they do devops is as deluded as 97% of the folks who claim that they are doing Agile. (If you are firmly on the other side of each of the four principles of the Agile Manifesto, you may or may not be doing great software development, but it's not Agile.)

The problem with the typical DevOps team is that there's no operations expertise.
by bruce511 | 2026-01-18 03:21:43+00:00
I agree, and I'll supplement with this;

>> But from now on, I'm either gonna be a successful founder, or I'm not. And if I'm not, I'll have to deal with having broken with the expectations that people had of me.

Don't worry, they expected you to fail. They hoped you'd succeed, but expected failure. Statistically most businesses fail, and failure rates are faster when your customers are VCs not users.

I say this as encouragement, not criticism. Accepting that failure is (by far) the most likely outcome is both realistic and freeing. The anxiety of failure is gone.

Frankly, your lack of marketing experience would worry me. Without the ability to reach users (much less customers) how can you do anything but fail? New businesses are not bounded by technical ability (especially in the age of AI) they are bounded by Marketing.
by isquaredr | 2026-01-18 03:24:11+00:00
Economically devs are the only ones that can do it. If I am a good QA engineer that cares enough about the product to do a good job, I could probably be making more money as a product manager.

These days when every iota of attention can be leveraged to the extreme by AI you can’t afford to tie up that attention testing a phone number input across 100 countries and interpreting the results.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-18 03:24:53+00:00
>COBOL was supposed to let managers write programs. VB let business users make apps. Squarespace killed the need for web developers. And now AI.

The first line made me laugh out loud because it made me think of an old boss who I enjoyed working with but could never really do coding. This boss was a rockstar at the business side of things and having worked with ABAP in my career, I couldn't ever imagine said person writing code in COBOL.

However the second line got me thinking. Yes VB let business users make apps(I made so many forms for fun). But it reminded me about how much stuff my boss got done in Excel. Was a total wizard.

You have a good point in that the stuff keeps expanding because while not all bosses will pick up the new stack many ambitious ones will. I'm sure it was the case during COBOL, during VB and is certainly the case when Excel hit the scene and I suspect that a lot of people will get stuff done with AI that devs used to do.

>But the job of understanding what to build in the first place, or debugging why the automated thing isn't doing what you expected - that's still there. Usually there's more of it.

Honestly this is the million dollar question that is actually being argued back and forth in all these threads. Given a set of requirements, can AI + a somewhat technically competent business person solve all the things a dev used to take care of? Its possible, im wondering that my boss who couldn't even tell the difference between React and Flask could in theory...possibly with an AI with a large enough context overcomes these mental model limitations. Would be an interesting experiment for companies to try out.
by sfink | 2026-01-18 03:25:43+00:00
Yeah, that's roughly my take as well. The AI bit is especially jarring, given the supposed goal of being "resonant", when in fact AI is the most powerful force right now towards making things that are functional without being resonant. As in, things that work superficially but just feel... off. (And upon closer inspection, they don't quite work as fully as you'd thought.)

Like, AI is certainly powerful and can do a lot, but this "resonance" is its weakness, not its strength.
by pixelready | 2026-01-18 03:27:24+00:00
Even if it was meant as satire, I have definitely known a scary number of the people being parodied there. Small, sharp, hard-headed. No poetry in the soul. A person like that just fully doesn’t get the need for college to be a place to become a deep, well-rounded, open-minded person where your understanding of yourself, your fellow man, and the world around you can evolve in leaps and bounds. To the college-as-job-factory folks it is simply a place to install valuable marketplace skills and the student loans are a pure business transaction.

I feel the exact opposite, that we as a society should pay for (or at least heavily subsidize) a broad college education so that we put people on the track to being the best versions of themselves before we release them back into the wild world of civilization. I want to work with people driven by a mission, chat with people who are curious and interesting, buy from artisans who are performing a craft with all their heart, live near people who are considerate and kind, and vote with people who have a strong moral core.

Liberal arts education is not the only path, but I think it’s one of the ways people hone those qualities in themselves.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-18 03:28:27+00:00
Personally I am attracted to the simplicity of the I Ching in that I can do a reading for someone very quickly in the field without a lot of explaining (off brand as-a-fox) so I pack an assortment of coins in my tail (ahem… backpack) though I am still looking for a second pocket I Ching so I have something other than Wilhelm.
by ndarray | 2026-01-18 03:28:50+00:00
The "user" is only half of a human anyway, 50% is the max consciousness people spend on whatever Netflix they have running as background noise. That's the target audience Netflix is optimizing for: half-humans. Saves them lots of bandwidth, expenses for quality, and yes, it needs a solid amount of exposition[0] to work.

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Exposition
by quotemstr | 2026-01-18 03:29:40+00:00
Yep. And that's a good place to be. Keep in mind that the "driver suite" in an seL4 system includes a bunch of things that others would put in the kernel: memory management and swap, networking, filesystems, linking and loading, and so on are all userspace. So, if you want, you still get to differentiate based on interesting low-level things.

Calling seL4 system guts a "driver suite" is like calling rustc "just a preprocessor for LLVM IR". True, but only in the most uselessly pedantic sense.
by nntwozz | 2026-01-18 03:30:01+00:00
Here's a wild idea, what if the option was given to the user to select the level of detail for icons?

We have such a vast library of icons now, make it an option in System Settings.

Call it themes or whatever, I'm sure every macOS enjoyer would love to play with the options and reminisce.

Celebrate your rich design history, don't trample it!