MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mentalquill | 2026-01-04 16:33:50+00:00
Howdy!

It took me a bit to get Fennel running properly with Neovim after a couple failed starts with Aniseed and Tangerine.

I googled a metric crapton and ran into more folks with troubles than solutions... So, I figured I'd share what worked well for me. I'm still working on my config for fun but it works as-is without a bunch of fancy macros or additional complexity.

My saving grace was finding nfnl and the authors dotfiles which made this a breeze compared to what I was banging my head against previously.

There's not a whole lot of resources out there, but once you get rolling it's very easy to manage. And any weird edges that you can't figure out can get shelved and seamlessly replaced with Lua from your searches with no troubles.

Hope this helps some folks out!
by bonesss | 2026-01-04 16:33:51+00:00
> even bad comments can be useful

Bad comments aren’t just less helpful than possible, they’re often harmful.

Once you’ve hit a couple misleading comments in a code base (ie not updated, flatly wrong, or deeply confusing due to term misuse), the calculus swings to actively ignoring those lying lies and reading the code directly. And the kind of mind resorting to prose when struggling to clarify programming frequently struggles with both maintenance and clarity of prose.
by philo23 | 2026-01-04 16:33:53+00:00
A long while ago I wrote a very simple static site generator for personal site, mainly just to play around with using GitHub/Cloudflare pages to host my personal site.

Then a couple of months ago I started comparing the big SSG tools after wanting something a bit less held together with duct tape... after a lot of experimenting I settled on 11ty at the time, but I really don't enjoy writing Liquid templates, and writing reusable components using Liquid felt very clumsy. I just wish it was much easier to use the JSX based templates with 11ty, but every step of the way feels like I'm working against the "proper" way to do things.

So over Christmas holiday I been playing around with NextJS SSG, and while it does basically everything I want (with some complicated caveats) I also can't help feel like I'm trying to use a oil rig to make a pilot hole when a drill would do just fine...

Anyone got any recommendations on something somewhere in between 11ty and NextJS? I'd love something that's structured similar to 11ty, but using JSX with SSG that then gets hydrated into full blown client side components.

The other thing I've been meaning to try is going back to something custom again, but built on top of something like Tempest [1] to do most the heavy lifting of generating static pages, but obviously that wouldn't help at all with client side components.

[1]: https://tempestphp.com
by schmuckonwheels | 2026-01-04 16:33:55+00:00
This post gets some of the details wrong. /usr/local is for site-local software - e.g. things you compile yourself, i.e in the case of the BSDs the ports collection - things outside the base system. (They may be compiled for you).

Since Linux has no concept of a base system, it's a stand-alone kernel with a hodgepodge of crap around it - this distinction makes no sense on Linux.

/opt is generally for software distros for which you don't have source; only binaries. Like commercial software packages. More common on Real UNIX(R) because most Linux users outside enterprise aren't running commercial software. You're putting your $500k EDA software under /opt.
by bgbntty2 | 2026-01-04 16:35:12+00:00
I'm at home most of the time, yet I prefer to go to the delivery office to pick up my packages. It's a 5 minute walk, as they're all over the city. Might not work well for big car-first American cities, though. I prefer going to the delivery office because I hate waiting for a delivery person to show up and wondering if I have time to go to the bathroom or not.

But I agree that not everything is easy to inspect. Most things seem to be, though. Another issue is not wanting third parties from seeing what you've purchased.
by jsheard | 2026-01-04 16:35:44+00:00
That doesn't gel with my experience, 1080p was the de-facto resolution for 24" monitors but 27" monitors were nearly always 1440p, and switching from 27" 1440p to 27" 4K requires a fractional 150% scale to maintain the same effective area.

