MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wang_li | 2026-01-12 18:38:32+00:00
>Something is wrong in the software industry. Desktop/PC operating systems aren't going away, but the industry have decided that it's no longer a relevant product category.

Half of humanity is not very smart. Once you've sold computers and software to everyone who is smart, you have to sell to the not smart half. And that not smart half isn't going to like or even be able to use complex software. Since there are far more people out there simply consuming things and few people creating things, the bias is going to be for the simpletons.
by hamdingers | 2026-01-12 18:38:36+00:00
This is always the top reply and it's not particularly useful. I want the ease and convenience of having a single device both play and display content, there's no reason that should be so hard. Of course I know I could Buy More Things but that sucks as a suggestion.

This is how most people use their TVs these days (despite the issues with it). It's reasonable and fair to ask for a better experience.
by eszed | 2026-01-12 18:38:59+00:00
I mean... That's kinda how it works? More than once I've halfway forgotten birthdays of friends who live in timezones to my east, and then sent them a message saying "Happy birthday! (It still is where I am, lol)".

I'm not necessarily defending the implementation, just pointing out another way in which time is irreducibly ambiguous and cursed.
by scoofy | 2026-01-12 18:39:41+00:00
His term ends on May 15, 2026, so it's almost pointless to file these charges now.

I see what's happening now as game-theory signaling, not as a real threat to Powell. I would suggest that this action is better seen as a latent threat to the next Fed chairman to let them know that they will either enact Trumps desired Fed policies or they will be prosecuted for anything that the administration can manufacture.
by nightpool | 2026-01-12 18:39:53+00:00
> where you can't just download a leap-second file from someone else's site thanks to the SOP

WDYM by this? Why does the SOP prevent a website from hosting a leap seconds file? All they need to do is set Access-Control-Allow-Origin to allow websites to access it. Or provide it as a JS file—in which case no headers are necessary at all. All the SOP prevents is you hotlinking someone else's leap-seconds file and using their bandwidth without their opt-in.

> Meanwhile, browsers update on a cadence more than sufficient to keep an up-to-date copy

Is this true? I don't know any browser right now that ships with a copy of a leapseconds data file. Adding such a data file and keeping it up to date would probably be a pretty non-trivial task for new browser developers—just for something the browser will never end up using itself. It's not like the ICU/CLDR files where browsers are going to need them anyway for rendering their own user-interface components.
by throw4847285 | 2026-01-12 18:40:41+00:00
It's not Philip Pullman, it's living in a Christian society. The Enlightenment growing out of the Reformation meant that all the foundational atheist thinkers had deeply sentimental views of Christianity, which is how you get the Jefferson Bible (yes, a deist), and that Pullman quote and many more like it. "Well if you strip away all the things I don't like, this philosophy is very compelling" is only a conclusion you could come to when you already are predisposed to like the philosophy.
by munificent | 2026-01-12 18:40:49+00:00
> I would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming example) and Zootopia as "simple" graphics.

I think an art director would describe them as "readable". When there's a lot of detail and quick motion, it's important that the audience can very quickly recognize what they're looking at and what's happen. Otherwise, it just turns into a big jumble of chaos that the viewer can't follow, like in Michael Bay's Transformer movies.

A big part of the art of movie making is telegraphic a sense of rich realism and complexity while still having everything clearly visually parsable. Doing that when cuts and action are fast is quite difficult.

Doing it well affects every level of the production: the colors assigned to characters so they are separated from the background, wardrobe choices to also keep characters distinct, lighting, set design, texture, animation, focus, the way the camera moves. It all works together to produce one coherent readable scene.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-12 18:40:57+00:00
Someone would have have to be deeply ignorant to think that Donald Trump, notorious for his numerous lawsuits and public threats to silence any critique of himself in the press, and whose campaign was coordinating with Twitter to take down posts while he was sitting president (just as the Democrats were, but they weren't in office) would champion Free Speech in any, way, shape or form.
by rerdavies | 2026-01-12 18:41:18+00:00
> Why do we have both 48kHz and 44.1kHz anyway

Because of greed.

