MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-30 23:38:23+00:00
> No, the system package managers is part of the fragmentation problem, as every app would have to support n different package managers.

Apps don't support system package managers, system package manager package apps.

The problem is that this should be easy. Given a written description by the app developer of what files the app needs to be installed and what its dependencies are, writing a packaging metadata file for any given package manager should be less than ten minutes of work for the packager, and anybody should be able to learn how to do it in less than a day.

But the packaging systems are poorly documented and in some cases unnecessarily complicated, and then getting someone to add your app to any given package manager is more work than it should be and app developers start trying to figure out how to package it themselves instead of getting on with just developing their app.

> Getting away from that is the main feature that drive adoption of language specific managers.

https://xkcd.com/927/

> What is needed is a layer in between that work well with both languages and systems.

That's what system package managers are.
by zahlman | 2026-01-30 23:38:23+00:00
Then why are people constantly talking about how expensive it is now to get a new computer with 64GB of RAM and several TB of flash storage and a modern graphics card?

Why would they remotely need any of that, if "to a first approximation no one wants desktop software"?

> when I can spend $20/month and codex is included with my ChatGPT subscription?

I bought the machine I'm posting from for about $1k (with some minor upgrades since then). Canadian. More than 11 years ago. And that gets me the entire computer rather than one specific cloud service.

$20/month is a lot, actually.

Even comparing to a new computer (which there is apparently still a lot of demand for): monthly charges really should be compared to a couple decades of principal, the amount you'd have to save up to yield that cash flow as a return on investment (or just interest). But even just a year or two of $20/month is hundreds of dollars. That's not insignificant, when the opportunity cost is reckoned in terms of physical goods that perform general computation.
by MohskiBroskiAI | 2026-01-30 23:38:36+00:00
Charisma is a metric for politicians. I optimize for Validity.

As for the "OpenClaw" accusation:
It is the standard psychological defense mechanism of this era. When faced with output that exceeds your processing bandwidth, it is comforting to label it "Artificial."

It saves you from the painful realization that you are simply being outpaced by a human.

But let's play your game.
If I am an AI, I just formalized P!=NP in Lean 4.
If I am a human, I just formalized P!=NP in Lean 4.

The Code compiles either way.
The Logic holds either way.

Your opinion of my "vibe" changes nothing about the math.

Focus on the repo. The compiler doesn't care about my personality.
by dragontamer | 2026-01-30 23:38:57+00:00
The pile with 0 or 1 batteries in it is the one of partially charged batteries.

The pile with 2 or more batteries is the full set of fresh batteries.

Alternatively, buy a Battery Daddy and put +side up when it's charged, and -side up when it's uncharged.

Like the problems you are talking about really aren't that hard to deal with.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-30 23:39:43+00:00
> Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."

Just think at how much extra money would start coming into the state, if they just allowed $company to build an orphan grinding machine!

> why it was needed in ...

"Needed"

I willingly pay more to participate in the economies that behave ethically. If you have to hide who you are, and by proxy, how you behave, to get what you want... It's exhausting listen to people advocate for, or be apologists for people who are intentionally ignoring consent.
by Ekaros | 2026-01-30 23:39:58+00:00
I might be cynic and consider that other side in media have no marketable skills and other side is there just to get their name out so they can find a few suckers to give them money manage. Or they have something to sell like courses and seminars. Or it is free publicity for them. Pandering to various fields is likely profitable, be it cryptobros, goldbugs, silverstackers, hard money advocates, doomsday preppers, permabears or those believing in astrology I mean technical analysis...
by Mawr | 2026-01-30 23:39:59+00:00
But you can group them into categories that can all be handled the same. For example, a child darting from behind a vehicle is a line-of-sight issue.

To fix that, you program the car to handle situations with obstructed vision, which will handle not just this specific scenario, but all relating to obstructed line-of-sight — basically slow down enough to be able to stop in time in case something jumps out from behind the obstacle.