To maintain a clean 200% scale you need a 5K panel instead, which do exist but are vastly more expensive than 4K ones and perform worse in aspects other than pixel density, so they're not very popular.
by tschumacher | 2026-01-04 16:36:03+00:00
I looked into this lately - Discord needs to use the Global Shortcuts Portal to do it properly but how is unclear. Discord is based on Electron which is based on Chromium. Chromium has support and Electron kind of has support since https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/45171 but this seems to be rather unknown and unused. Although somewhere in this API chain keyup events are lost, meaning that only "normal" shortcuts would work but no push-to-talk. There are multiple options for Discord to implement this: implement Global Shortcuts Portal directly, go via Electron global shortcuts API, hook into Chromium shortcuts API, maybe others - with the caveat that some of those don't support keyup events. Vesktop devs are currently stuck in same dilemma: https://github.com/Vencord/Vesktop/issues/18
by _alastair | 2026-01-04 16:36:07+00:00
It’s fascinating to see so many implementations targeting the same thing, along with the crazy variation in runtime size. I’d love to see memory usage comparisons too but I suppose you’d need to establish what you’re actually measuring first.

A few years ago I started work on a kind of abstraction layer that would let you plug Rust code into multiple different engines. Got as far as a proof of concept for JavascriptCore and QuickJS (at the time I had iOS and Android in mind as targets). I still think there’s some value in the idea, to avoid making too heavy a bet on one single JS engine.

https://github.com/alastaircoote/esperanto
by theandrewbailey | 2026-01-04 16:36:07+00:00
I started writing a blog engine back when I was in college. I've been working on it ever since, and it's let me implement and play with cool web features. I implemented Markdown over 10 years ago, and I don't regret it. The Markdown is converted to HTML once on save.

It's supported RSS since practically the beginning, and RSS later served as a foundation for a backup and restore system. A few years ago, I implemented SSG functionality (exports html, css, images, etc in a zip).

https://github.com/theandrewbailey/gram
by p_ing | 2026-01-04 16:36:08+00:00
> /var for variable data. This is where you would put things like your Postgres data files.

This one never sat well with me. I think of /var as temporary data, something I can lose without much consequence. But never data files. I know it's the default, but still.

/srv I like because it seems like a proper place to separate server-related data, i.e. /srv/wwwroot or similar. But if you like /var, that of course would be the place for this type of data.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-04 16:36:15+00:00
No, not really.

In fact I would say the opposite is true. LLMs must protect against this as a security measure in unified models or things the LLM 'sees' may be faked.

If for example someone could trick you into seeing a $1 bill as a $10 it would be considered a huge failure on your part and it would be trained out of you if you wanted to remain employed.
by raffael_de | 2026-01-04 16:36:26+00:00
Not necessarily. Such an event would be a geopolitical reenactment of the Danish folk tale "The Emperor's New Clothes". Turns out the emperor isn't just naked he's still living in his parent's basement. And the emperor here is Europe and the parents are the US. Why would I as a German support a war over an island that has not just been criminally neglected by a supposed alley (Denmark), it is even politically and economically irrelevant (as of now). And not just that ... "we" have been begging the US to keep protecting us and for them Greenland is in that respect very much serving a purpose in line with that very military support. Europe is naked as it stands. I don't like it. But that's just how it is.
Show HN: A browser based Python linked list visualizer with real-time debugging
by rushedcomet | 2026-01-04 16:36:36+00:00
Hi HN, I built this while solving linked list problems and getting tired of mentally (or on page) tracking pointer changes.

NeurAL-Viz runs real Python code in the browser using Pyodide and visualizes how linked list nodes and pointers (curr, prev, next, etc.) change at each execution step. It records snapshots during execution and lets you scrub backward and forward through the algorithm.

Source code: https://github.com/risheeee/NeurAL-Viz

Would love feedback on usability.
by askonomm | 2026-01-04 16:36:47+00:00
As someone who works at a place where we do a lot of code analysis and also research AI's effect on code quality, if you do not even so much as look at your code anymore, I do not believe you are creating maintainable, quality software. Maybe you don't need to, or care to, but it's definitely not what's sustainable in long-term product companies.

