MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dijksterhuis | 2026-01-10 08:39:59+00:00
> This leads to the point: in general do we care about this non-determinism?

> Most of the time, no we don't.

well that’s a sweeping generalisation. i think this is a better generalised answer to your question.

> It depends on the problem we’re trying solve and the surrounding conditions and constraints.

90% of software engineering is debugging — understanding the problem space.

are 99% of us building a pacemaker? no. but that doesn’t mean we can automatically make the leap to assuming a set of tools known for being non-deterministic are good enough for our use case.

it depends.

> Once you accept that the next stage is accepting that most of the time the non-deterministic output of an LLM is good enough!

the next stage is working with whatever tool(s) is/are best suited to solve the problem.

and that depends on the problem you are solving.
by ozim | 2026-01-10 08:41:01+00:00
We got bunch of internal meetings starting at quarter past instead of full hour and mostly we can get it finished in 45mins.

Gives people room to breathe for those who are back to back scheduled full day. When they have calls with customers or other departments they are usually late anyway and don’t have time to go to toilet in between because as always other meetings run past time.
by wronex | 2026-01-10 08:41:48+00:00
According to Hardware Unboxed this problem goes away with the new generation displays. They are switching over to using a standard (LCD-like) striped pixel layout.

https://youtu.be/c90FLTWQiSY

Must say my first generation Samsung display looks amazing both for gaming and programming though. If it wasn’t for the annoying smart-tv stuff, and the mini connectors, it’s a perfect monitor.
by Zarel | 2026-01-10 08:41:52+00:00
I'm surprised Starship is so popular. It's missing really basic powerlevel10k features like empty segments. If you look at some examples:

https://starship.rs/presets/gruvbox-rainbow

You can see that when the segments are empty, they still appear as a 1-width segment, rather than entirely disappearing.

It also makes you configure many things by hand. powerlevel10k has an interactive wizard that lets you design your prompt one option at a time (do you want a nerd font? do you want it one line or two? etc) but Starship makes you manually write escape codes if your preferences don't match one of the presets.

No judgment, but I do wonder what people like about Starship that makes up for these things.
by mwcampbell | 2026-01-10 08:43:21+00:00
I want something like this, but running on my own box. I now have a Linux box with plenty of RAM and storage under my desk. (It happens to be an NVIDIA DGX Spark, but I'm not really interested in passing the GPU through to these sandboxed VMs; I know that's not practical anyway.) Maybe I'll see if I can hack together a local solution like this using Firecracker.
by jiggawatts | 2026-01-10 08:43:21+00:00
That problem is not clearly stated, so if you’re pasting that into an AI verbatim you won’t get the answer you’re looking for.

My guess is: first move the weights to the middle, and only then remove them.

However “weights” and “bar” might confuse both machines and people into thinking that this is related to weight lifting, where there’s two stops on the bar preventing the weights from being moved to the middle.
by atoav | 2026-01-10 08:44:24+00:00
Let me explain what I meant with opinionated:

Markdown decided for the users what the needed formatting options are, instead of giving them a bunch of tools that they could then combine in many different ways. The latter would be unopinionated as it doesn't force the opinions of the devs onto the users.

For example, why doesn't markdown have columns? Why do tables have to have headers? Etc. The reason is someone decided to do it that way on purpose.
by roenxi | 2026-01-10 08:45:12+00:00
It isn't particularly hard to understand - people should be allowed to make their own determination about what is good for their health, what isn't and what risk tolerance they are personally comfortable with. If that principle is embraced a whole heap of good things are fairly obvious - why there shouldn't be state-backed eugenics programs, why exercise is voluntary and it makes health policy a lot less charged. If the principle is thrown out then a lot of problematic policy becomes hard to reject.

I mean, look at what the vax-mandatory movement got - they enraged a bunch of people, helped secure Trump II, made vaccine scepticism a mainstream and popular position which arguably handed the US health department vaccine policy to anti-vaxers. Maybe avoiding authoritarian tactics and sticking to principle would have gotten them a better outcome? Hard to see how it could be worse, to be honest. They screwed up pretty badly.
by ghusto | 2026-01-10 08:45:32+00:00
After holding out for literally years after Mac changed their default shell to ZSH, I finally switched over. I didn't love it, but it was okay and had some niceties that I wasn't used to. Then I started to configure it and inevitably ran into Oh My Zsh, and spent some time playing around with that to get it how I liked.

