MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by radicalcentrist | 2026-01-16 08:28:58+00:00
I believe there is a kernel of truth here, but having used both the mainstream products and their "underdog" alternatives, this is completely counter to my experience.

Nokia is a bit before my time, but I've used both iPhones and Androids and simply cannot suffer iPhones anymore. There are so many features of Android that are impossible to replicate on Apple products. Even something as simple as blocking ads is a fool's errand on iOS. I make extensive use of third-party app stores, patching .apk files, and my device's filesystem. I laugh when iOS introduces a new features that's been included in Android for half a decade.

I've had to suffer many work Macbooks and vastly prefer both the hardware and (Linux) software stack on non-Apple laptops. The history of Apple hardware and OS X (sorry, macOS) is littered with blunders such as the touchbar, keyboard issues, and now Liquid Glass. Is a ThinkPad the holy grail of PCs? Probably not, but they've been a lot more reliable in my experience.

NVIDIA's Linux drivers are especially laughable. After years of wrangling their drivers, struggling to make sleep work, and getting X/Wayland rendering working reliably, at this point I can't bother. I simply disable any discrete NVIDIA laptop GPUs entirely and use the integrated graphics. It just works better and doesn't drain my battery. On a desktop I'm with AMD all the way.

I promise you, I have plenty of experience with both sides and I am most definitely not "suffering under inferior tech", at least not anymore.
by k4roshi | 2026-01-16 08:29:10+00:00
Actually novel ideas are very rare and very valueable.
That said you can build a perfectly viable business with not a single original thought. I.E. a restaurant or a clone of another business.

I'd split execution mainly in two:
Building
Selling

Building, barring some possibly extremely hard technical challenges, is not as hard as people make it to be, and LLM are definitely a huge help but I would never call vibecoding an entire application "Building a production ready SaaS".

Selling or, to put it better Product/Market fit, is what's actually very very hard and where most ideas fail.
by makingstuffs | 2026-01-16 08:29:43+00:00
I can’t agree more. I’m torn on LLM code reviews. On the one hand I think it is a place that makes a lot of sense and they can quickly catch silly human errors like misspelled variables and whatnot.

On the other hand the amount of flip flopping they go through is unreal. I’ve witnessed numerous instances where either the cursor bugbot or Claude has found a bug and recommended a reasonable fix. The fix has been implemented and then the LLM has argued the case against the fix and requested the code be reverted. Out of curiosity to see what happens I’ve reverted the code just to be told the exact same recommendation as in the first pass.

I can foresee this becoming a circus for less experienced devs so I turned off the auto code reviews and stuck them in request only mode with a GH action so that I can retain some semblance of sanity and prevent the pr comment history from becoming cluttered with overly verbose comments from an agent.
by coderwolf | 2026-01-16 08:30:38+00:00
A lot of the things are fundamentals, right? Teach him/her that. Like he/she still needs to learn to read. Then do basic maths to know how much to pay for groceries, etc.

Prep for the worst, hope for the best. So, if the AGI, UBI doesn't happen, that still would be ok. And if it does, knowing things that are useful, how those AGI things work might come in handy. Maybe those will end up empowering the kids.
by eerikkivistik | 2026-01-16 08:31:59+00:00
I've had to test out various networked filesystems this year for a few use cases (satellite/geo) on a multi petabyte scale. Some of my thoughts:

* JuiceFS - Works well, for high performance it has limited use cases where privacy concerns matter. There is the open source version, which is slower. The metadata backend selection really matters if you are tuning for latency.

* Lustre - Heavily optimised for latency. Gets very expensive if you need more bandwidth, as it is tiered and tied to volume sizes. Managed solutions available pretty much everywhere.

* EFS - Surprisingly good these days, still insanely expensive. Useful for small amounts of data (few terabytes).

* FlexFS - An interesting beast. It murders on bandwidth/cost. But slightly loses on latency sensitive operations. Great if you have petabyte scale data and need to parallel process it. But struggles when you have tooling that does many small unbuffered writes.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-16 08:32:34+00:00
Neither, I will rather go with Java or .NET based languages.