AI is a force multiplier - it makes bad worse, it _can_ make good better. You need even more engineering disciplines than before to make sure it's the latter and not the former. Even with chaining code quality MCP's and a whole bunch of instructions in AGENTS.md, there's often a need to intervene and course adjust, because AI can either ignore AGENTS.md, or because whatever can pass code quality checks does not always mean the architecture is something that's solid.

That being said, I do agree our job is changing from merely writing code, to more of a managerial title, like you've said. But, there's a new limit - your ability to review the output, and you most definitely should review the output if you care about long-term sustainable, quality software.
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-04 16:36:51+00:00
This piece is wildly unfair to folks with neuro-divergence - all get lumped into one bucket. Everything suggested is either a "works-for-me" assertion, from a sample size of 1, or a broad generalization about typical neuro-divergent individuals - and that seems like a contradiction in terms. Let's be fair here.
by jokethrowaway | 2026-01-04 16:36:58+00:00
It's easy to argue we don't really live in a democracy. Plenty of laws and regulations go against the majority to favour a few powerful entities (think about copyright laws, healthcare in the US).

That said, the alternative to democracy is not necessary the increasingly authoritarian governments we see around the world. If we gave more power and freedom to the individual and less to the state, we could have more freedom without democracy.

Democracy after all is the dictatorship of the majority on the minority. Why not just have any entity controlling the lives of others?
by transcriptase | 2026-01-04 16:37:00+00:00
I still suspect what happened was when the midwits all got access to ChatGPT etc and started participating in the A/B tests, they strongly selected for responses that agreed with them regardless of whether they were actually correct.

Some of us want to be told when and why we’re wrong, and somewhere along the way AI models were either intentionally or unintentionally guided away from doing it because it improved satisfaction or engagement metrics.

We already know from decades of studies that people prefer information that confirms their existing beliefs, so when you present 2 options with a “Which answer do you prefer?” selection, it’s not hard to see how the one that begins with “You’re absolutely right!” wins out.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-04 16:37:05+00:00
In the fresh Portuguese democracy from 70's and early 80's many of us, my family included, could mostly afford the pirated stuff from street bazars.

Being able to save money and be able to buy a proper brand at a regular shop, even if on sales, it was a big deal, and many times reserved for special occasions like a birthday, Christmas, some achievement at school.

Nowadays I would not think twice of just ordering whatever from Temu and friends, other than if they actually would fit my size.

The west has done this to ourselves, devaluing any kind of product in the search of the cheapest manufacturing possible, while keeping the push for exponential profit margins.

That being the case, why not buy directly to the same factories.
by iamnothere | 2026-01-04 16:37:25+00:00
I feel very lucky to have attended college before this sort of thing:

> Platforms like Sway—already in use on at least 77 campuses and backed in part by U.S. intelligence community funding—and Dialogues typically work by prompting students to enter their views on contested topics such as abortion, immigration, and policing, then matching them with peers who hold opposing positions for structured online exchanges. What was once a casual conversation becomes part of a permanent record. Beliefs are transformed into data — recorded, scored, and retained. Discretion is limited, and opting out often comes with its own costs. Over time, institutions accumulate detailed records of what students say, how confidently they say it, and how others judge them for it.

How on earth did we get here? This reads like dystopian sci-fi.

The idea of matching up students with different views for discussion is not at all bad, but the tracking is nightmarish. Universities should not be tracking the political views of students, period.

Edit: looking at Sway’s privacy policy, it sounds more private than the article implies. Dialogues seems to be less private than Sway. Have not verified beyond this.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-04 16:37:28+00:00
I had written a similar comment here asking for people's opinion but I would like to add something that I know about which I didn't see in your list

Tinycorelinux

I know that it doesn't follow the best user practices etc. but I did find its tcz package format fascinating because they kind of work similar to mountable drives and I am not exactly sure but I am fairly certain that a modern package management system where two or more packages with conflicts etc. can run on the same system.