Early audio manufacturers (SONY notably) used 48kHz for profession-grade audio equipment, that would be used in studios or TV stations, and degraded 44.1khz audio for consumer devices. Typically you would pay an order of magnitude more for the 48kHz version of the hardware.

48khz is better for creating and mixing audio. You cannot practically mix audio at 44.1khz without doing very slight damage to audible high frequencies. But enough to make a difference. If you were creating for consumer devices, you would mix at 48Khz, and then downsample to 44.1khz during final mastering, since conversion from 48kHz to 44.1kHz can be done theoretically (and practically) perfectly. (Opinions of the OP notwithstanding).

I think it's safe to say that the 44.1kHz sampling rate was maliciously selected specifically because it is just low enough that perfect playback is still possible, but perfect mixing is practically not possible. And obviously maliciously chosen to be a rate with no convenient greatest common denominator with 48Khz, which would have allowed easy and cheap perfect realtime resampling. Presumably SONY would sell you the software or hardware to perform perfect non-realtime conversion of audio from 48khz to 44.1khz for a few tens of thousands of dollars. Not remotely subtle how greedy all of this was.

There has been no serious reason to use 44.1kHz instead of 48kHz for about 50 years, at least from a technology point of view. (And no real reason to EVER use 44.1khz instead of 48kHz other than GREED).
by gmueckl | 2026-01-12 18:41:48+00:00
Other languages also have non-local qays of influencing compiler behavior, for example attributes in rust (standard) or compiler pragmas in C (non-standard).

When reading working code, it doesn't matter whether the language mode allows variable reassignment. It only matters when you want to change it. And even then, the compiler will yell at you when you do the wrong thing. Testing it out is probably much faster than searching the codebase for a directive. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
by brabel | 2026-01-12 18:41:50+00:00
I think it's not that they lose their mental faculties... it's that they lived most of their lives in a world without computers (at least home computers - which only became a common occurrence in the 90's, when today's older people were already in their 50's. So they just never learned to use computers and smart phones and are completely unused to their modern UIs. Even I find it hard to use many apps on my phone! Like, how am I supposed to know that wiping carefully up and to the left is the only way to do something!!!??? So, older people may try a few things, and if it's too frustrating they just find something else to do and give up. At least that's my experience with my mom and auntie. Both of them managed only to learn how to open WhatsApp and call family, but it's always an agony when they accidentally touch something and the video disappears, or pauses, or flips so they can see only themselves or some other nonsense. And that's all they use their "smart" phones for! They just wanted an old fashion phone with a big dial buttons, plus a screen to see the person on the other side.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-12 18:41:58+00:00
My suspicion is that it will be bad for salaries, mostly because it'll kill the "looks difficult" moat that software development currently has. Developers know that "understanding source code" is far from the hard part of developing software, but non-technical folks' immediate recoiling in the face of the moon runes has kept our profession pretty easy to justify high pay for for ages. If our jobs transition to largely "communing with the machines", then we'll go from a "looks hard, is hard" job, to a "looks easy, is hard" job, which historically hurts bargaining power.
by rcarmo | 2026-01-12 18:42:00+00:00
I was using the OpenCode free model defaults. This was a test setup, so I didn't configure anything - toadbox just installs toad, which then lets me install and run OpenCode without any configuration.

Edit: digging around in a fresh container the default model I'm getting is `big-pickle`, and I have to assume that this is the one that decided to use that proxy.
by realityfactchex | 2026-01-12 18:42:03+00:00
It is no fun to have old iCloud photos deleted unexpectedly. Apple has provided plenty of footguns, even if they really are user errors. For examples: (1) during device restores and (2) premium subscription management fumbles.

Product idea: Apple should offer a paid service to restore the "old backups" of photos that are no longer accessible via iCloud UI/API, which were soft-removed for missing the subscription quota or whatever, if Apple happens to have that data tucked away in cold storage somewhere.

Case in point, I had some c. 2016 era photos in iMessages that I thought I handled right to not lose from iCloud, but they are apparently nowhere to be found in iCloud API based on recent checks. More than mildly irritating.

