MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quuxplusone | 2026-01-27 14:29:27+00:00
> There's one or two people that will hold your code hostage until you reply to every little nit. At that point they don't feel like nits.

If the comment must be addressed before the review is approved, then it is not a nit, it is a blocker (a "changes required"). Blockers should not be marked as nits — nor vice versa.

I agree that prefixing comments with "Nit:" (or vice versa in extreme cases "This is a big one:") is psychologically useful. Yet another reason it's useful is that it's not uncommon for perceived importance to vary over time: you start with "hmm, this could be named blah" and a week later you've convinced yourself it's a blocker — so, force yourself to recognize that it was originally phrased as a nit, and force yourself to come back and say explicitly "I've changed my mind: I think this is important." With or without the "nit/blocker" prefixing pattern, the reviewer may come off as capricious; but with the pattern, he's at least measurably capricious.
by pstuart | 2026-01-27 14:29:30+00:00
That approach is not without merit, however, it's still a possible dead end.

I see this pattern happen consistently even with really good engineers:

* Identify a problem and design a solution for it
* Apply the solution and it fixes the problem
* Later a problem occurs with the solution, so
* Apply a fix for that solution's problem
* Later another problem happens somewhere in the "solution chain" and the same repair cycle is applied

At a certain point, it's worth revisiting the original problem and its original solution and see if there's a better way to address it (especially with all the lessons ostensibly learned in the solution chain).
by PurpleRamen | 2026-01-27 14:29:53+00:00
They are in transition, so for the moment I believe them to have technical problems, because it also matches my experience. Yesterday I encountered problems with several videos, which are working today. And not all of them were political.

Going by the comments, people on TikTok seem very fast in seeing conspiracies, when many problems can be simply explained with normal problems or human failings. And it's good to be critical and aware of dangers, but I fear if they are so easy to call out problems, it will wear of fast, and people will start to ignore real problems again, like they used to be.
by fragmede | 2026-01-27 14:29:55+00:00
i'm trying to build a Linux desktop and the first thing I got stuck at is X11 versus Wayland for the greater. Next thing Il got stuck at his XFCE4 doesn't exist for Wayland. What the shit. if we want to tell me wayland is the future, fine. sure. great. Tt's been 11 years!
by ben_w | 2026-01-27 14:30:01+00:00
I agree Ukraine could probably build a new nuclear deterrent, similar examples as you give.

> They couldn't have launched the Russian warheads as-is, but disassembly and reuse of the warhead material is another thing entirely.

Another thing entirely, yes.

But consider that Ukraine build the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, lost it in the collapse of the USSR because the (captain?) just sailed off with it: everyone would have noticed if Ukraine had tried to keep those weapons, and at least some of them would have demonstrated how upset they were with an invasion and/or by bribing guards to put them in trucks and drive them across a border (not necessarily the USSR-Ukraine border) regardless of what the government thought.
by spmurrayzzz | 2026-01-27 14:30:58+00:00
When I've measured this myself, I've never seen a medium-to-long task horizon that would have expert locality such that you wouldn't be hitting the SSD constantly to swap layers (not to say it doesn't exist, just that in the literature and in my own empirics, it doesn't seem to be observed in a way you could rely on it for cache performance).

Over any task that has enough prefill input diversity and a decode phase thats more than a few tokens, its at least intuitive that experts activate nearly uniformly in the aggregate, since they're activated per token. This is why when you do something more than bs=1, you see forward passes light up the whole network.
by MiscIdeaMaker99 | 2026-01-27 14:31:15+00:00
During the Summer of 1997, I stayed at my university and had a job at the computer lab in the basement of the library. We had four Windows 95 PCs, four Mac Quadras, and then tons of VT terminals. I specifically remember the one at the lab assistants desk being a VT-320. Anyway, it was enough for me to telnet to BatMUD. I got all the way up to level 32 or so (and made some friends!) before I stopped playing. Man, that was a great Summer. Well ... it was great until I got cheated on but that's a whole other story. :-p
by WillAdams | 2026-01-27 14:31:21+00:00
Remember that your perception of the past has been filtered by what survived Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) --- the problem is that this is now doubled with a layer of AI, so it's something like:

90% of everything is AI-generated, of the 10% which is left, 90% of it is crap, leaving just 1% of articulate, interesting, well-crafted content.

