MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ashenfad | 2026-01-04 18:04:24+00:00
calgebra lets you compose calendar timelines using Python's set operators: | (union), & (intersection), - (difference), and ~ (complement).

Queries are lazy—you build expressions first, then execute via slicing.

Example – find when a team is free for a 2+ hour meeting:

from calgebra import day_of_week, time_of_day, hours, HOUR

# Define business hours
weekend = day_of_week(["saturday", "sunday"], tz="US/Pacific")
weekdays = ~weekend
business_hours = weekdays & time_of_day(start=9*HOUR, duration=8*HOUR, tz="US/Pacific")

# Team calendars (Google Calendar, .ics files, etc.)
team_busy = alice | bob | charlie

# One expression to find available slots
free_slots = (business_hours - team_busy) & (hours >= 2)

Features:

- Set operations on any timeline source

- Recurring patterns via RFC 5545 (dateutil under the hood)

- Filter by duration, metadata, or custom properties

- Google Calendar read/write

- iCalendar (.ics) import/export

Fwiw, I think focused DSLs are a great pairing with code-focused agents like huggingface's smol-agents or agex (my other hobby project).

Video of a calgebra-enabled agent: https://youtu.be/10kG4tw0D4k

Would love feedback!
by stackghost | 2026-01-04 18:04:47+00:00
I started blogging with emacs and an org-based solution, and it was horrid.

I had a vision of what I wanted the site to look like, but the org exporter had a default style it wanted. I spent more time ripping out all the cruft that the default org-html exporter insisted on adding than it would have taken to just write a new blog engine from scratch and I wish I had.

There's a way to set a custom export template, but I couldn't figure it out from the docs. I found and still do find the emacs/org docs to be poorly written for someone who doesn't already understand the emacs internals, and I wasn't willing to spend the time to become an emacs internals expert just to write a blog.

So I lived with a half-baked org->pandoc->html solution for a while but now I'm on Jekyll and much happier with my blogging experience.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-04 18:04:49+00:00
> Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.

Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you? Just Google with site:StackOverflow.com and you won’t have to click through many results to find something closed.

Spending all of the time to log back into the site and try to find the closed question just to post it to HN to have more people try to nit-pick it again hardly sounds attractive.

> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners

The entire point of the story above was that it wasn’t a beginner question.
by apsurd | 2026-01-04 18:04:59+00:00
how do you know?

in the first item, LLMs don't use incomplete sentence fragments?

> It’s seductive to fall in love with a technology and go looking for places to apply it. I’ve done it. Everyone has. But the engineers who create the most value work backwards: they become obsessed with understanding user problems deeply, and let solutions emerge from that understanding.

I suppose it can be prompted to take on one's writing style. AI-assisted, ok sure, but hmm so any existence of an em-dash automatically exposes text as AI-slop? (ironically I don't think there are any dashes in the article)

EDIT: ok the thread below, does expose tells. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46490075 - yep there's definitely some AI tells. I still think it's well written/structured though.

> It's not X... it's Y.

That one I can't unsee.
by digitalPhonix | 2026-01-04 18:05:17+00:00
> Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...

It’s not asking for documentation, it’s quite literally asking how to do something. There are links to documentation to prove that I read all the documentation I could (to preemptively ward off the question getting closed).

Yes, I deleted it because I solved the question myself, no need for it to exist as a closed question. How can I “Edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. You can edit the question or post a new one.”? The answer is quite literally facts (the message format) and citations which is what I was hoping to get from someone else answering.

I undeleted it so I could give this example.

> So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.

What would looking at it again do? I had no idea it was being voted to close in the first place; I have no way to request a review; and the instructions for what to do to “fix” the questions make absolutely no sense so there’s nothing to change before it gets “looked at again”.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
by secure | 2026-01-04 18:05:24+00:00
GNOME’s “proper wayland implementation” also does not work with my monitor, as I explained in the article:

> By the way, when I mentioned that GNOME successfully configures the native resolution, that doesn’t mean the monitor is usable with GNOME! While GNOME supports tiled displays, the updates of individual tiles are not synchronized, so you see heavy tearing in the middle of the screen, much worse than anything I have ever observed under X11. GNOME/mutter merge request !4822 should hopefully address this.
by malco_2001 | 2026-01-04 18:05:53+00:00
I am absolutely blown away to have the author of AppImage (Probono) partnering with me on a project I started that to be honest I didn't know if it would ever go anywhere. There is no better validation, and this is exactly what the spirit of creating open source solutions is all about for me. I wish I had known now years ago about GNUstep earlier. I took a path of learning FreeBSD deeper instead in 2004 when I started my career. I contributed to PCBSD as I learned programming in 2013 which eventually brought me to making FuryBSD for a short time.

