MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bze12 | 2026-01-18 02:05:53+00:00
Apple mostly cares about legibility and consistency in icons now, not art. All the new iOS features like tints and liquid glass don't lend themselves well to intricate designs. It's disappointing, but I tend to agree that the skeuomorphic icons are harder to read.

From their icon guidelines:
"Embrace simplicity in your icon design. Simple icons tend to be easiest for people to understand and recognize. An icon with fine visual features might look busy when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights..."
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Self plug, but I made an app related to this - it's a conceptual art gallery for app icons. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to remove the functional premise and just let an icon be a decorative symbol. It's called 001 (https://001.graphics)
by fn-mote | 2026-01-18 02:07:50+00:00
Knowledge of cc has never been needed? What an optimist! You must never have had headers installed in a place where the compiler (or Makefile author) didn’t expect them. Same problems with the libraries. Worse when the routine you needed to link was in a different library (maybe an arch-specific optimized lib).

That post is only true in the most vacuous sense.

“A similar project” discovered where, on BITNET?
by heliographe | 2026-01-18 02:08:05+00:00
Here is the same post on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@heliographe_studio/1158908195095453...

I publish all my posts on Threads/X/Bluesky/Mastodon because I have to meet my customers where they are, but Mastodon is the preferred platform that I point everyone to for open standards reasons.

(if a moderator doesn't mind updating the link, that'd be great)
by kcplate | 2026-01-18 02:09:07+00:00
> Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency.

I always thought Lumberg gets a somewhat un-derserved bad rap in that flick. He is characterized as the villain and of course is—from Peter’s perspective which is where the story is told. But within that universe and at a 10,000 foot POV was he? He seems to be the only one within the corporation that is actually functional, capable, motivated and excelling in his role. No doubt he is a dick, but that’s just part of his role and he’s good at it. He’s a cog, knows he’s a cog, but realizes the machine still needs to run. He recognizes that Peter has hit that competence/incompetence point. He also realizes the Bob’s are incompetent, but powerful. He really is the only one that seems to realize everything that is going on.
by perinban | 2026-01-18 02:09:52+00:00
Hey HN! I built MetaXuda after getting tired of "buy Windows for ML" advice when working on Apple Silicon.

Problem: Most ML libraries (XGBoost, scikit-learn) are CUDA-only with zero macOS GPU support. Existing translation layers (ZLUDA) add overhead.

Solution: Native Rust + Metal runtime from scratch.

Key features:
- 1.1 TOPS throughput (95% of M1 theoretical peak)
- Tokio async scheduler with zero race conditions
- Multi-tier memory: GPU → RAM → SSD (handles 100GB+ workloads)
- 230+ GPU ops (math, transform, ML primitives)
- CUDA-style APIs for easy library integration
- Bypasses Numba execution path

Technical approach:
- No CUDA/ZLUDA reuse (licensing + perf reasons)
- PyO3 wrapper for Python
- Arrow-based quantization in-kernel
- 93.37% GPU cap to prevent macOS starvation

Known limitations:
- Metal stream limits still undocumented by Apple
- CUDA API coverage incomplete (in progress)
- Some blocking favors stability over raw speed

pip install metaxuda

Open to questions on Metal vs CUDA architecture, Rust async patterns, or Apple GPU quirks. Also looking for feedback on scheduler design.

License inquiries: p.perinban@gmail.com
by tjr | 2026-01-18 02:10:00+00:00
Anecdote: I have decades of software experience, and am comfortable both writing code myself and using AI tools.

Just today, I needed a basic web application, the sort of which I can easily get off the shelf from several existing vendors.

I started down the path of building my own, because, well, that's just what I do, then after about 30 minutes decided to use an existing product.

I have hunch that, even with AI making programming so much easier, there is still a market for buying pre-written solutions.