Get to choose between Java, Scala, Kotlin, Clojure, C#, F#, JIT, JIT cache with cloud compilers, or plain AOT deployments.

Never had the need to go low level control that Rust provides for the last 25 years, and I have been writing backend applications since when the options used to be C or C++, maybe with a little bit of Perl as well.

Go just feels it belongs to the 20th century in language features.
by dntrshnthngjxct | 2026-01-16 08:32:51+00:00
AGCOM is a bane on Italy's internet. Anyone who defends them doesn't understand the harm they cause to the rest of us, and all because Big Football doesn't want their peons to watch overpriced football matches for a more reasonable price.

I say this because the paid services are terrible, and pirating makes things almost too convenient. So it's not even a question of competing with a "free" product, but competing with something that does better and it's cheaper.
by steveruizok | 2026-01-16 08:32:57+00:00
Hey, Steve from tldraw here. We use AI tools to develop tldraw. The tools are not the problem, they're just changing the fundamentals (e.g. a well-formed PR is no longer a sign of thoughtful engagement, a large PR shows more effort than a small PR, etc) and accelerating other latent issues in contribution.

About the README etc: we ship an SDK and a lot of people use our source code as docs or a prototyping environment. I think a lot about agents as consumers of the codebase and I want help them navigate the monorepo quickly. That said, I'm not sure if the CONTEXT.md system I made for tldraw is actually that useful... new models are good at finding their way around and I also worry that we don't update them enough. I've found that bad directions are worse than no directions over time.
by reena_signalhq | 2026-01-16 08:34:03+00:00
This is really cool! I've tried speed reading apps before but they always felt unnatural. 900wpm is impressive if it maintains comprehension.

A few thoughts after trying it:
- The visual design is clean and doesn't distract from reading
- Would love to see reading comprehension tests built in (to verify you're actually retaining at 900wpm)
- Maybe add a "warm-up mode" that gradually increases speed?

The viral aspect is smart - people love sharing their WPM scores. Have you thought about adding a leaderboard or social sharing features?

Great work on this! Bookmarking to use for catching up on long articles.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2026-01-16 08:35:51+00:00
Laws and regulations are also ”advanced behaviour modification”. That is how they work. Tobacco is clear example of this, almost everybody used to smoke back in the 90’s and 00’s (including me) whereas after years of laws regulatios, taxation, public education, and providing healthcare for addiction, we are at the point where smokin makes you a loser rather than some cool Marlboro dude/dudette. There is very little society can do for grandparents addicted to fb, but we can prevent the same happening to the future elderly.

Limiting at which age you can use the product is just one part of the puzzle. You could also hit a big tax on ad revenue gained via social media to veer people off from ruining their brains. There is a host of others tools as well and I think we will see them implemented more and more. The tech billionaires fight back and rather fund a fascist dictator to power than lose a single cent, but there you go. But I think the Musk’s and the like have constantly stepped over boundaries to the extent that the tide has changed.
by anthk | 2026-01-16 08:36:06+00:00
You can use whatsapp over IRC->Bitlbee and reading newspapers at least for text mode. Privilege? more like the reverse. There are phone data plans for $10 that upon finishing your monthly data, you got throttled like that until the next month.

And in my country people did crazy stuff in order to ilegally watch soccer matches in cable TV's, such as writting magnetic deco cards with an electronic PICF84 based tool.

That compared to using Lagrange and gemini://gemi.dev to read the local newspapers and bookmark them in order to avoid typing down the https:// URL over and over, it's lke going for a Ph.D instead of joining a local library.

People isn't that dump, it's just lazy. And, sadly, uninformed.

In the infamous blackout in Spain, I was the only one in the bus that could fetch the news reliabily over Gemini due to the low bandwitdh.
The rest were waiting over and over.

And after that everyone got a pocket radio tuner just because. Something I was just doing over decades too because FM and AM radio will actually work anywhere.