In the end, I realised nothing was as good (to me) as my original Bash set up. I have all the features I need, it's universally supported, and it's fast.

Tip: Install the post GNU2 version from brew
by altairprime | 2026-01-10 08:45:54+00:00
The article concurs:

> Within the past few weeks LG has announced RGB stripe OLED panels which will resolve this problem, but there aren’t currently any monitors available using these panels

with two links to five known upcoming devices.

https://news.lgdisplay.com/en/2025/12/lg-display-unveils-wor...

https://www.analyticsinsight.net/news/ces-2026-first-rgbstri...

3440x1440 @ 34" (110ppi): Asus PG34WCDN, Asus XG34WCDMS, MSI MEG X, MSI MPG 341CQR X36

Digging into this further, I also found another Asus panel that's closer, if not all the way there yet (5K would be, but this is 4K) to the usual Mac pixel densities:

3840x2160 @ 27" (163ppi): Asus PG27UCWM

I'll still be waiting for 5K @ 27" with the new tech, but I'm really glad to see they finally solved this!
by srean | 2026-01-10 08:46:10+00:00
It depends on parameterization.

For example, if you prameterize the x,y coordinates of a plane-circular trajectory in terms the angle theta, it's nonlinear function of theta.

However, if you parameterized a point in terms of the tuple (cos \theta, sin \theta) it comes out as a scaled sum. Here we have pushed the nonlinear functions cos and sin inside the basis functions.

Consider the Naive Bayes classifier. It looks nonlinear till one parameterized it in log p then it's linear in log-p and log-odds.

If one is ok with dimensional basis this linearisation idea can be pushed much further. Take a look at this if you are interested

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4471490/a-proper-ap...
by maxbond | 2026-01-10 08:46:18+00:00
Adding more resources doesn't solve the problem that they aren't being managed sustainably. We can't exhaust all the resources in space, but we could definitely exhaust all of the resources accessible to us in space. Like how we can't exhaust all of the oil or all of the gold on this planet, but we could exhaust all of the resource which can be mined economically.

This was once explained to me with a metaphor of a bacteria colony in a jar. The colony doubles every 24 hours. So they quickly exhaust the space in the jar. No problem, you give them another jar. 24 hours later, their population doubles, and they have filled both jars.
by moffkalast | 2026-01-10 08:46:33+00:00
Small yes, efficient no. It's more or less on par with comparable minipcs in power draw, needs an active cooler and idles at over 3W. That's as much as a Pi 2 uses going flat out. They keep increasing power draw with marginal efficiency gains and don't bother to do much power management. It's absolutely atrocious compared to the average smartphone SoC.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-10 08:47:27+00:00
I'm absolutely baffled by colleague who somehow manage to be five minutes late to an online meeting while working from home. Because you're right, you get a reminder 10 - 15 minutes in advance, you just need to click the join meeting button, you're already at the computer. We have, for remote meetings, a five minute buffer at the start of every meeting, for people to "settle in" makes no sense, just start the meeting.

In general a lot of people just aren't being serious about meetings, which I guess is also why many hate them. So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
by thegrim000 | 2026-01-10 08:47:28+00:00
I mean, I come on HN, and the #6 post at the top of the page is some decisive US politics story about vaccines, posted by an account with does nothing but posts extremely divisive US political content, literally nothing else, all politics, all hate inducing content, all stories which are against the HN terms of use. The #6 post at top of the site at the moment. It's so tiring. Think I'll just leave instead of continuing to browse. Please mods, clean things up.
by rock_artist | 2026-01-10 08:47:35+00:00
It’s a circle that needs to be broken. It has multiple parties even without device manufacturers.

Users - there is a broad scope of users. For sustainable eco-system you need also user interest and support of such.