When I started FuryBSD which was a livecd creator for FreeBSD that made it easy for others to spin up projects Probono noticed and started reaching out, helping me making some great contributions. It became the basis for the current GhostBSD LiveCD, HelloSystem, I believe RavynOS, and FyneDesk used it or at least were also using it in the past.

Probono blew me away with his work on LiveSTEP, and it just kind of stuck with me. I ended up silently carrying it forward, and getting back in touch after I realized what we could do with it. I recently gave Probono ownership for the GitHub org, and full creative control so I could focus on harder functional parts like a truly integrated WindowManager. It's all just been somewhat a miracle, and a matter of timing lining up I suppose. I am very much looking forward to seeing the cool things we can do together in 2026!
by furyofantares | 2026-01-04 18:06:14+00:00
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question; if you can the same answer faster, you don't need SO.

Plus they might find the answer on SO without asking a new question - You probably would expect the # of new questions to peak or plateau even if the site wasn't dying, due to the accumulation of already-answered questions.
by morkalork | 2026-01-04 18:06:22+00:00
It's naive to think there isn't already a 5th column at work.

This guy:

https://provincialtimes.ca/questions-mount-over-jamil-jivani...

Is best buds with the VP:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...

Premiers are also being courted:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-danielle-smit...

And there's some sketchy things going on in her province:

https://www.desmog.com/2025/07/22/trump-officials-discussed-...

Honestly feels like we're asleep at the wheel as a country..
by hansmayer | 2026-01-04 18:06:50+00:00
Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everything you are trying to do needs a click of sorts. Recently I was writing an e-mail and noticed I misspelled the e-mail address of the recipient, which I rarely do. So, I should just be able to click the address and edit it quickly, right? Wrong - now you have a popup menu and inside of it you have to search for "edit e-mail" option. Most of the rest of his lessons while valuable in their own right, are not something I would put under the headline of "after X years at <insert-major-tech-company>", as they do not quite seem to be that different from lessons you pick up at other companies ? I´d more interested to hear about how the culture was impacted when the bean-counters took over and started entshittifying the company for both the users and the employees too.
by lifetimerubyist | 2026-01-04 18:06:53+00:00
Yeah. I love programming. I even love the business side where you solve real problems for people.

What I don't love is the constant pressure to just deliver faster and faster. So forcing these chatbots on us fill a need for the CEOs and manager types that just want to DELIVER DELIVER DELIVER, but the benefit for the people that are forced to use them are marginal at best. There are some valid use cases for LLM-based tools, but businesses mostly aren't interested in those because it doesn't make line go up. Streamlining operations? Nah. Shove a Chatbot where it doesn't belong so you can try to get a billion dollar investment? NOW WE ARE COOKING

C-suites and managers don't give a shit about quality unless they feel the pain. That's the most important thing I've learned. If you can find a way to push the pain up to the people that make the decisions, the more likely they are incentivised to improve it. It doesn't matter if you see a problem that takes 2 days to fix coming a year away - they do not care until the application crashes because of it.

Office politics sucks.
by tptacek | 2026-01-04 18:06:54+00:00
It's not that someone can forward your mail unencrypted. It's that in the normal operation of the system, someone taking the natural next step in a conversation (replying) can --- and, in the experience of everyone I've talked to who has used PGP in anger for any extended period of time, inevitably does --- destroy the security of the entire conversation by accidentally replying in plaintext.

That can't happen in any modern encrypted messenger. It does happen routinely with encrypted email.
by leofabmonaco | 2026-01-04 18:07:51+00:00
Christmas is the time of .

Back in 2018, while taking the “Early Human Cognition” course during my MSc in Brain and Cognition, one experiment by & () really stuck with me.

It showed that appear to come into the world with basic “-” about how reality works: , , and .

Today, I feel like that study helped me navigate the debate between and . Particularly, if we want to reach or truly - , . We need systems that build an , able to and . In other words: .

I summarized the core idea in the below, and I linked the article for anyone who wants the deeper dive. Full presentation and academic paper in the first comment.

And on a personal note: I became a a few months ago. Getting to observe up close has made this topic even more fascinating.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-04 18:07:53+00:00
> See, you assume here that /usr/local/ makes any sense.

You’re presenting your comment as a rebuttal but you’re actually arguing something completely different to the OP.

They’re talking about UNIX convention from a historic perspective. Whereas you’re talking about your own opinions about what would make sense if we were to design the file system hierarchy today.