So, either work to create that 1% of interesting content, or filter/curate to find it.

I will note that there is a _lot_ of interesting old work which has dropped off the radar --- Hermann Hesse's _Magister Ludi_/_The Glass Bead Game_ was a book which greatly inspired me in my youth (arguably, it's why I use programming tools such as: https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor ) --- read it?
by mhitza | 2026-01-27 14:31:34+00:00
> this is a moral dilemma for the left lovers!

I think your optics are skewed as to what is seen as "the left" in US centric ways. In my east european part of the world the perspective isn't shaped by ethnicity at all (except when the organized right does anti immigration manifestations), but with disgust of what authoritarians do around the world. The world seems to be in a simmering stage, and the fact that we have our Serbian neighbors continuously protesting for more than a year, dampens ideals of being able to effect change through protests.
by manofmanysmiles | 2026-01-27 14:31:40+00:00
One of my favorite blog posts. I enjoy it every time I read it. I've implemented two C package managers and they... were fine. I think it's a pretty genuinely hard thing to get right outside of a niche.

I've written two C package managers in my life. The most recent one is mildly better than the first from a decade ago, but still not quite right. If I ever build one I think is good enough I'll share, only
to mostly likely learn about 50 edge cases I didn't think of :)
by stephen_g | 2026-01-27 14:32:18+00:00
That’s a cop-out though. Company boards are legally required to act in the best interests of shareholders, and plenty of shareholders would agree that running a business in a sustainable way that can deliver profits over the long term is more in their interests than a business trading its future for some short term profits.

It’s a cultural problem really, where too many people who study business and economics have been taught this idea that it’s a moral necessity that businesses maximise profit for shareholders (to the point where plenty of people even wrongly believe that’s a legal requirement!), but it’s an ideological position that has only caused once great companies to fail and huge damage to our economies.
by btrettel | 2026-01-27 14:32:30+00:00
Presumably these books can still be searched via HathiTrust: https://www.hathitrust.org/

More on the HathiTrust project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust

Though I don't know how many of the HathiTrust books are the "preview" kind the Reddit post mentions. Maybe none are?
by kouteiheika | 2026-01-27 14:32:53+00:00
> If you enjoy AI art, you're probably fake and have no appreciation. That's my take.

I enjoy AI art. I don't enjoy AI slop. There's a fundamental difference between the two. It's true that the Internet is flooded with low-effort AI slop, but AI is just a tool like any other, and you can create real art with it. It just takes skill.

Here's an experiment: try visiting CivitAI's featured images page[1] and then tell me with a straight face that you'd classify none of those images as art.

[1] - https://civitai.com/images
Show HN: FitVow – a smart contract that fines me if I miss weekly fitness goals
by the42thdoctor | 2026-01-27 14:33:15+00:00
FitVow is my personal commitment-device experiment: I lock funds in a smart contract for 12 weeks, define weekly fitness goals, and if I miss a week a penalty becomes enforceable.

Enforcement is permissionless: anyone can call the contract and a portion of the penalty is paid to the caller; the rest goes to a charity (Giveth).

Weekly activity data comes from my smartwatch (via Samsung Health / Health Connect), synced by an Android app that publishes the weekly activity on-chain.

The site is mostly a viewer for on-chain state. Full write-up / architecture / security notes in the first comment.
by benterix | 2026-01-27 14:33:23+00:00
I would reframe that. Everything that Kremlin says may or may not be true, so one may as well ignore it. And they are very happy to use the judiciary system against their opponents as in this case the victim is not just the enemy of the Kremlin, it's the enemy of all citizens (or, to be more precise, the ones who trust the version of truth presented by their government).
by the42thdoctor | 2026-01-27 14:33:44+00:00
Author here: I built this because I kept finding ways to “renegotiate with myself” on weeks I didn’t feel like training. I wanted a commitment device with real consequences and no trusted referee — just code and incentives.