But the web doesn't offer a nice degradation. In the blackout, they just kept sending the full raw data, literal thousands of cookie trackers, JS scripts and the mandatory ads. You at least have https://text.npr.org and https://lite.cnn.com. My country? They just pushed the web SPA's and OFC they set no OPUS stream (something every smartphone understands from at least 2012) with a smaller bitrate.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-16 08:37:22+00:00
If it's able to have a trailer hitch fitted, it's designed to have a trailer hitch fitted. You can't just stick it on with a couple of random holes drilled and a bolt through.

I always find it kind of surprising how large a vehicle people in the US think they need to pull trailers, especially when you compare with the size of trailers people pull in the UK. My own elderly Range Rover (1990s P38A) has a plated towing weight of 3500kg which means you can pull another one on a trailer with it easily. With the back full of tools and spares and a couple of passengers, you've got an all-up weight well over six tonnes!
by flomo | 2026-01-16 08:38:47+00:00
Possibly above the weeds just to try to explain. Linux was a IBM PC-compatible OS and booted from a BIOS partition, and handled disks that way. Not dissimilar to DOS/MINIX/OS2/NT or any other PC OS.

'Historically', *BSD was ported from minicomputers and had some other boot/disc/partition magic which didn't map directly onto the PC model. So that was a long resolved hassle. But it was more 'IBM' than 'MINIX'.
by utopiah | 2026-01-16 08:39:17+00:00
> The tech is moving so fast.

Well that's exactly the problem : how can one say that?

The entire process of evaluating what "it" actually does has been a problem from the start. Input text, output text ... OK but what if the training data includes the evaluation? This was ridiculous few years ago but then the scale went from some curated text datasets to... most of the Web as text, to most of the Web as text including transcription from videos, to most of the Web plus some non public databases, to all that PLUS (and that's just cheating) tests that were supposed to be designed to NOT be present elsewhere.

So again, that's the crux of the problem, WHAT does it actually do? Is it "just" search? Is it semantic search with search and replace, is it that plus evaluation that it runs?

Sure the scaffolding becomes bigger, the available dataset becomes larger, the compute available keeps on increasing but it STILL does not answer the fundamental question, namely what is being done. The assumption here is because the output text does solve the question ask, then "it" works, it "solved" the problem. The problem is that by definition the entire setup has been made in order to look as plausible as possible. So it's not luck that it initially appears realistic. It's not luck that it can thus pass some dedicated benchmark, but it is also NOT solving the problem.

So yes sure the "tech" is moving "so fast" but we still can't agree on what it does, we keep on having no good benchmarks, we keep on having that jagged frontier https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700 that makes it so challenging to make more meaningful statement than "moving so fast" which sounds like marketing claims.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-16 08:39:54+00:00
You’re both kind of right.

On the average consumer hardware at launch, 95 and XP were slow, memory hungry bloats. In fact everything that people say about Windows 11 now was even more true of Windows back then.

By the end of the life of Windows 95 and XP, hardware had overtook and Windows felt snappier.

There was a reason I stuck with Windows 2000 for years after the release of XP and it wasn’t because I was too cheep to buy XP.
by unwind | 2026-01-16 08:40:05+00:00
That sounded fascinating as a rather large difference in world view stemming only from using different languages.

It turns out that there are various models for the number of continents, and that is (phew) known in Spanish, too. See the Wikipedia page [1] (link to Spanish version) for instance. This is for European Spanish though, but I couldn't find a version of the page in es-AR.