I don’t disagree with your general points, but it also doesn’t mean that the OP is incorrect either.
by gmiller123456 | 2026-01-04 18:08:08+00:00
It's a lot less about being discovered, or invented, and a lot more about the idea of using it at all. The Renaissance was a massive change in culture. Before that, art was a tool used in rituals or storytelling rather than something to be enjoyed on its own. There was more emphasis on reproducing things as they actually were than how they looked from a particular vantage point.
by packet_mover | 2026-01-04 18:08:17+00:00
Thanks, appreciate the context.

Bounding box input is a really interesting idea. For my product, the best use would probably be to automate the request/fulfillment flow if this ever picks up. Letting someone draw/paste a bbox makes the request unambiguous and could be automated end-to-end.

Btw, the pack build process isn’t that compute-heavy. It’s not instant, but as a rough data point: on my laptop, a small country like Austria/Slovakia is on the order of ~1 hour to build the three artifacts (tiles + routing tiles + SQLite geocoder).
by shmeeed | 2026-01-04 18:08:20+00:00
PSA: Statcounter data is garbage, please stop referring to them.

This data is based on their own tracking solution customers, which is only about 0.3-0.6% of all websites (none of the big ones) and therefore highly self-selected.

Note that "unknown" is basically the inverse curve to Windows and has risen from 6 to 16% within the last year. In India, "unknown" has 55% market share. They don't give any explanation for this absolute failure of analytics, which is telling me that they really don't care at all.

There's no way to know within this context what "unknown" really is, but what I can tell you for sure is that any statistic based on this kind of data is absolutely useless.
by dahart | 2026-01-04 18:08:50+00:00
> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.

Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-04 18:08:57+00:00
> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users

It's worth noting that Osmani worked as a "developer evangelist" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer working on a product shipped to users.

It might be useful to keep that in mind as you read through what his lessons are, because they're surely shaped by the positions he held in the company.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-04 18:09:44+00:00
Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment.

The late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere.
by tptacek | 2026-01-04 18:09:59+00:00
I wrote the post and object to the argument that it primarily covers GnuPG issues.

But stipulate that it does, and riddle me this: what's the point? You can use Sequoia set up for "modern crypto including AEAD", yes, but now you're not compatible with the rest of the installed base of PGP.

If you're going to surrender compatibility, why on Earth would you continue to use OpenPGP, a design mired in 1990s decisions that no cryptography engineer on the planet endorses?
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2026-01-04 18:10:41+00:00
They’re both short stories, less than 10 minutes to read.

If you’d like to read novel length LeGuin, “The Left Hand Of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed” are excellent. Much of her most lauded work shares a universe, but each novel stands alone and doesn’t share relevant characters, let alone protagonists.

Edit: „The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas“ can be read at https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
by eth0up | 2026-01-04 18:11:01+00:00
I do:

Secondary camera (with OpenCam) *oss

Security camera (various software)

Alarm clock with custom audio files (tibetan bells make a very unobtrusive wakeup sound)

Guitar tuner & general audio recorder

Mp3 player while working in harsh environments

And it stays simless, in airplane mode, after a nice adb session where I uninstall just about everything I can. I could easily live without it, but I'm often glad to have it.
by aap_ | 2026-01-04 18:11:08+00:00
This is low-effort fantasy history. It may be directionally correct, but why bother when you don't care about the details? From analyzing the UNIX manuals and other old files we get the following (not fully complete) picture:

We'll skip PDP-7 UNIX, no hierarchical file system yet.

UNIX v1 on the PDP-11 had an RF11 fixed head disk (1mb) for / and swap, and an RK05 moving head disk (2.5mb) for /usr (the user directories)

By v2 they had added a second RK05 at /sys for things like the kernel, manual pages, and system language stuff like the c compiler and m6.

By v3 they added yet another RK05 at /crp for, well, all sorts of crap (literally), including yacc apparently. /usr/bin is mentioned here for the first time.

I don't feel like looking up when sbin was first introduced but it is not a Bell Labs thing. possibly BSD or AT&T UNIX? Binaries that one would normally not want to run were kept in /etc, which includes thing like init, mount, umount, getty, but also the second pass of the assembler (as2), or helpers like glob.
Also i don't know when /home became canonical but at Bell Labs it was never a thing (plan 9 has user directories in /usr where they had always belonged logically).

The lib situation is more difficult. Looks like it started with /usr/lib. By v3 we find the equivalent directory as /lib, where it contains the two passes of the C compiler (no optimization pass back then), C runtime and lib[abc].a (assembler, B, C libraries respectively). /usr/lib had been repurposed for non-object type libraries, think text-preparation and typesetting.