I really enjoyed the idea of gobolinux as well. I haven't played with that but it would be good if some more mainstream os could also implement it. Nix and Guix are more mainstream but they also require to learn a new language and I think that we might need something in the middle like gobo but perhaps more mainstream or adding more ideas / additions perhaps? I would love it if someone can tell me about some projects we are missing to talk about and what they add on the table etc.

I haven't tried Gobo though so I am not sure but I really wish more distros could add features like gobo, perhaps even having a gobofied debian/fedora eh?
by 13point5 | 2026-01-04 16:37:35+00:00
1. Thanks for the .flat suggestion

2. It’s clear you didn’t read the rules folder because it’s a rule to tell cursor to teach me

3. You say you don’t understand why TensorData can be a single integer. Scalars are tensors too. I’m trying to support PyTorch’s spec and ops as much as possible which is why I’m supporting it. The obvious use cases are for reduction ops and scalar unary ops.

4. Fine I’ll post after I’ve made more progress.
by josefx | 2026-01-04 16:37:37+00:00
It may not just be NVIDIA. From what I understand any open source solution is stuck with second rate graphics support on Linux, simply because the groups behind HDMI and other graphics related standards have overly restrictive licensing agreements. Valve ran directly into that while working on its newest console, the AMD drivers for its GPU cannot legally provide full support HDMI 2.1 .
by logicallee | 2026-01-04 16:37:46+00:00
This is pretty relelevant to a project I'm working on - a new web browser not based on Chromium or Firefox.

Web browsers are extremely complex, requiring millions of lines of code in order to deal with a huge variety of Internet standards (and not just the basic ones such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS).

A while ago I wanted to see how much of this AI could get done autonomously (or with a human in the loop), you can see a ten-minute demo I posted a couple of days ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xdIMmrLMLo&t=42s

The source code for this is available here right now:

http://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/160toy-browser.py.tx...

It's only around 2,000 LOC so it doesn't have a lot of functionality, but it is able to make POST requests and can read some Wikipedia articles, for example. Try it out. It's very slow, unfortunately.

Let me know if you have anything you'd like to improve about it. There's also a feature requests page here: https://pollunit.com/en/polls/ahysed74t8gaktvqno100g
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2026-01-04 16:37:53+00:00
<< The harms range from minor (annoyance, or running down the wrong path because I didn’t have a good idea to start with) to dangerous (reinforcing paranoia and psychotic thoughts). Do you agree that these are problems, and there a more useful term or categorization for these issues?

I think that the issue is a little more nuanced. The problems you mentioned are problems of sort, but the 'solution' in place kneecaps one of the ways llms ( as offered by various companies ) were useful. You mention the problem is reinforcement of the bad tendencies, but no indication of reinforcement of good ones. In short, I posit that the harms should not outweigh the benefits of augmentation.

Because this is the way it actually does appear to work:

1. dumb people get dumber
2. smart people get smarter
3. psychopaths get more psychopathy

I think there is a way forward here that does not have to include neutering seemingly useful tech.
by eviks | 2026-01-04 16:38:02+00:00
Oh, that's an awesome idea to get rid of those awful splits and focus on apps! Scoop package manager on Windows works the same way. Though it has a few issues when some security apps ignore "current" symlinks (and don't support regex for versioned paths), and then versioned dirs bite you when versions changes.
Wonder whether this distro has similar issues and whether it'd be better to have the current version a regular dir and then the versioned dir a symlink
Show HN: SafeTemp.email – Temporary email addresses (privacy-friendly)
by jimenezxik | 2026-01-04 16:38:39+00:00
Hi HN! I built SafeTemp.email, a simple temporary email service to help you sign up for websites without exposing your personal inbox.

You can generate a disposable address instantly and use it for one-off verifications and trial signups. My goal is to keep it fast, minimal, and privacy-friendly.

I’d love feedback on:
1) UX: is it obvious how to generate/use an address?
2) Features: what would you add/remove?

(Disclosure: I’m the creator)
by jcelerier | 2026-01-04 16:38:58+00:00
> Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026.