Further, I would speculate that this remains true of other areas of AI content generation. For example, even if it's trivially easy to have AI generate music per your specifications, it's even easier to just play something that someone else already made (be it human-generated or AI).
by phil21 | 2026-01-18 02:11:41+00:00
You don't really have that many competent solar installers in most locations in the US. I basically gave up trying. I'm sure they exist, but if you don't want some financed/leased/etc. financial-product-as-a-solar-install your options dwindle.

It's entirely obvious that most of these places make money off the financial engineering, not the installation part.

I'd sign a competent contractor today for my quite marginal installation plans if I could find someone I'd trust to build something decent and to my specification.

They also tend to devalue the house as it's more difficult to get insurance, and many potential buyers are used to shitshow level of installs and/or dealing with a more complex close due to the seller needing to pay off loans/leases/etc.

A lot of these plays are also companies setting up complex financial engineering schemes that boil down to government subsidy arbitrage.
by goda90 | 2026-01-18 02:12:45+00:00
A few years ago I set out to refactor some of my team's code that I wasn't particularly familiar with, but we wanted to modularize and re-use in more places. The primary file alone was 18k+ lines of Typescript that was a terrible mess of spaghetti. Most of it had been written in JavaScript but later converted haphazardly. I ended up writing myself a little app that used the Typescript compiler APIs to help me just explore all the many branches of the code and annotate how I would refactor different parts. It helped a bit, but I never got time to add some of the more intelligent features I wanted like finding every execution path between two points.
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-18 02:13:00+00:00
When the price of a thing is negative, the entity facing the negative price is being paid to consume it.

We don't have enough automatic integration yet to make it happen, but: Residentially, that'd be a great time to charge millions of EVs and raise the temperature of water heaters. It'd be perfect for getting a head start on heating the glass kiln for Monday morning, or to supplement the used railroad ties and other fuels that might be feeding a lime kiln.

It's pretty easy to think of loads that feature scale and/or quantity, and the ability to switch on and off rather quickly. Even if the negative price event only lasts for an hour. (Even if it only lasts 5 minutes.)
by amluto | 2026-01-18 02:13:02+00:00
> Apple mostly cares about legibility and consistency in icons now, not art.

The second-to-oldest one is legible. The word “PAGES” is quite legible. It’s pretty clear what’s going on. In fact, it’s the only one in the entire set where I would look at the icon and quickly recognize what it is and what it’s for. (The one that is one iteration newer is worse because it’s less legible.)
by estearum | 2026-01-18 02:13:07+00:00
It seems you've forgotten the thread here. I'm totally fine with experimenting with this idea.

The comment I replied to said, however, "this pretty much proves we can somewhat slow down climate change by spraying certain chemicals into the air".

No, it doesn't![†] In fact, your article mentions how much we don't know and how many risks there are. I.e. it is not proven. There are still unanswered questions of literally existential magnitude. That's why the consensus view toward this amongst people who think about our options on climate all day long do not see this as a great option, never mind a proven one.

Anyway, as for your article, merely breaking an experiment into 3 phases does not make it like a clinical trial. This experiment has nowhere near the controls nor the limited blast radius of even the riskiest clinical trial being conducted today. So that's my commentary on that. Seems naive and/or dishonest to compare it to a clinical trial.

† Technically of course it's possible to lower the temperature of the earth via aerosols. But this article/observation didn't "prove it," it's not new information, and it doesn't address the main reasons not to do this otherwise obvious idea. Which again is why the scientific consensus is not currently behind it
by D-Machine | 2026-01-18 02:13:08+00:00
I have about 1500 lines in my VSCode settings.json dedicated to custom syntax highlighting and text decorations (this could be trimmed, some is from before the days of semantic highlighting), but regardless, the amount of differentiation I can achieve with this is simply not possible on a light background. I've tried! (Solarized light is a nice theme though)
by brigandish | 2026-01-18 02:13:35+00:00
I can point you to several pages that are protected by groups of interested admins that will make changing even blatantly obvious misinformation impossible, let alone contentious stuff.