Developers - that sounds funny. I know. But you need enough leverage to get apps or services to be open.

Companies/Software - a modern mobile device takes place in almost any interaction. Commuting, payment, banking, grocery shopping, social messaging, doom scrolling.

Biggest hope for the future is ensuring PWA becomes standardized enough.
That way the OS lock-in could be reduced.
by epochcore | 2026-01-10 08:48:13+00:00
Add to your GitHub workflow in seconds

# .github/workflows/godel-review.yml
name: Gödel Code Review
on: [pull_request]

jobs:
review:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4

- name: Gödel Task Router
uses: Jvryan92/Godel-Task-Router@v3
with:
swarm-agents: '8'
auto-fix: 'true'
# Pro features (requires license-key)
optimize: 'true'
watermark: 'true'
audit-deps: 'true'
by quintu5 | 2026-01-10 08:49:21+00:00
Markdown viewing is one of the core use-cases I had in mind when building the Tachi Code browser extension (https://tachicode.com/).

Open a raw .md file in your browser and it'll automatically open in a side-by-side editor/preview. If viewing is all you want, you can set the default preview mode for markdown files to be fullscreen.
by bpavuk | 2026-01-10 08:51:51+00:00
> Assuming that wasn't trolling, what's the last thing you tried and when?

vibe-coding the GTK-rs app with Codex, delegating ready Figma designs to Junie to implement in Jetpack Compose, improving a11y and perf on my personal website built in Svelte with Claude. (a friend threw $100 into that slot machine and shared access to Claude Code with me.)

all in December 2025. all failed *horrendously*. Claude Sonnet 4.5 actually worsened the Lighthouse performance score on mobile from 95 down to 40!! though, it did a decent job on a11y.

Codex CLI constantly used older versions of all sorts of crates, spat out deprecated code, outright refused to use Blueprints and Context7, but some time after, I could get a mockup of Superhuman-style email client.

and Junie... well, it did best. it had Gemini 3 Flash picked as a model. despite Material 3 Expressive being beyond Gemini's knowledge cutoff, it actually used Context7 to fill the gap. though, it fumbled the bag with details, performance, and overabstractioning.

> I recommend giving their top plan a fair chance for a month.

as I said, my friend already did. we both find it the worst spend of the decade. seriously, in yesteryear's Call of Duty we would at least have fun. being a purchase worse than Call of Duty is a floor so low, you have to break it deliberately.

before you say "try again," do your research around food prices and salaries in Ukraine. (or delegate it to Claude Deep Research feature, you may love it.) to feed yourself well here, you have to spend measly by Western standards $300-600/mo. (that's without housing and utilities, presuming you live alone.) though, salaries outside dev jobs are just as measly, and then you have the overall job crisis in Ukraine overlaid on top of the worldwide IT job crisis.

4-8 months of Claude Max amount to the rumored price of Steam Machine. I would rather spend $800 to see the joy on my younger sister's face and familiarize her with true games, beyond what's on Google Play.

> That is people who can code, who are used to delegate (good at phrasing) and are more likely to accept something that works even though is not character by character what they expected.

I would rather spend that time nursing a real open-source contributor or a junior colleague. I would have a real person with real willpower and real ideas in my network, and that would spread the joy of code.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-10 08:55:43+00:00
>If I understand how the underlying physics and dynamics are working but don't know how to write the code then theres no world where I could make something like this.

You could learn coding same way as you learned the physics and dynamics. Programming and physics aren't mutually exclusive. Actually every physicist is (was?) required to know (multiple) programming (languages).

>If I were to be someone who just tells AI "implement drag"

That'll mean at least you understand drag. Could do even worse, regards to learning at least rather result, prompting something like "make a cool-looking physically-realistic 2d rocket launch simulator", which we're at point that will most certainly return a functional app.

>but im understanding whats happening

Do you though? You depend on AI correctly translating your natural language input to code. Though arguably this is something LLMs excel at, since math (logic) also plays role you've to be able to at least read and review the resulting code for correctness. (Assuming you actually care about the physical accuracy that is.)
by impossiblefork | 2026-01-10 08:56:18+00:00
Depending of course, on what you mean by world war three.