I should have used an iCloud photos backup tool like this much sooner.

Print what you want to keep onto archival paper with archival dyes. Everything else will atrophy.
by thesz | 2026-01-12 18:42:13+00:00
Rust code can have arbitrary I/O effects in any parts of it. This precludes using only Rust's type system to make sure code does what spec said.

The most successful formally proven project I know, seL4 [1], did not extracted executable code from the proof. They created a prototype in Haskell, mapped (by hand) it to Isabelle, I believe, to have a formal proof and then recreated code in C, again, manually.

[1] https://sel4.systems/

Not many formal proof systems can extract executable C source.
by echoangle | 2026-01-12 18:42:26+00:00
The satellite still needs to be able to receive the signal from the terminal. If the Iranian Government sets up transmitters that send up Noise at the satellites, the satellite isn't going to be able to receive the low power transmissions from the terminal if the jammer is close enough to the terminal.

It depends on the Jamming power and the satellite beamforming how close you would have to be to jam it.

This is not the case for GPS because GPS is receive-only and the satellite doesn't listen for user transmissions (although you could still try to jam the control uplink to prevent synchronization which would decrease accuracy over a few days, but then you would have to be close to the GPS control stations and you'll probably get arrested soon)
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-12 18:42:30+00:00
The best part is feeling the judgement from someone who thinks taking GLP1s is a moral failure when they are carrying an extra 50+ pounds themselves. I have met many people who seem to believe that being fat is actually the higher moral ground than using medication to help solve it. And these are religious people, too! Don't they know about gluttony?
by kasrak | 2026-01-12 18:43:10+00:00
Have been working on Lightpage for the past ~18 months. It's a personal notes app that "writes back" using LLMs.

Before this, I dumped all my personal notes, ideas, journal entries, etc into Apple Notes -- I liked the simplicity. But as LLMs get smarter, I wanted to have them read my notes and proactively help move things forward.

Right now most of the early users use it as a journal. On a whim I shipped a feature a few months ago where the LLM writes you a "letter" every Sunday based on the past week's notes. That's ended up being a really popular feature.

https://lightpage.com
by lillecarl | 2026-01-12 18:43:14+00:00
If you only expose SSH then you're fine, but if you're deploying a bunch of WebApps you might not want them accessible on the internet.

The few things I self host I keep out in the open. etcd, Kubernetes, Postgres, pgAdmin, Grafana and Keycloak but I can see why someone would want to hide inside a private network.
by procflora | 2026-01-12 18:43:37+00:00
Yep, and I'll add: the first reader is the first maintainer. When that is turned over to an LLM agent the organization's leadership had better be prepared to entertain rewrites (reprompts?) of significant portions of LLM-generated code on a regular basis. The call of the rewrite isn't new of course, but it'll be far more alluring since LLMs are at their most "productive" and least destructive when working from a clean slate.
by submeta | 2026-01-12 18:44:24+00:00
Western governments do not want democracy in Iran. They want the son of Shah back in Iran, the Shah whose father tortured and exploited Iranians, and that led to the revolution and the rise of the mullahs. The US and Israel want regime change so Israel can dominate the ME. Just like they replaced Assad in Syria by Jolani, a wanted Al Qaeda terrorist who does not oppose Israel in any way but slaughter kurds and alavites because they are moderate muslims.

The revolts in Iran are backed by US/Israel. They openly brag about it on every channel. They don’t care about Iranian‘s freedoms. They are the same who support every dictator in the region if and only if that dictator accepts Israel‘s dominance.

Edit: Yeah, let’s downvote instead if arguing.
by atonse | 2026-01-12 18:44:27+00:00
There's something to be said for companies that just say "We're going to continue to milk our current cows for the foreseeable future" – yeah definitely, keep doing that. And they're printing money. But so was Microsoft under Ballmer.

And you can see how much Nadella changed everything. There is such a thing as stagnating, but isn't always related to printing money.
by sudobash1 | 2026-01-12 18:44:45+00:00
I feel I should point out that USPS has a lower rate for postcards (currently $0.61), so the threshold might be a bit lower.

