MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by felipeerias | 2026-01-17 22:46:15+00:00
Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing? I’m not sure that it does.

Historically, it would seem that often lowering the amount of people needed to produce a good is precisely what makes it cheaper.

So it’s not hard to imagine a world where AI tools make expert software developers significantly more productive while enabling other workers to user their own little programs and automations on their own jobs.

In such a world, the number of “lines of code” being used would be much greater that today.

But it is not clear to me that the amount of people working full time as “software developers“ would be larger as well.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2026-01-17 22:46:21+00:00
> a bunch of juniors were fired the day before Christmas because the founder heard them discussing the latest movies they watched and decided that they had bad opinions and shouldn’t work at his company since he’d be embarrassed if his peers heard their tastes.

Just out of curiosity, was it something despicable like them liking Marvel movies? Or more akin to disagreeing whether Eyes Wide Shut could be considered a good Kubrick movie?
by weiliddat | 2026-01-17 22:46:29+00:00
I feel similarly. Sounds a bit like other crafts that were later industrialized and (partially) mechanized, like woodworking and carpentry.

One can certainly enjoy the laborious handcrafted process of building your own table, and yet go back to a shop that churns out cheap furniture that’s nonetheless useful for many others, and see the value in both.

Obviously there’s more degrees of freedom in software, but I’m trying to see it that way to rationalize how I’m feeling with the current state of things.
by stopbulying | 2026-01-17 22:46:45+00:00
11 days later, more bullying:

"Trump says 8 EU nations face tariffs rising to 25% if Greenland isn't sold to US" https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/17/trump-greenland-tariffs-nato... ..
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662530 (closed as duplicate?)
by WalterBright | 2026-01-17 22:46:53+00:00
The idea includes gaps where the roof meets the ceiling, so air is drawn from outside.

> If you aren't using A/C and have the windows open, then it only helps, of course.

I make use of the "stack effect" to cool the house down in the evening. Not even a fan is necessary.

One mistake I made was to not have the A/C pull from the basement, which is always 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house.
by alexharri | 2026-01-17 22:47:02+00:00
The ASCII moon tool is fun to play around with!

No plans to build a library right now, but who knows. Feel free to grab what you need from the website's code!

If I were to build a library, I'd probably convert the shaders from WebGL 2 to WebGL 1 for better browser compatibility. Would also need to figure out a good API for the library.

One thing that a library would need to deal with is that the shape vector depends on the font family, so the user of the library would need to precompute the shape vectors with the input font family. The sampling circles, internal and external, would likely need to be positioned differently for different font families. It's not obvious to me how a user of the library would go about that. There'd probably need to be some tool for that (I have a script to generate the shape vectors with a hardcoded link to a font in the website repository).
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-17 22:47:15+00:00
Well personally I don’t think the USA has a strong claim to Hawaii. It’s basically a strategic military outpost that got retconned into being a state after the war.

It’s kind of weird, like sure Wikipedia articles exist but it’s not as if people who have some position are basing their position entirely on the Wikipedia article and I can infer the structure of their position from the Wikipedia article. So I’m asking about what people think, and all I hear back is “reeeeeee”.
by rcMgD2BwE72F | 2026-01-17 22:49:21+00:00
I much prefer to subsidize my neighborhood / friends / colleagues / family / … than have the world sink in ads. That enshites everything. It turns all social media into hate machines. And the cost is only externalized and it is definitely not reduced by polluting the mind with all the ads (same as climate change where we're only making the situation worse by procrastinating). The free part and the fake generosity are an illusion.
by skybrian | 2026-01-17 22:49:48+00:00
If there were a store selling cigarettes to children, then naturally you'd want the store to stop doing it. It's their responsibility. But they do need information about who they're serving. (Just enough information.)

Making a website adults-only should be as easy as setting a web server's config parameter. The fact that the industry has taken so long to come up with a decent Internet standard for this is pretty ludicrous. It doesn't have to be perfect. Even just a minimal implementation like requiring an "X-adult: yes" HTTP header from the browser would work for a locked-down client like an iPhone.

Sure, older kids will get around it but that's okay; they probably learned something.
by koiueo | 2026-01-17 22:49:58+00:00
> How does this work on laptop screens?

Offtop: but is this the right question to ask?

Coming from Linux (involuntarily), the menu/tray implementation was one of the loudest UX issues I immediately discovered. Some functions can only be invoked from a system tray icon, and those actions can also be app/workspace-sensitive (like taking a screenshot with some special config using a screenshot tool). MacOS renders those functions inaccessible if the currently focused app has more than ~6 items in the menu.

Gosh, some apps even have menus so big, they don't fit on a single screen (btw, MacOS's solution is to compress the font, yeah, ask me how I know), leaving only the control center in the tray (which is completely useless in this scenario).

This is the first time I encounter a MacOS user who at least acknowledges the problem, albeit from a different angle: "you are displaying it wrong/your screen is too small".
by pbmonster | 2026-01-17 22:51:00+00:00
Dota 2 is a real time strategy game with an arguably more complex micro game (but a far simpler macro game than AoE2, but that's far easier for an AI to master), and OpenAI Five completely destroyed the reigning champions. In 2019. Perfect coordination between units, superhuman mechanical skill, perfect consistency.