Have you ever tried changing something on Wikipedia regarding politics (which now includes several health issues) or religion?

Edit: also, I did write "I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited." and yet you're suggesting I get into that argument. I quite clearly don't want to because it's pointless, and we had years of it anyway.
by somewhereoutth | 2026-01-18 02:13:57+00:00
> Investors were briefly spooked last July when an M.I.T. study suggested that almost none of this is useful to businesses. Corporations had poured tens of billions of dollars into A.I., yet only one in 20 projects had succeeded, the study reported. But a Wharton study in October delivered the opposite verdict. After interviewing 801 leaders at U.S. companies, Wharton concluded that three-quarters of the businesses were getting a positive return on their A.I. investments.

MIT actually carried out a study. Wharton just asked some execs, who of course parroted the party line. Winter is coming.
by hintymad | 2026-01-18 02:14:39+00:00
> The total surface area of "stuff that needs building" keeps expanding.

I certainly hope so, but it depends on whether we will have more demand for such problems. AI can code out a complex project by itself because we humans do not care about many details. When we marvel that AI generates a working dashboard for us, we are really accepting that someone else has created a dashboard that meets our expectation. The layout, the color, the aesthetics, the way it interacts, the time series algorithms, and etc. We don't care, as it does better than we imagined. This, of course, is inevitable, as many of us do spend enormous time implementing what other people have done. Fortunately or unfortunately, it is very hard to human to repeat other people's work correctly, but it's a breeze for AI. The corollary is that AI will replace a lot of demand on software developers, if we don't have big enough problems to solve -- in the past 20 years we have internet, cloud, mobile, and machine learning. All big trends that require millions and millions of brilliant minds. Are we going to have the same luck in the coming years, I'm not so sure.
by jonjacky | 2026-01-18 02:15:19+00:00
Back in the 1950s Olivetti was famous for its striking, modernist showrooms, with typewriters and calculators displayed on pedestals like works of art.

It's been said that they inspired the Apple stores.

https://www.archdaily.com/155074/ad-classics-olivetti-showro...

https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-i-los...
by Twey | 2026-01-18 02:15:33+00:00
Sorry, I didn't mean to confuse matters — by pulling in the etymology of the morphology I was trying to be generous to the argument. Namely, I thought there might be a chance that the bare infinitive in e.g. the conditional mood is derived from an older true mood (in the linguistic sense, i.e. a verb form that is sufficient to signify the mode), which I would consider a pretty reasonable justification for considering the bare infinitive there to be a true conditional mood, albeit one that happens to be identical to other forms. I couldn't find evidence for it though, and as far as I know it's not a common feature in other Germanic languages.

As for the syntactic argument — I think it would usually be said not to be the case due to the periphrastic nature of the construction. That is, it's not the verb conjugation itself that signifies the mode but the combination of a conjugation (that is used in a variety of different constructions) with the ‘that’ (or ‘would’, aut cetera, for other moods). As with a lot of these things, though, it's significantly a matter of the conventional definition of terms. For instance in English grammar the ‘full infinitive’ ‹to + bare infinitive› is usually considered a conjugation even though it includes an extra particle. Go figure :)

On that note, it's important to distinguish syntax from semantics: the term ‘bare infinitive’ doesn't mean that morphology is _semantically_ infinitive, the infinitive was just picked as the class representative to name that particular morphology, which is known as the ‘bare infinitive’ wherever it occurs. Ditto with ‘past participle’ and ‘present participle’, and especially ‘gerund’ (which is named after a grammatical function that doesn't even exist in English!).
by blutoot | 2026-01-18 02:15:56+00:00
Fair point - my statement is more about stealing market for simpler integrations by undercutting them on price.