[1]: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continente#Modelos_continental...
by em-bee | 2026-01-16 08:41:03+00:00
this is precisely why i refuse to use AI to generate code at all. i'd have to not only read it but internalize it and understand it in a way as if i had written it myself. at that point it is easier to actually write the code myself.

for prototypes and throwaway stuff where only the results count, it may be ok. but not for code that goes into a larger project. especially not FOSS projects where the review depends on volunteers.
by steveruizok | 2026-01-16 08:41:11+00:00
Reviewing code is much less of a burden if I can trust the author to also be invested in the output and have all the context they need to make it correct. That's true for my team / tldraw's core contributors but not for external contributors or drive-by accounts. This is nothing new and has up to now been worth the hassle for the benefits of contribution: new perspectives, other motivations, relationships with new programmers. It's just the scale of the problem and the risk that the repo gets overwhelmed by "claude fix this issue that I haven't even read" PRs.
by fastasucan | 2026-01-16 08:41:37+00:00
One guy I work with has little formal training (and mid level experience), but do a lot with LLM's. But in every situation he has to do anything without an LLM he heavily struggles/are not able to anything (say a basic sql query). There is no way someone with his experience and position would still be at that level.

I guess people differ in thinking that is a good or a bad thing. I think it makes up for a huge risk, as he cant really judge good from bad code (or architecture), but his supervisors have put him in a position where he should.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-16 08:41:58+00:00
Another part of it is the ability to play with enterprise hardware. That level of hardware has so many features which is cool for the technically inclined, but useless for a normal home user. When enthusiasm hits resources and the desire to acquire knowledge, this happens sometimes.

I have seen a couple of guys who acquired older generation storage "racks" which they "play with" in the weekends. Do they have the cooling? No. Does it affect their electricity bill? Very. But they want to learn that thing and want to play with it, which is understandable, as long as it's kept checked.

Not different from audiophiles who lose their way, actually.

I was a wannabe data-hoarder by accident, but I understood why I'm doing and decided to slim down drastically. I'm merging, deduplicating and deleting data step by step, because many of it is my own files from the days of yore, and I want to preserve some of them. To be frank, at this very moment I'm verifying that I have copied a bunch of files without corruption, so I can start working on them (sha256deep is an underappreciated tool).

Some of the datahoarders give me weird looks when I say, I'd rather have a single NUC with a couple of spinning drives for backing up what I care rather than having them all in a cabinet full of RAID arrays, but I already have them at work. I don't want another server at home (not because that I don't enjoy it, but I want to have some time touching actual grass).
by watwut | 2026-01-16 08:43:25+00:00
Public transport was never a place where you start conversation with a stranger. Nor even meant to be that space. I genuinely do not understand why would you pick public transport as a place where you would expect people to socialize.

And yes, I was using public transport before cell phones. And yes, women are using public transport more then men, always were, because if the family have only one car, man is typically the one using it.
by cbeach | 2026-01-16 08:44:06+00:00
We’ve struck an incredible 71 trade deals since Brexit. And there are more in the pipeline. We genuinely have a better global position now than we did in the customs union.

You think the NHS is “keeping us sane”. Two of my family members have been close to death waiting for an ambulance that never arrived / waiting in a crowded emergency waiting room with internal bleeding for hours. I pay about £10K per year in tax to the NHS for a service that is inferior to the private care I receive for approx £1K a year. The whole system is a shambles and gets worse every year. It underpays and mistreats its staff. It is inefficient.

On your point about renewables, I never claimed we needed more reliance on fossil fuels. I think we should be building more nuclear plants. France is a shining example of how to generate electricity. And then, once we have affordable battery storage (in a few years) we will be able to expand wind/solar in a sensible fashion without our stupid politicians making our energy bills the highest in the developed world.

> Renewables haven't been reducing your energy bills because you guys haven't been putting up anything of note.

The UK is #1 in Europe for wind capacity and #2 globally for offshore wind (behind China). And we have the highest energy bills in the developed world
by keepamovin | 2026-01-16 08:44:28+00:00
It matters, but not more than I think, because the mistake is on me. What really matters is you can move at the speed of ideas with execution. The code slog, that I used to do myself? Now AI can. All the other stuff, (the admin, checklist stuff), that I never did even before AI, now I have to do that stuff.

I was never good at that stuff, now I have to be. It is an important thing, but it's not the important thing. The important thing is you can move at the speed of ideas. I just have to get good at checklists, proofing...Sounds boring! But it matters, but not as much as speed.
by phgn | 2026-01-16 08:44:28+00:00
Borders are an imaginary concept made-up by nation-states, which only serves the people in power.