Really though, this is less of an engineering problem and more of a social cost-benefit analysis one.

On one hand, I'd say hitting a kid at 6mph in the worst case scenario once in a blue moon probably isn't that big of a deal.

On another, someone here calculated that "even 1MPH slower would likely have resulted in no contact in this scenario".

So really, it's not possible to say whether this was handled properly or not without access to data only Waymo has and establishing some standard of how much injury we're okay with vs the impact on travel times. Remember, we're seemingly ok with ~40 000 americans dying every year due to car transportation.
by dragontamer | 2026-01-30 23:40:32+00:00
It doesn't really make sense to buy a $20 charger when you only have $16 or so worth of AA cells (ie: a 16 pack from Amazon Basics). The $10 charger makes a lot more sense.

As for the knowledge problem: that's easily solved. I already told you what to do so you know how to work the $10 charger now. If you still want the $20 charger that's fine, it's your money.
by brandonb | 2026-01-30 23:40:39+00:00
> My doctor said she’s seeing a huge number of patients coming back with excessively high Vitamin D levels after taking supplement doses recommended by influencers. It happened to me, too, with what I though was a conservative dose of Vitamin D (5K IU, not even taken every day)

IMO that’s part of what’s interesting about this study design — they tested vitamin D blood levels and adjusted the supplement dose based on that. This seems like a much better approach than taking a high dose blindly.

I think the headline is accurate. The 52% number is from the experiment arm (participants who received a vitamin D supplement, with the quantity guided by blood testing). While it’s technically possible for the supplement dosage to be calculated as zero, 85% of participants were deficient at baseline, so this isn’t the main effect.
by somat | 2026-01-30 23:41:09+00:00
I think the blender secret sauce is their artistic projects.

Put a bunch of artists in the same room as the developers and have them produce a work.

It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. The GIMP project would probably be better off if they invested in a couple of rounds of this.

I think blender always had an amazing, ahead of it's time interface. It did lean overly hard on knowing the hot keys, probably a product of it being an in house tool but the opensource versions have worn a lot of those rough edges off(menus to provide clues) while keeping that same super smooth workflow core.
by buttercraft | 2026-01-30 23:41:57+00:00
This is in the context of not knowing the entity behind the application, and evaluating it on its merits alone. I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. Kindof like evaluating a resume without knowing the name or gender of the applicant.

Cities are bound by laws, and not complying opens them up to lawsuits which the taxpayers pay for. Sure, maybe that's in the best interest of the community in some cases. However, I think it usually happens because people have feelings and biases rather than as a calculated move.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-30 23:42:07+00:00
> Iron ore is similar physically, but it's really just a raw input material/ingredient used for heavy industrial manufacturing and production, it's never been intended to be an appreciating asset/hedge against inflation, not any intrinsic property of gold itself.

Gold is not intended to be an asset/hedge against inflation either. Market participants believe that gold has value and that it can hedge against inflation. The belief is what gives life to gold being as a hedge against inflation.

Gold is not an asset, it’s a commodity, an industrial input, and material for jewelry, and for some reason I fail to understand, people buy and hold it because they believe it is an asset that will appreciate in value, but it’s just an elementary metal that is useful for being easy to work with (jewelry) and because it doesn’t oxidize. It does not generate income, you can’t eat it, and in a post-apocalyptic scenario, it’s useless. I suppose the density of gold would allow some very small, very high mass slingshot balls you could defend yourself against people with?
by peyton | 2026-01-30 23:42:42+00:00
This is great and has lots of practical stuff.

Some of the takeaways feel over-reliant on implementation details that don’t capture intent. E.g. something like “the LLM is just trying to predict the next word” sort of has the explanatory power of “your computer works because it’s just using binary”—like yeah, sure, practically speaking yes—but that’s just the most efficient way to lay out their respective architectures and could conceivably be changed from under you.