And I don't want to trivialize the reality of enterprise platforms where bespoke connectors rule. I have dealt with migrations of platforms that are business critical and managing version compatibility and ensuring none of the integrations regressed was par for the course. I am not even saying that that makes me qualified to replicate Honeycomb.io. But I do think someone with a deep technical background in building observability platforms armed with Claude Code or Codex and armed with the right set of MCP's and all the necessary tooling should be able to build a clone of Honeycomb.uio.

Maybe it won't be a fast turnaround like a typical vibe-coded project but even if it is a month-long project to even get to 60% feature parity. these vendors will have to sit up and pay attention.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-18 02:16:07+00:00
I used to be a staffer in this space and almost became an academic, but decided I like tech too much and fighting to spend half a decade doing a PhD in order to become an adjunct Econ or Policy professor at a state college would be a waste of my CS education. It's easy to cite sources on stuff when I've either studied with or under the people who are mentioned in these article, or been friends with their staffers.

> Do you have some script or something to format your sources

I do it by hand. It's fairly easy.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-01-18 02:16:12+00:00
"cowardly to wait till he's dead when he isn't able to refute any of the points"

It's only here in the past few days that I have ever heard this particular view: that it's somehow "cowardly" or uncouth or otherwise inappropriate to speak critically of someone who has died because being dead, they are unable to respond.

I am genuinely curious where this idea came from. I've heard "don't speak ill of the dead" all my (by now, getting to be pretty long) life but I never heard this rationale for it except here in threads related to this guy.

I agree that it would be inappropriate to, say, attend someone's funeral and walk around saying you know, in a lot of ways, this guy was a real asshole.

But to claim it as some kind of general principle, with that rationale? That is... deeply weird, or at least it strikes me that way. How on earth could anyone ever discuss any historical figure while abiding by this rule?

Or on a much smaller scale, imagine a family with an abusive member who dies. Are the remaining members never to speak of the ways they were affected by that person? That's crazy.

People are who they are, live the lives they live, and do the things they do. Most people are better than the worst thing they ever did and worse than the best thing they ever did. There's nothing wrong with assessing that fully after they die.

But it's the "because they can't respond" rationale that surprises me. I had no idea that rationale even existed, let alone seems (at least here, with respect to this guy) to be somewhat widespread.
by CMay | 2026-01-18 02:16:40+00:00
From the reports I'd read and the interviews I'd seen, it's not that Venezuela let people go so much as it couldn't stop them. Many people who fled the country state they had to hide their property and children to prevent it from looking like they were not coming back when crossing the border. This might have been an agreement with Columbia, since Columbia doesn't want mass migration into their country. In some cases it was starve, jail, die or flee which is not the same as "let go".

Do they put the persecution and threat on so thick intentionally to encourage them to leave, so that if democracy did return in some way socialist ideology would be all but certain to win? I don't know.
by kylecazar | 2026-01-18 02:16:48+00:00
I agree with what's written, and I've been talking about the harm seemingly innocuous anthropomorphization does for a while.

If you do correct someone (a layperson) and say "it's not thinking", they'll usually reply "sure but you know what I mean". And then, eventually, they will say something that indicates they're actually not sure that it isn't thinking. They'll compliment it on a response or ask it questions about itself, as if it were a person.

It won't take, because the providers want to use these words. But different terms would benefit everyone. A lot of ink has been spilled on how closely LLM's approximate human thought, and maybe if we never called it 'thought' to begin with it wouldn't have been such a distracting topic from what they are -- useful.
by ossa-ma | 2026-01-18 02:16:55+00:00
OpenAI hit 800M weekly average users and communication to OpenAI investors from this week state:

> "Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time-highs (Jan 14 was the highest, Jan 13 was the second highest, etc.)"