Russia will certainly not respond with nuclear weapons, as the EU would similarly respond with nuclear weapons. I don't China and Russia have a defence pact where each has agreed to come to the aid of the other.

Consequently I don't agree at all, and I don't think it's a problem to have war with Russia.
by defrost | 2026-01-10 08:56:28+00:00
Without the postpartum and early childcare of those countries.

Denmark doesn't do mandatory vaccines to the same degree as they catch early development of disease and treat it when it appears, consistently across the whole population.

The US has a case for mandatory multi childhood vacination as the data shows otherwise preventable childhood diseases will spread untreated and unchecked.

If you like Japan and Denmark ad want the same - get onto improving the US health system for everybody regardless of employment status.
by rainonmoon | 2026-01-10 08:56:40+00:00
The gutless liberals that dominate your country’s preconceptions of “the left” are not your anti-police state faction, but you do their work for them by conflating the two. The anti-police state faction are the ones habitually being physically brutalised if not outright murdered by the cops while the media wags their finger at them for their apparent lack of civility.
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2026-01-10 08:59:09+00:00
Yeah. I used zsh for decades, invested a reasonable amount of emotion and time in my config but swapped to fish last year as a sort of January trial and it stuck.

It's not perfect, the lack of HEREDOCs are annoying sometimes, and no background-able blocks (eg `{x}&`) means you can't async things as easily in scripts.

Zsh has a lot of advanced stuff (at least for a shell) that can deliver pretty complex scripting such as throw/catching, mountains of variable flags and switches which I do miss when I write fish scripts but really -- I've abused them a lot over the years and now days I would be more likely to just use a "builds to a single binary" language.

I will probably swap to nushell when it gets a bit more stable (in my experience it's runtime is stable, but it's feature set / command names are still shaking out. I really like it's general ideas though in terms operating on structured data.
by tazjin | 2026-01-10 09:00:45+00:00
You can sell the phones alright, and they might even work, but the fact is that participation in society - especially if you live in a city - will be much harder without Android/iOS.

Note, not impossible: You can always carry cash to avoid phone-based bank payments (which would be needed at e.g. my local farmer's market, where nobody has a card payment terminal), some taxi services (Yandex Go for example) provide a web view with some of the features, you can open map services in the browser ...

But for the browser-based cases the experience will be even worse than the standard app experience, and friction is overall much higher.

As a result, only a very small fraction of nerds are committed enough to buy and use these devices. You then have a chicken&egg problem about getting a third option to work.

The only way this has been done semi-successfully in recent years is Huawei's HarmonyOS - and they did it by way of a) already being an absolutely massive phone company, and b) keeping around an expensive Android-compatibility core for many years.
by jeswin | 2026-01-10 09:01:56+00:00
Yes performance is a big issue, and so is security (or the lack of it). I'm attacking this from another angle: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsonic

Write TypeScript, compile to native code via CLR's NativeAOT. We're almost there, you can see some examples here: https://github.com/tsoniclang/proof-is-in-the-pudding

You get everything; real multithreading, stack allocated types, single binary output (x64, ARM64 for Linux/MacOS) etc.
by justinclift | 2026-01-10 09:01:57+00:00
> The sticking point like always will be media playback (read: DRM/widevine). That is the graveyard where Linux browsers go to die.

The Orion Alpha is happily playing back Youtube video's at 4k for me out of the box.

Confirmed it just now with this one to make sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFG3Ah-zf18
by jstanley | 2026-01-10 09:03:10+00:00
> Since each position takes up 6 bits ($2^6 = 64$), multiplying 6 bits by 32 pieces gives us 192 bits / 24 bytes (1 byte = 8 bits).

But each position can only be used once, so you really only have 64*63*62*61*...*33 possibilities = 64!/32! = ~2^53, so you could encode this with less than 7 bytes, and then use the basic 12-byte encoding for captures, castling, en-passant, and promotions, and you are below 19 bytes in total. (Did I miscalculate this?)

Also pawns can never be on the 1st or 8th rank so you can subtract those possibilities from each of the numbers that represents a pawn.