Write-up / architecture / threat model:

https://pedrooaugusto.github.io/blog/posts/making-missed-wor...

Current run parameters:

- Network: Arbitrum (Ethereum L2)

- Duration: 12 weeks (Jan 19 → Apr 13)

- Total stake: ~$235 (0.075 ETH)

- Penalty per failed week: ~$19 (0.00625 ETH)

How enforcement works:

- If a week fails, anyone can call enforceAgreement() and receive a share of the penalty; the rest goes to the Giveth charity.

- There’s also a Chainlink Automation backstop so “nobody enforced” can’t become an escape hatch. If automation is the first to enforce a missed week, there’s no caller to reward, so 100% of the fine goes to Giveth.

I’d love feedback on:

1) where you’d try to cheat this,

2) what would make it more verifiable/auditable to you.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-27 14:33:53+00:00
> that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to

The information is everywhere. Visit any news site, open any general social media feed, turn on any TV. We’re discussing it right now in the front page of HN!

Everyone in the US has easy access to the same information. Acting like only the rest of the world has easy access to this information is ridiculous.
by neoromantique | 2026-01-27 14:33:56+00:00
>In fact, we believe - quite rightly - that if the US had conditioned military assistance to Israel on appropriate care for civilians, then the awful tragedy that unfolded in Gaza could have been averted.

What you saw in Gaza was ALREADY incredible levels of care and restraint (that has cost many Israeli soldiers their lives) to minimize civilian harm, when fighting against an enemy that benefits from increasing said harm.
by jleyank | 2026-01-27 14:34:08+00:00
Going forward, make sure you have strength in a secondary field rather than just concentrating on development. Know business or science or engineering so you can do in-field application development. Perhaps with a minor in the subject if possible. These kinds of people will be (much) less common than Python weenies.

Or be traditional. Gate-kept fields like medicine, or higher skilled fields like law or biotech/pharma are still there and people still need new meds. Perhaps law is oversubscribed, don’t have personal experience there.
by basilikum | 2026-01-27 14:34:09+00:00
Windows 10 LTSC IoT 2021 is the way to go, if you have to use Windows. Gets security updates until 2031 but no new "features".

You can't just pay for it like the Home or Pro edition because Microsoft is not interested in actually selling an OS as a product to users, but https://massgrave.dev/ is your friend.
by ako | 2026-01-27 14:34:26+00:00
I think i have enough control, probably more than when working with developers. Here's something i recently had claude code build: https://github.com/ako/backing-tracks

If you check the commit log, you'll see small increments. The architecture document is what i have it generate to validate the created architecture: https://github.com/ako/backing-tracks/blob/main/docs/ARCHITE...

Other than that most changes start with the ai generating a proposal document that i will review and improve, and then have it built. I think this was the starting proposal: https://github.com/ako/backing-tracks/blob/main/docs/DSL_PRO...

This started as a conversation in Claude Desktop, which it then summarized into this proposal. This i copied into claude code, to have it implemented.
by fragmede | 2026-01-27 14:34:43+00:00
FWIW, there's https://a.co/d/gOk1RkB which takes an airtag and AA batteries, and should need replacement in 10 years. Unless they make BMWs a lot smaller where you are, you can fit it somewhere. Now I just need a retailer that sells speakerless airtags.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-27 14:34:49+00:00
I am the first generation after the fall of Salazar's dictorship, so naturally I belong to those that had the opportunity to grow in freedom while hearing the stories from everyone that suffered from it, the dead and crippled from colonial wars, many sent as punishment for their political views and so on.

Never I though that I would still see the return to such politics in my lifetime, even in Europe it is getting harder to push back on them.
by 0x3f | 2026-01-27 14:34:50+00:00
And what's your experience of other world airports? Have you been to Heathrow? What about somewhere like Changi? It's not just the dropoff that sucks at JFK.

Public realm is almost universally terrible in America because Americans rarely leave and don't experience anything better. It's bad, actually, to wait in traffic for a large portion of your life.