This does not indicate that they're losing users, at all...
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-18 02:18:26+00:00
Our choices seem to either be getting tracked by everyone & the likely government to get through age gates (see recent EFF on the ad-tracking infecting age-gates, https://bsky.app/profile/eff.org/post/3mciort6sir2p ), or perhaps only being able to use a small number of approved browsers that supports a nea Digital Credential API, that can maintain our security somewhat but which restricted browser choice heavily & cuts out open source offerings (not necessarily but likely). https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...
by cml123 | 2026-01-18 02:18:40+00:00
Incidentally, the largest group of Chinese characters are phono-semantic e.g. encode both meaning and pronunciation. Over half of all Chinese characters are in that bucket. That actually allows speakers to have some ability to guess both pronunciation and meaning of characters they have never seen. There are rules to guide this.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C7%92u_bi%C4%81n_d%C3%BA_bi%...
by bsder | 2026-01-18 02:20:48+00:00
> not necessarily more pleasant or efficient in the cooking process.

For amateurs, I find that the gain of control from using induction far outweighs everything else--especially at low heats. If I put a newbie on an induction with a temperature sensor, they generally do great. Over time they start to correlate the behavior of the food with the temperature, but, even if they don't, they still can maintain control over the food via the temperature sensor.

> The techniques for cooking on induction cooktops well have not been learned, taught and communicated.

And, sometimes, those old techniques are just a pain in the ass and only exist because of the lack of control. Caramelizing onions requires a lot less attention when I can set the pan to a specific temperature and don't have to worry about thermal runaway as the water cooks off. There are all manner of directions for thickening custards that aren't required if you can set the pan at exactly 180F and know that it isn't going above that. Tempering chocolate is stupidly easier when you can set the pan for 115F-81F-88F rather than having to swish it on a marble slab or put it on a double boiler and risk seizing the chocolate because of water. On an electric or gas stove, I plan for two batches of caramel because I almost always screw up my first batch if I haven't done it in a while; on induction I almost never miss. etc.
by altmanaltman | 2026-01-18 02:20:55+00:00
No, that's not what I meant. I meant more like you could flop a high probability draw that does get there on the river, but the nepo kid still wins even though they just had one pair.

In poker, there are rules everyone has to follow. In real life, the rules can differ from person to person. Hence, the odds are rigged.
by otoolep | 2026-01-18 02:20:58+00:00
>First of all, does anyone believe that highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions are general high quality services?

This is the only part of your response that doesn't quite sit right with me. There could be many "highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions" out there that are working very well, you just don't notice because they work so well. There could be a selection-effect here.

Quality is a big deal for me[1]. But I think you're defining "quality" too narrowly in this context. "Quality" could also mean "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do." The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal.

[1] https://philipotoole.com/always-thinking-of-the-next-guy/
by phil21 | 2026-01-18 02:21:14+00:00
> First, US demand increased by 3.1%. That is bad

It is not bad. Energy usage is the best proxy we have for societal wealth. It's starting to somewhat decouple, but I'd posit that's largely due to financial woo-woo than actual real wealth. Time shall tell. A lot of energy (no pun intended) was put into short-term easy wins on the efficiency side the last couple decades, but those low hanging fruits are largely picked over. In the end, it requires serious capital investment into energy production and distribution.

> demand should be going down

Naw. If we want to actually regain any sort of self-determination as a nation we need to re-industrialize and learn to make things again. This is a multi-generational project that takes decades to even build the foundation for. This all requires energy - preferably as clean and cheap as possible.

We should be looking what what China is doing. Building everything possible as quickly as possible. Spam solar, wind, nuclear, and yes natural gas which enables the former two to exist to begin with. Start spinning up battery plants as well on top of it. Coal I can grant is silly to invest in these days, re-purpose those plants as their useful lifetimes run out into natural gas or nuclear power plant sites.

Then start spamming long distance transmission lines throughout the country to further even out demand vs. supply, so more sunny and windy locations can pick up the slack in other regions of the country. Start telling NIMBYs to go pound sand.

This degrowth stuff is just a way to make poor and working class folks suffer. China and India are building so much energy production capacity it simply doesn't matter anyways. Build or have your grandchildren be left behind.