You also don't care about the order of bishops, rooks, knights, and especially pawns - so you should be able to do even better.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-10 09:04:46+00:00
> If you’re not reading your output, then why does skill level even matter?

Few thoughts here.

Experience helps you "check" faster that what you asked for is actually what was delivered. You "know" what to check for. You know what a happy path is, and where it might fail. You're more likely to test outside the happy path. You've seen dozens of failure modes already, you know where to look for.

Experience also allows you to better define stuff. If you see that the output is mangled, you can make an educated guess that it's from css. And you can tell the model to check the css integration.

Experience gives you faster/better error parsing. You've seen thousands of them already. You probably know what the error means. You can c/p the error but you can also "guide" the model with something like "check that x is done before y". And so on.

Last, but not least, the "experience" in actually using the tools gives you a better understanding of their capabilities and failure modes. You learn where you can let it vibe away, or where you need to specify more stuff. You get a feeling for what it did from a quick glance. You learn when to prompt more and where to go with generic stuff like "fix this".
by somat | 2026-01-10 09:04:56+00:00
That is the point, markdown has nice looking plain text, It is a terrible formatting language, it has no semantic ability. The whole point of markdown is that it is nice looking plaintext that can be typeset. I would even go so far to say that the intended primary render of markdown is the plaintext

This is why I don't like proposals to make markdown a better markup language, I understand the intent, markdown sucks as a decent language, but these "improvements" make the plain text ugly, and that is most of the value of markdown lost right there.
by chegra | 2026-01-10 09:05:29+00:00
I did a summary here: https://www.chestergrant.com/highlights-from-spark-how-exerc...

It's in my top 15 books that changed my worldview.

Some key highlights:

1. In 2001 fit kids scored twice as well on academic tests as their unfit peers.

2. German researchers found that people learn vocabulary words 20 percent faster following exercise than they did before exercise, and that the rate of learning correlated directly with levels of BDNF.

3.Specifically, every fifty minutes of weekly exercise correlated to a 50 percent drop in the odds of being depressed.
by elbci | 2026-01-10 09:05:45+00:00
Ha ha, I feel so old now... Not only I have no idea who's "that" Heather Burns but I've seem to have skipped the "Wired has a paywall" entirely. Soo... Village Voice and NewYorker - are they still around, "resisting"?

This being said, I'm honestly glad that Heather Burns - whomever she is - has glimpsed the limits of performative "resistance" on the internet. When resistance is a corporate media product you consume or a Che t-shirt you buy, don'y be surprised when Ohio unemployed steel workers vote Trump just to spike you...
by lmeyerov | 2026-01-10 09:06:01+00:00
I'm optimistic most people can, given the time and resources

In the CCC video, you may enjoy the section on how we are moving to eval-driven AI coding for how we more methodically improve agents. Even more so, the slides before on motivating why it gets harder to improve quality as you go on.

One big rub is it's one of those areas where people grossly misunderestimate what is needed for the quality goals they're likely targeting, and if a long-living artifact to be maintained, the on-going costs. It's similar to junior engineers or short-term contractors who never had to build production-grade software before and haven't had to live with their decisions: These are quite learnable engineering skills, and I've found it useful to burn your fingers before having confidence in the surprising weight of cost/benefit decisions. The more autonomy and expectations you are targeting for the agent, the more so.
by concinds | 2026-01-10 09:06:09+00:00
> My line of thinking is that if someone is technical enough to root his phone he understands the risks.

That is a terrible assumption. I had a rooted phone when I was 12 to pirate games. Friends asked me to root theirs. Rooting isn’t hard and lots of people do it (absolute not relative terms)

And the idea that so-called “technical” people know what they’re doing and are hack-proof is hot garbage machismo BS. Modern attacks use social engineering and extremely technical people fall for it all the time. There were several stories on here just this week.
by Eisenstein | 2026-01-10 09:06:35+00:00
Except you didn't respond to anything I wrote. A 'simple and straightforward' response that does not address the content of the post you are responding to is not how this board operates.

From the guidelines:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."