See also: the revolt over NYC congestion pricing. The congestion fee in Manhattan should be $50 or more.
by woeh | 2026-01-27 14:35:24+00:00
Fair enough, I did not know that. Maybe add to your list of reasons that attention is divided over so many conflicts nowadays. Probably there have been conflicts all the time, but with Ukraine, Greenland, Minnesota, Gaza and Venezuela getting a lot of attention it feels like a lot. Note that I don't think the conflicts are remotely comparable with each other, but they each take up a lot of mindspace at least for me.
by lstodd | 2026-01-27 14:35:46+00:00
Actually "build something on 10 different distros" is not a problem either, you just make 10 LXC containers with those distros on a $20/mo second-hand Hetzner box, sick Jenkins with trivial shell scripts on them and forget about it for a couple years or so until a need for 11th distro arrives, in which case you spend half an hour or so to set it up.
by norome | 2026-01-27 14:35:49+00:00
While it's decent to acknowledge the past, it doesn't make a country nice. just as Germany has no reputation for niceness despite their self-flagellation.

Canada's world reputation comes from the progressivism in the 60's and 70s, which has largely disappeared or failed (ecological science, multiculturalism). The undercurrent of canadian politics is just as neo-liberal as the US, and we differentiate ourselves on a facade of social progressivism. Canadians confuse their dont-rock-the-boat attitude with actual solutions to social problems. meanwhile they have similar political schisms as the US, just look at the Ford politial dynasty. Canadian niceness is mostly good PR.

A clear indicator is that Canada has consistently underfunded their military as a show of deference to our powerful neighbour. This is why all the bluster of Canadian politicians "taking a stand" against the US is theatre. The truth is in the state of our military and economic allegiances, which are mainly with China and the US, nothing nice about that.
by NickC25 | 2026-01-27 14:35:56+00:00
I don't know.

I think that over the years, bad faith actors in the world of geopolitics have taken advantage of this in a very nefarious way in order to sow chaos, bad-faith/purposefully-inaccurate "talking points" and capture the hearts and minds of the ignorant, the stupid, and the willfully delusional masses who are desperate to cling to a conspiracy if it fits their worldview which is in turn reinforced by said bad actors.

Is it a potentially unconstitutional slippery slope? yes, absolutely.
Is it something we need to tackle as adults and citizens? yes, absolutely.
Should the desires of SV tech bro billionaires have any input in those discussions? no, absolutely not.
Show HN: Nr – 26x faster NPM run replacement
by dawsonbotsford | 2026-01-27 14:36:39+00:00
I got frustrated by npm run's cold start time, so I built nr.

It's a drop-in replacement written in Rust. No config needed – just use `nr test` instead of `npm run test`.

Especially useful if you're using AI coding assistants that run npm commands constantly.
by ubermonkey | 2026-01-27 14:36:42+00:00
Lots has been written about this.

The post-9/11 freakout is a GREAT example of the syllogism "Something must be done! This is something, so we must do it!" -- IOW, a train of thought that includes absolutely no evaluation of efficacy.

Security expert Bruce Schneier noted, I believe, that the only things that came out of the post-9/11 freakout that mattered were (a) the reinforced cockpit door and (b) ensuring all the checked bags go with an actual passenger.

The ID requirement, for example, was a giveaway to the airlines to prevent folks from selling frequent-flier tickets (which was absolutely a common thing back then). (And wouldn't have mattered on 9/11 anyway, since all the hijackers had valid ID.)
by Aurornis | 2026-01-27 14:36:50+00:00
> Honestly I'm surprised people don't jump ship more often with social media platforms.

Most people don’t pick one social media platform and use it for 100% of everything.

They’ll switch between TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and others during the day.

It’s not hard to see when one of those platforms is missing discussion of current events.
by venusenvy47 | 2026-01-27 14:36:59+00:00
The weirder phone that they had was the ROKR in 2005. It was a collaboration with Apple and worked with iTunes. People say that it helped Apple get in the phone business, and helped Motorola become even more irrelevant in that space around this time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr_E1
Show HN: Confcrypt – Encrypt Secrets in YAML/JSON Configs with FIDO2/Age/SSH
by maurice2k | 2026-01-27 14:37:09+00:00
I built confcrypt to encrypt sensitive values in config files – hostnames, usernames, URLs stay readable. Makes reviewing configs and debugging much easier than tools that encrypt everything. Think sops, but simpler.