By v4 the system had escaped the labs (see the recent news) and at that point everyone modified the system to their taste anyway. Perhaps it should be noted that the v7 distribution (which is the first that is very clearly the ancestor of every modern UNIX) has no /usr/bin, only /bin. /lib and /usr/lib are split however.

These are just some rough notes and due to a lack of early material they're still not as accurate as i would like. Also UNIX ran on more than one machine even in the early days (the manuals mention the number of installations) so there must have been some variation anyway. Something I'd like to know in particular is when and where RP03 disk drives were used. These are pretty huge in comparison to the cute RK05s.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2026-01-04 18:11:20+00:00
Maybe not the point you were making, but Windows 8 was lame, then 8.1 was an improvement, 10 was more improvement, and now 11 is further improvement. That's from a daily user. A lot of Windows criticism sounds like it comes from non-users or users who want to be in the hater in-group more than they want to invest in setting it up well.

The AI stuff is definitely terrible, but I turned it off a long time ago and never see it, it's another thing I don't understand the outrage about. The FUD about it getting reactivated hasn't come to pass for me.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-04 18:11:48+00:00
> will only reduce risk not eliminate it.

Same with medications? It’s well known that medications don’t eliminate risk.

For the average person without genetic outlier risk, perfect diet and exercise would definitely make heart disease a non-issue in their lifetime.

The risk your cardiologist is talking about is probably the risk that you have one of those genetic outlier conditions that require medication regardless of diet.
by MirrorEthic | 2026-01-04 18:12:00+00:00
Good question. I don't have a formal benchmark yet, but here's what I've measured in practice:

Token reduction: 64-95% depending on codebase size and work pattern. The variance is because it depends on how many files are in your .claude/ directory and how focused your session is.

How to measure yourself:
1. Check `~/.claude/attention_history.jsonl` after a session
2. Run `python3 ~/.claude/scripts/history.py --since 2h` to see what got injected vs evicted
3. Compare your token counts before/after in Claude Code's usage stats

The 25k character injection cap is the key constraint (adjustable), forces the router to prioritize ruthlessly instead of dumping everything in.

A proper benchmark comparing baseline Claude Code vs claude-cognitive on identical tasks would be useful. If someone wants to build that, I'd happily collaborate.
by j3s | 2026-01-04 18:12:13+00:00
feels LLM assisted, at the very least.

> The skill isn’t being right. It’s entering discussions to align on the problem

> clarity isn’t a style preference - it’s operational risk reduction

> The punchline isn’t “never innovate.” It’s “innovate only where you’re uniquely paid to innovate

> This isn’t strictly about self-promotion. It’s about making the value chain legible to everyone

> The problem isn’t that engineers can’t write code or use AI to do so. It’s that we’re so good at writing it that we forget to ask whether we should.

> This isn’t passive acceptance but it is strategic focus

> This isn’t just about being generous with knowledge. It’s a selfish learning hack

"Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Chrome and AI."

ah, got it.
by port11 | 2026-01-04 18:12:59+00:00
This article is infuriating. The most misunderstood? Of all novels? Are we sure? Why not call it a “very misunderstood” novel?

The entire article is a maze of ideas, explaining very little in the end. Okay, it’s misunderstood by young readers, people who think the latest movie adaptation looks cool, and so on.

That’s it? You don’t think The Catcher in the Rye and Dracula were even more misunderstood? I don’t get what the BBC columnist is getting at here. I’ve re-read the novel and it does ‘feel’ different when you’re older, but it never conveyed that the 20s were cool and parties were awesome back then. Ach!
by kqr | 2026-01-04 18:13:12+00:00
Lehman talked about the developer-software-user triad. Each of the three have a different understanding of the problem to be solved.

Developers misunderstand what the users want, and then aren't able to accurately implement their own misunderstanding either. Users, in turn, don't understand what the software is capable of, nor what developers can do.

> Good intentions, hopes of correctness, wishful thinking, even managerial edict cannot change the semantics of the code as written or its effect when executed. Nor can they after the fact affect the relationship between the desires, needs, and requirements of users and the program […] implementation; nor between any of these and operational circumstances – the real world.

https://entropicthoughts.com/laws-of-software-evolution
Ask HN: What is better to do, big projects or small ones?
by DenisDolya | 2026-01-04 18:13:14+00:00
I'm a regular developer, and I'm faced with the question of whether I'm really doing small projects like utilities or libraries - is that correct? I just always thought it's better not to waste time on something big to see people's reaction, whether they really liked your work, but usually my mini utilities or libraries don't become popular And I thought maybe it's because of their scale, like they're so simple that nobody needs them. So I want to ask you what's really better: doing mini projects with the hope that someday it will be useful to someone useful, or do something large-scale?