LOL

I installed a new windows 11 yesterday on a fairly powerful machine, everything lags so much on a brand new install it's unreal. Explorer takes ~2-3 seconds to be useable. Any app that opens in the blink of an eye under Linux on the same machine takes seconds to start. Start menu lags. It's just surrealistic. People who say these things work just have never used something that is actually fast.
by dubeye | 2026-01-04 16:39:21+00:00
Good points. Works both ways though, you are splitting your time between two worlds, and don't have a fully clear view on the costs of bad choices on a small business

to know this you need to know what processes these businesses have been using for the past decade to run real full time business with full time staff. for example, you don't know just how bad the prior systems were, that the self built systems replaced.

with all due respect you don't have all the info to make the calculation on my world. just as I don't have it for yours.

the same tool that helped me build our systems, is not going to be the same tool that helps you maintain your large code base. But my point is, that I'm on the front line of change, and my guess is it's not going to be limited to my size of business. I don't know what your tool will look like, but I'd bet it's coming
by 7777777phil | 2026-01-04 16:39:34+00:00
Sharing this here again - I did not adapt the article for recent events but one can do 1+1. The developments in Venezuela offer a real-world case study for the Bretton Woods III framework. The thesis is that political decisions can creates a structural incentive for nations to diversify into 'Outside Money' (physical commodities and gold) to mitigate jurisdictional dependency.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-04 16:40:12+00:00
> But now, for the first time, I tried Claude Code's Skills, and they blew me away, because I wasn't aware that those skills are injected automatically

They work so well because they're also "baked in" the training run of the model. The concept is simple, but training it to actually use it unlocks the "wow" factor. (using cc with other models, not trained specifically for this, reveals how big training is)

They also highlight this in their docs, you don't need to teach claude about skills. Or to write new skills. It "knows" what skills are, how to use, edit them etc.
by holowoodman | 2026-01-04 16:40:16+00:00
No. Temporary data is /var/tmp or /tmp. The difference: /var/tmp should survive a reboot. /tmp might be lost on reboot.

/var is data that needs to be writable (/usr/*, /bin and /lib may be readonly), and that might be important. Like databases, long-term caches, mail and printer queues, etc.
by mckabue | 2026-01-04 16:40:44+00:00
Hi HN,

For the past few months I've been managing over 1TB per month of media archives using custom Python scripts. It worked, but the operational debt kept growing-regex-heavy metadata pathing (eg: container/{file_created_date}/{file_created_datetime}:{filename}), async I/O quirks across OSes, and fragile long-running transfers became harder to reason about than the actual data movement.

Over the past Christmas break, I challenged myself to replace that setup with a state-aware, local-first workflow engine. The result is Blober: https://blober.io/

----

Architecture highlights

1. Local-first store
Blober isn't a CLI wrapper. It persists configurations, workflows, tasks, and state in a local SQLite DB so transfers can be resumed, inspected, and replayed deterministically.

2. Immutable jobs
Each run snapshots configuration into a Job object. Once started, the job doesn't change, even if the user edits the workflow later.

3. Background executor
A background loop (Electron-based) manages long-running transfers and prevents system sleep during multi-hour jobs. This was critical for my use case and a advantage over rclone.

4. Metadata-aware paths
Files are inspected at runtime (stat() or provider APIs), allowing variables like {file_created_date} or {file_size_mb} to be injected into destination paths without pre-scanning. This is the biggest advantage over rclone.

---

I built the desktop app in ~14 days using heavy AI assistance. What worked surprisingly well was forcing a planning gate before any code generation: having the model produce a phased implementation plan first reduced over-engineering and large hallucinated files.

That said, I'm looking to extend this to support all cloud providers and use cases, so any feedback is welcome.

I'd love brutal feedback, especially on:

- Simplicity of the application and the workflow model

- Whether this actually reduces "organizational debt" for large archives

- Where this breaks down compared to rclone or similar tools

Blog post on the build process: https://toknow.ai/posts/vibe-coding-challenge/

App: https://blober.io/