Multiple key types as recipients:
- Native age keys (X25519)
- SSH keys (ed25519, RSA) – use your existing keys
- FIDO2 devices (YubiKey 5, SoloKey, etc.) via hmac-secret
- YubiKey OTP via HMAC challenge-response

Hardware keys derive the private key on-demand with a touch – never stored on disk.

How it works:
- Pattern-based: only keys matching /password$/, /api_key$/, etc. (configurable) get encrypted
- Values encrypted with AES-256-GCM, key wrapped per recipient
- `confcrypt check` for CI – exits 1 if unencrypted secrets found

Example:

database:
host: localhost # readable
username: admin # readable
password: ENC[AES256_GCM,data:c3VwZXI=,iv:...,tag:...,type:str]

Written in Go. Adding a recipient = encrypting the AES key for them, no re-encryption of existing values.
by fauigerzigerk | 2026-01-27 14:37:13+00:00
>The other point I've seen is that its string library is slow and very accurate.

Swift strings default to operating on grapheme clusters, which is relatively slow. But you can always choose to work with the underlying UTF-8 representation or with unicode scalars, which is fast.

The only situation where UTF-8 incurs overhead is if the String comes from some old Objective-C API that gives you a UTF-16 encoded String.
by jact | 2026-01-27 14:37:19+00:00
I use Fossil extensively for all my personal projects and find it superior for the general case. As others said it’s more suited for small projects.

I also use Fossil for lots of weird things. I created a forum game using Fossil’s ticket and forum features because it’s so easy to spin up and for my friends to sign in to.

At work we ended up using Fossil in production to manage configuration and deployment in a highly locked down customer environment where its ability to run as a single static binary, talk over HTTP without external dependencies, etc. was essential. It was a poor man’s deployment tool, but it performed admirably.

Fossil even works well as a blogging platform.
by run_veridian | 2026-01-27 14:37:19+00:00
Solo dev, built three utilities I needed:

1. RegexGPT (regexgpt.dev) – describe what you want to match, get the pattern + explanation of each part

2. PRoast (proast.dev) – paste a diff, get code review feedback (bugs, security, style)

3. VaultAgent (vaultagent.dev) – AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor) can use secrets via scoped sessions without seeing the actual values. Zero-knowledge encryption, client-side.

All have free tiers that are actually usable without a credit card. No telemetry beyond basic uptime monitoring.

Built with Next.js, Supabase, Claude API. Happy to answer questions about the architecture or approach.
by closewith | 2026-01-27 14:37:32+00:00
No, the vast majority of terrorist truck, car, bombing, shooting, stabbing attacks have single digit casualties due to the security measures in place and the level of difficulty (thankfully) in killing large numbers of people.

For a given number of people, money, resources, and risk, an attack against an airliner will have disproportionate casualties and effect. As above, a similar amount of co-ordination was required for Bataclan vs 9/11, with an order of magnitude fewer casualties.
by tdb7893 | 2026-01-27 14:37:34+00:00
Larry and David Ellison have been buying media outlets and those media outlets have started spiking (or delaying, editing, etc) stories that look bad for Trump. It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it.

This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
by pjmlp | 2026-01-27 14:37:39+00:00
Could be better, think .NET Core 1.1 timeframe when Microsoft finally decided to make it cross-platform.

You get the bare bones standard library, some of it still WIP, and naturally most libraries were written expecting an Apple platform.

Windows workgroup was announced yesterday, and Linux support is mostly for macOS/iOS devs deploying some server code, because naturally OS X Server is no more.
by Ciantic | 2026-01-27 14:38:12+00:00
I've used Smithay's Rust client toolkit for a few months now. For making apps it is still sometimes have unsafe wrappers disguised as safe. It has a lot of internals wrapped in Arc<>, but in my tests, the methods are not safe to call from different threads anyhow, you will get weird crashes if done so.

I will seek to dive-in to how Wayland API actually works, because I'd really like to know what not to do, when the wrappers used 'wrong' can crash.