I know that this is tongue-in-cheek and would be pretty funny to receive, but it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The experience of getting a little message printed on receipt paper is nothing like the experience of receiving a note or card in the mail. Through the mail you receive something physically from someone with their handwriting and some personality to it. Getting the Amazon message is more like printing out a text message on crummy paper.

Also, I don't have Prime, so it definitely isn't cost competitive for me anyway.
by anonymouskimmer | 2026-01-12 18:44:48+00:00
SORRY TO EVERYONE ELSE FOR GOING OFF TOPIC.

I didn't see you 41 day old reply to me until it was too late to comment on it. So here's a sarcastic "thanks for ignoring what I wrote" and telling me that exactly what I was complaining about is the solution to the problem I was complaining about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114935

1) I told you my household can't use Target or Amazon for unscented products, without costly remediation measures, BECAUSE EVEN SCENT-FREE ITEMS COME SMELLING FROM PERFUME CROSS-CONTAMINATION THANKS TO CLEANING, STORAGE, AND TRANSPORTATION CONDITIONS. SOMETIMES REALLY BADLY.

FFS. If you are going to respond, first read.

I also mentioned something other than "government intervention to dictate how products are made" as a solution to this issue, namely adequate segregation between perfumed and non-perfumed products.

And I care less about my wallet than I do about my time and actual ability to acquire products that are either truly scent free, or like yesteryear, don't have everlasting fragrance fixatives.

For people in my position, which make up a small percentage of the population (that still numbers in the millions), the free market has failed. We are a specialized niche that trades tips on how to make things tolerable.

SORRY TO EVERYONE ELSE FOR GOING OFF TOPIC.
by coronapl | 2026-01-12 18:44:50+00:00
Recently, I also started using queues for integrating with legacy health care applications. Most of them run on-promise and they don't have incoming internet connection for security reasons. The strategy is to send a message to a queue. The consumer application uses short polling to process the messages and then it can call a webhook to share the status of the job. Do you also follow a similar approach?
by throw4847285 | 2026-01-12 18:44:52+00:00
Just peruse the list of great works that Ancient Aliens proponents claim could not have been built by the people who built them. Do they make that claim about the Parthenon? No. Other than Stonehenge, it's all stuff built outside of Western Civilization.

It could be a series of coincidences, or it could be old strains of racist anthropology, briefly suppressed by Boasian Cultural Anthropology, finding a new conspiratorial outlet.
by tshaddox | 2026-01-12 18:45:01+00:00
It's a common source of off-by-one date formatting bugs in client-rendered web apps, particularly ones that pass around "YYYY-MM-DD" date strings (common for OpenAPI JSON APIs).

const dateStringFromApiResponse = "2026-01-12";
const date = new Date(dateStringFromApiResponse);
const formatter = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-US', { dateStyle: 'long' });
formatter.format(new Date("2026-01-12"));

// 'January 11, 2026'
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 18:45:02+00:00
Cargo cults are a religion, the things they worship they do not understand, but the planes and the cargo themselves are real.

There's certainly plenty of cargo-culting right now on AI.

Sacred texts, I don't recognise. Yudkowsky's writings? He suggests wearing clown shoes to avoid getting a cult of personality disconnected from the quality of the arguments, if anyone finds his works sacred, they've fundamentally misunderstood him:

I have sometimes thought that all professional lectures on rationality should be delivered while wearing a clown suit, to prevent the audience from confusing seriousness with solemnity.

- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky

Prophets forecasting the end-of-days, yes, but this too from climate science, everyone who was preparing for a pandemic before covid and is still trying to prepare for the next one because the wet markets are still around, from economists trying to forecast growth or collapse and what will change any given prediction of the latter into the former, and from the military forces of the world saying which weapon systems they want to buy. It does not make a religion.

A means to escape death, you can have. But it's on a continuum with life extension and anti-aging medicine, which itself is on a continuum with all other medical interventions. To quote myself:

Taking a living human's heart out without killing them, and replacing it with one you got out a corpse, that isn't the magic of necromancy, neither is it a prayer or ritual to Sekhmet, it's just transplant surgery.