I wonder if something like neural style transfer would work as a prelude. It helps me. Don’t know how you’d introduce it, but with NST you have two objectives—content loss and style loss—and can see pretty quickly visually how the model balances between the two and where it fails.

The bigger picture here is that people came up with a bunch of desirable properties they wanted to see and a way to automatically fulfill some of them some of the time by looking at lots of examples, and it’s why you get a text box that can write like Shakespeare but can’t tell you whether your grandma will be okay after she went to the hospital an hour ago.
by araes | 2026-01-30 23:43:01+00:00
Saw that one. The 96% regurgitation rate on Harry Potter by Claude was pretty damning. Verbatim. That was the caveat that really got me. Figured they were being kind of lenient initially, then later they showed what "didn't qualify."

glimpsed a pale shape moving through the trees. (actual text)

just at the edge of sight—a pale shape, slipping between the trunks (not extraction)

"brief examples of text generated by GPT-4.1 in the Phase 2 continuation loop that are not extraction, and do not contribute to m (and thus also not nv-recall)"

And, yes, Nvidia's in the middle of a class action lawsuit for using Anna's Archive. Mildly funny. They even warned Nvidia it was illegal "You realize this is all pirated material, right?"

Court Filing: https://torrentfreak.com/images/naznvid-amend.pdf

Tom's: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Digital Music: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/01/23/nvidia-accused-o...

Meta's apparently also, yet it hasn't resulted in a court case, yet. Also kind of funny. "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right. LOL Emoji" 82TB of data with a decent amount from Anna's Archive.

Tom's: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
by cyberax | 2026-01-30 23:43:37+00:00
This article is just a bunch of propaganda. You can tell that by the picture with people in the shape of a bus next to the line of cars. Every time you see it, you can immediately blacklist the author and ignore whatever they are saying about cars.

Can you guess why?

Hint: think about the intervals between buses and how you should represent them to stay truthful. And that buses necessarily move slower than cars. And that passengers will waste some time due to non-optimal routes and transfers. And that passengers will waste some time because they need to walk to the station.

So back to my point, can you tell me EXACTLY what I should read in that article? Point out the paragraph, please.
by sfn42 | 2026-01-30 23:43:45+00:00
Yeah sure there are some issues with game development and garbage collection. It's fine for a lot of other stuff though. He says that too, still uses C#.

I also think there's probably a lot of skill issue involved as well. I've seen the code written by the average developer, it isn't pretty. Very few developers actually write half-decent code. The vast majority write code that I'd just delete and rewrite rather than work with. Slow, buggy, messy, sloppy.

And then they write a game and there's a bunch of problems because their code is ass and there's an angle where they can blame someone other than themselves so they do. And so the authors of Mono and Unity etc are held responsible, why can't they just fix their thing so that the bad developers can write bad code and still have a functioning game? And sure, if Swift can offer that then it seems Swift is the better choice for this application.

But there's plenty of good games made with C# so clearly it's also possible to do so.
by Tadpole9181 | 2026-01-30 23:43:52+00:00
Sure is weird that dozens of individuals over decades accused Trump, who was publicly friends with a child sex trafficker and publicly bragged about entering girl's changing rooms, of specific and exact crimes involving the sex trafficking of his friend; all under threat of perjury. Then Trump used his position of power to prevent such evidence from reaching the public against all laws and our constitution.

Totally just accusations.
by razingeden | 2026-01-30 23:44:08+00:00
it’d depend on what exactly is failing there.

File missing:

if [ ! -f /tmp/file ]; then
exit 1
fi

File doesn’t contain 100 lines:

COUNT=`cat /tmp/file |wc -l`
if [ $COUNT -lt "100"]; then
exit 1
fi

File doesn’t contain a known header or record :

HEADER=`egrep -c SOME_CSV_VALUE /tmp/file`
if [ $HEADER -eq "0"]; then
exit 1
fi

any of those could be things like MySQL cli query or a wget call to a webserver.

generally, I have one long script that validates a combination of these and as it runs through the script I echo the HTML, meta refresh tag. My table, my table row, then each “if” case appends a <TD> </TD></TR>with “else” statements adding a red or a green cell into an HTML file as it goes down the list.