Or how are people fleeing from prosecution, looking for a better life, or just feeling like living somewhere else exactly hurting you? It's really a human right to move to another place, without reason required.

If you're thinking about jobs, skilled workers immigrating will compete with you much more than less-privileged people. And "we cannot pay for them" is BS made up the system as well. It is possible to pay for social security for everyone, but not if all profits go to shareholders of course.
by em-bee | 2026-01-16 08:44:34+00:00
In these cases AI writing the code is pure gain.

no, it isn't. unless the generated code is just a few lines long, and all you are doing is effectively autocompletion, you have to go through the generated code with a fine toothed comb to be sure it actually does what you think it should do and there are no typos. if you don't, you are fooling yourself.
by PonyoSunshine | 2026-01-16 08:45:00+00:00
I am in North Seattle, and I have a flock of nerds under me that would like to see real demonstrations of penetration testing via radio (Wifi and more). I have been proposing doing monthly meetups where we go up on a the rooftop of various buildings, bust out the tools, the antennas, and every other toy we have to scan and show how it's done. There are stories about others and me that the younger generation would love to see in action and then we teach what is going on, how we are doing it, and more importantly, when we find a vulnerable target, offer help to fix the hole. Kind of like white hat pen testing. So many of the younger generation wants to exploit things, but do not understand the ethics as to why and why not, and how to do good with having those sort of skills. I know this might be slightly off topic, but I think the real answer to the question here is who is willing to take the lead and step out of the normal club, party, con, meetup crap and get back to the old school groups like we had back in the 90s?

It seems a lot of you are in Seattle and I'm willing to try and host an event like this if any of you might be interested.
by maomaomiumiu | 2026-01-16 08:45:24+00:00
I think that if GitHub had charged everyone from the beginning, it wouldn’t have become so popular and wouldn’t have attracted so many users. Maybe if they introduce charges now, it could work, but I’m still sure that a lot of users would drop off, and only those who are basically forced to use it would stay. And this would simply open the door for competitors to create similar products.
by c16 | 2026-01-16 08:45:44+00:00
> Hyper-perfect social media / television setting "the best" expectations for an event.

My approach around this is suggesting the idea to people up front and then throwing everyone into a WhatsApp chat and laying down the plan. Anyone who can't join gets removed/leaves. No one expects a whatsapp group to be a refined VIP experience. It's just people getting together and sharing an experience.

Having moved countries and needing to start up a new friend group, things like Meetup or Facebook groups help a lot. There are _many_ people out there who are looking to meet people.

For throwing a party, my general rule of thumb is expect 50% of people to turn up.
by nunobrito | 2026-01-16 08:45:49+00:00
Nope. Uses only one frequency that quickly gets crowded and if you are in urban areas you'd be lucky to get more than 200 meters.

It is a toy. A cheap Quangsheng/Baofeng for 20 euros can reach a few kilometers in urban area, use multiple frequencies and go for 100 kilometers easily on LoS. They even reach Australia from Europe when using a wire antenna large enough.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-16 08:46:19+00:00
You’ve fallen into the common trap of conflating reaction time with observable alignment time.

Reactions are about responding to one off events.

Whereas what you’re describing is about perception of events aligned to a regular interval.

For example, I wouldn’t react to a game of whack-a-mole at 50ms, nor that quickly to a hazard while driving either. But I absolutely can tell you if synth isn’t quantised correctly by as little as 50ms.

Thats because the later isn’t a reaction. It’s a similar but different perception.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-16 08:47:09+00:00
The funny thing is, I keep a set of historical Linux ISOs to be able to work with older servers in my fleet.

Needing Debian 8 because that Lights Out connection requires JVM-something for the Java Web Start based console of the system.

Moreover, funnily, some newer servers work wonkier with more modern ipmitools and browser versions while connecting remotely. Intricacies of older embedded systems.