…

Immunity to smallpox isn't a prayer to the Hindu goddess Shitala (of many things but most directly linked with smallpox), and it isn't magic herbs or crystals, it's just vaccines.

- https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2025/06/22-13.21.36.html
by oldandboring | 2026-01-12 18:45:09+00:00
> The activists want the excessive death and suffering to end in Palestine, and they want to avoid death and suffering in Iran.

And yet they are silent on the death and suffering in: Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo, Myanmar, Libya. Just to name current active conflicts where people are dying, to say nothing of all the others that have flared up and subsided in my decades on this earth as I've watched "activists" ignore them all so they could hyper-focus on whatever Israel was doing at the time to protect its citizens and the Jewish diaspora. The word "exhausting" doesn't even scratch the surface of how it feels to deal with otherwise smart, educated people who roll around in this hypocrisy-laden dogpile.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-12 18:45:41+00:00
> It's incredibly relevant, why are GLP-1s less needed in Germany vs. US

Aside from whether the local healthcare coverage will pay for it, and the rate of GLP1 usage probably being proportional to the obesity rate, what is the basis for assuming there is disproportionately fewer people in Germany using these medications? Most people don't announce it.
by yawaramin | 2026-01-12 18:45:53+00:00
> for 1 nuclear plant

Yes, because others were mostly not affected by the Fukushima disaster despite being in the impact area. Why? Because they took safety precautions. Onagawa was closer to the epicentre, but they built on a high embankment and did not flood and lose power.

Anti-nuclear people conveniently ignore, because it suits their argument, that Japan is restarting their nuclear energy program. They finally understood that there's no other viable option for energy security, price, and achieving decarbonization goals.
by smeeagain2 | 2026-01-12 18:46:16+00:00
Congratulations on your great fortune. What a success you are! A shining example to others of how to succeed with ease, despite the hurricane strength headwinds holding us all back.

You should write a book to share your special wisdom so that others may learn and benefit. As a loving act of charity, maybe consider distributing copies of this invaluable book for free to the miles and miles of homeless camps in your state, the inhabitants of which will surely be fascinated to hear the Good News that their situation is really their own personal fault and has nothing to do with you or anyone else whatsoever.

Their situation certainly isn't society's fault in any way. Perish the thought. No, it's just giant and ever-growing crowds of millions upon millions of people with easily solvable Personal Problems, which could be corrected by the sad wretches if only they had a few precious pearls of your Common Sense wisdom to analyze. Thank God we've got you here to show us the Path. Utopia is just around the corner. What a hero.

(Unfortunately I'm personally too hard headed and stubborn to learn from your incredible advice, so I'll have to miss out on this burgeoning utopia and just remain "miserable" here in my quiet and peaceful cabin in the woods of Alabama.)

Truth is, you were born on third base and think you hit a home run. Nevermind the zillions of other 50 year olds just like you who have been or will soon end up being laid off due to ageism in this corrupt, wicked, and selfish society, when companies get tired of paying those high salaries and prefer to find some idiot college graduate to enslave instead. Those people just didn't make the right choices is all. Not like you. But they'll see the light one day. You'll teach them how wrong they were and how it's really all their fault.

How much do you have saved up for retirement at this point? I mean hard money, not paper or digits in a computer. The average American today regardless of perceived "social status" doesn't have two actual nickels to rub together. Yes, that includes tons of really smart, very well employed college graduates. Hopefully your "success" isn't dependent on the stock or housing market continuing to soar. Amazing how a 50% haircut can turn the biggest winners into the biggest losers, literally overnight. It usually shuts them up too.

When you get hungry enough, remember what I told you about that Piggly Wiggly dumpster. It's one of the few places left that even has an open, unlocked dumpster anymore. Most places today use a sealed trash compactor, which absolutely ensures noone can ever benefit from the giant piles of wealth these Really Smart And Good People throw away on a daily basis.

Enjoy your commute, while it lasts.