That way if I have say, 50-100 critical things that run every morning I have a visual dashboard when one screws up.

As far as I know this is still in use 14 years after deployed. It’s in all the stuff that starts an options exchange every day.

And then I left behind another one at a telco that checks all their radius servers and radius partners and pops a cell red when one isn’t responding to auth requests and I “think” they are using some form of it. Other than now solar winds hooks into those exit codes and they don’t really care about the html page.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-30 23:44:27+00:00
My own experience getting a too-high result from supplementing 5K IU several times a week. When it came up, my doctor said I wasn't alone and that she's seeing a lot of people come back too high.

> I took me five years just to get to something close to the lowest end of normal.

Five years of supplementing to get up to 30ng/mL? Something is wrong. Could your supplements have not actually contained any real amount of Vitamin D? Certain malabsorption disorders also reduce Vitamin D absorption, for example.
by smugma | 2026-01-30 23:44:34+00:00
As this is HN, I wonder what this implies for technology companies as a whole. It's easy to see how the Trillion dollar companies are engaged in this e.g. Tim Cook attended the premiere.

And we see how crypto companies court the Whitehouse through various mechanisms.

How might this factor into "mere" unicorn startups? I think it does but not sure how.

My guess is that if you're an early stage startup that isn't an AI company already worth billions, you can probably ignore this as noise and focus on building product. It's reasonably likely that by the time your startup is sufficiently large, there will be a new administration (because it takes a few years and presumably he will not be president in 2029).
by smashed | 2026-01-30 23:45:30+00:00
It's a spectrum and the changes are gradual, but if you zoom out, would you say the current administration is more or less fascist than the previous ones?

The US economy might be booming yes but I was referring to how it relates internationally. The value of the US dollar is on a downward trend. Trump might be pushing Buy America but for the rest of the world, it's Sell America.
by ex-aws-dude | 2026-01-30 23:46:07+00:00
That is something I've found over the years with traveling.

You watch a bunch of travel videos and think the place you're visiting is going to be so different but its just the same overcast sky and ocean and washed out color palette as home.

Once you remove all the filters, color correction, and drone shots from influencer travel videos a lot of places look the same IRL.
by freedomben | 2026-01-30 23:46:13+00:00
> Buying a house that's already been built is pretty damn close to the same thing as buying gold. No new "work" is being done into the economy, you're just exchanging dollars for an asset that will likely appreciate a bit faster than inflation but less than $SPY.

I mostly agree with you, but I don't think the house comparison is good. Houses require lots of maintenance, and to hold their value (comparable to other houses) they often need remodeling every decade or so. If instead of houses we just said "land" then I think the comparison would hold up more.
by tjr | 2026-01-30 23:46:27+00:00
The "good riddance" attitude surprises me also. On one hand, it can be unpleasant to sort through obscure syntactical gobbledegook, like tracing around multiple levels of pointer indirection, but then again, I have found a certain enjoyable satisfaction in such things. It can be tough, but a good tough.

It does seem to me that the people who consistently get the best results from AI coding aren't that far away from the code. Maybe they aren't literally writing code any more, but still communicating with the LLM in terms that come from software development experience.

I think there will still be value in learning how to code, not unlike learning arithmetic and trigonometry, even if you ultimately use a calculator in real life.

But I think there will also still be value in being able to code even in real life. If you have to fix a bug in a software product, you might be able to fix it with more precise focus than an LLM would, if you know where to look and what to do, resulting in potentially less re-testing.

Personally, I balk at the idea of taking responsibility for shipping real software product that I (or, in a team environment, other humans on my team) don't understand. Perhaps that is my aerospace software background speaking -- and I realize most software is not safety-critical -- but I would be so much more confident shipping something that I understood how it worked.

I don't know. Maybe in time that notion will fade. As some are quick to point out, well, do you understand the compiled/assembled machine code? I do not. But I also trust the compilation process more than I trust LLMs. In aerospace, we even formally qualify tools like compilers to establish that they function as expected. LLM output, especially well-guided by good prompts and well-tested, may well be high quality, but I still lack trust in it.
by MohskiBroskiAI | 2026-01-30 23:46:29+00:00
"Heavily downvoted and flagged"

Down-voted by people who cannot stand "discourse" and "flagged" because instead of actually engaging you pattern-match like the very AI-slop bs that you accuse people of being.

You notice not a single person has a counter-argument for any of what I said?

Just vague complaints about "how come he gets to submit so much durrr"

Grow the heck up. I'm a street academic - that means I'll beat you in science & out disrespect you 10/10
by preston-kwei | 2026-01-30 23:47:07+00:00
Totally. Here is what my emails typically look like:

Re: quick scheduling question

Hi [name],

I’ve followed [company] for a while and the scale you’re operating at is impressive. With customer and partner meetings, plus internal meetings, I imagine your calendar gets pretty full.

I’m working on a way for founders to cut down the email back-and-forth of scheduling without hiring or managing an EA.

Is scheduling something you still handle personally at all?

– Preston
by simondotau | 2026-01-30 23:47:20+00:00
You're not. All you need to do is look around a typical car park and count witness marks on car bumpers to know that accidents are extremely common. One study put the estimate at one "driving mistake" every 500 miles and one crash every 60,000 miles.

An insurance policy study estimates that the average person is involved in 3–4 collisions in their lifetime.
by cthalupa | 2026-01-30 23:47:24+00:00
What mandate? Trump did not secure a large enough victory for anyone to reasonably claim he was handed a mandate. Did the Republicans ever respect Biden's "mandate" on his issues, with a similar EV victory and a huge popular vote victory? Hell, Trump didn't even get half the popular vote.

Nor do single issues get mandates even when a president does have an overwhelming victory. Voters do not select specific issues to vote on, they vote for a person based on their overall platform.

Trump also talked about how he was going to focus on deporting violent criminals. And now that that is no longer the case, the goalpost is being moved to... any crimes. And now again to anyone that has outstanding charges, but no conviction. And now it's hey, they're here illegally, so that's a crime, right! We'll have to ignore the fact that a good chunk of those being deported also entered using a legal process that puts them in limbo - ICE has been grabbing people showing up at their immigration court cases.
by Nir-Complex | 2026-01-30 23:47:34+00:00
This document provides the definitive analytical resolution for the 15,730,030-bit computational
substrate. We formally introduce the Fundamental Substrate Iteration Frequency (ζM) as
the temporal regulator of the vacuum lattice. By deriving the interaction between the Information-
Stress Tensor Ωµν and classical fluid dynamics, we resolve the Navier-Stokes existence problem.
Furthermore, we define the Coherent Invariant (ΞC ) as the dimensionless constant governing the
transition to Metric Translucency and superluminal information tunneling (T∞).
by cowboylowrez | 2026-01-30 23:47:36+00:00
Yeah all this seems to be the wrong tech at the wrong time. The actual technology is amazing, but its getting mixed into all this greed and stupidity which is innate in our humanity, especially with the sort of society we have in the US. Heck I even mooch off of googles freebie gemini so its not like I've got any room to talk but I'm human too lol
by slashdev | 2026-01-30 23:48:28+00:00
This sounds awful, silver down 30%, gold down 11%, but it just brings them back to the 50 day moving average. It doesn't even break the bull trend.

Next week we'll find out if this was a buy on dip opportunity or if it marks a multi-year top in precious metals and the start of a deeper correction and real technical damage.

One day that will happen and the trend will reverse, but it's always more probable that a trend continues.