I see no reason why AoE2 would be any different.

Worth noting that openAI Five was mostly deep reinforcement learning and massive distributed training, it didn't use image to text and an LLM for reasoning about what it sees to make its "decisions". But that wouldn't be a good way to do an AI like that anyway.

Oh, and humans still play Dota. It's still a highly competitive community. So that wasn't destroyed at all, most teams now use AI to study tactics and strategy.
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2026-01-17 22:51:24+00:00
Who remembers Model-Driven Architecture and code generation from UML?

Nothing can replace code, because code is design[1]. Low-code came about as a solution to the insane clickfest of no-code. And what is low-code? It’s code over a boilerplate-free appropriately-high level of abstraction.

This reminds me of the 1st chapter of the Clean Architecture book[2], pages 5 and 6, which shows a chart of engineering staff growing from tens to 1200 and yet the product line count (as a simple estimate of features) asymptotically stops growing, barely growing in lines of code from 300 staff to 1200 staff.

As companies grow and throw more staff at the problem, software architecture is often neglected, dramatically slowing development (due to massive overhead required to implement features).

Some companies decided that the answer is to optimize for hiring lots of junior engineers to write dumbed down code full of boilerplate (e.g. Go).

The hard part is staying on top of the technical (architectural and design) debt to make sure that feature development is efficient. That is the hard job and the true value of a software architect, not writing design documents.

[1] https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_origina... A timeless article from 1992, pre-UML, but references precursors like Booch and object diagrams, as well as CASE tools
[2] You can read it here in Amazon sample chapter: https://read.amazon.com/sample/0134494164?clientId=share
by joomy | 2026-01-17 22:52:33+00:00
That's pretty cool! From what I can tell, it does a morphological guess based on the suffix. If you didn't have the apostrophe, it'd have issues with ambiguity (say "aşı", does it mean vaccine or does it mean "aş" in accusative case?) but the apostrophe solves that problem too.

My solution for this problem in Kip was to go all the way with the morphological analysis using TRmorph (https://github.com/coltekin/TRmorph) for it, and then resolve the ambiguities in type checking / elaboration. (Therefore Kip almost never needs apostrophes.) Whether it was worth it, I don't know, but it was a fun problem to solve. :)
by WalterBright | 2026-01-17 22:52:41+00:00
Around Seattle, modern houses are square boxes with a flat roof, and zero eaves. I watch these homes get built all the time. A few years later, I see all the water damage to the siding.

You're right about ridge vents, they behave much like a cupola, but the holes in them are too small for much airflow, and are easily blocked by debris, insects and moss.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-17 22:53:03+00:00
I just don't understand the perspective that Trump is a historical threat and therefore we can't accept business as usual. I have a number of disagreements with the status quo myself, but I'm not going to pursue them until Trump is out of power, because I want to absolutely minimize the number of people who feel they have to choose between supporting Trump and abandoning some principle of theirs. To me, any other strategy seems tantamount to saying that Trump isn't so bad.
by pilord314 | 2026-01-17 22:53:41+00:00
I've been playing around with an AI generated knowledge base to grok our code base, I think you need good metrics on how the knowledge base is used. A few things is:

1. Being systematic. Having a system for adding, improving and maintaining the knoweldge base
2. Having feedback for that system
3. Implementing the feedback into a better system

I'm pretty happy I have an audit framework and documentation standards. I've refactored the whole knowledge base a few times. In the places where it's overly specific or too narrow in it's scope of use for the retained knowledge, you just have to prune it.

Any garden has weeds when you lay down fertile soil.

Sometimes they aren't weeds though, and that's where having a person in the driver's seat is a boon.
by tmnvix | 2026-01-17 22:54:35+00:00
To an extent I agree with you. Some places and lifestyles (e.g. means of earning a living) don't make cutting back on driving a viable choice.

However, these things can and do change (introduction of public transport and saner planning allowing local shops and the possibility for children get to and from school autonomously for example).

One problem as I see it is that many people that don't have a viable choice other than driving everywhere are politically opposed to structural change. Adopting this political point of view is also a personal choice.
Ask HN: Why is the $0 hijacking of intellectual labor so normalized in OSS?
by fumi2026 | 2026-01-17 22:54:38+00:00
I’ve noticed a fascinating paradox in this community. We celebrate "disruption" and "innovation," yet we maintain a cultural dogma where individual's lifework is expected to be donated for $0.
"Open Source" has become a polite euphemism for the legalized looting of independent inventions. We expect creators to sacrifice years of life-force, only for Big Tech to strip-mine the logic and patent the derivatives—effectively banning the original author from their own work.
I’m curious about the collective ethics here:
1. The Cognitive Tax: If one requires an LLM summary to "verify" a non-perturbative logic, does that person truly qualify as a "contributor," or are they just an end-user of someone else’s cognitive sacrifice?
2. The "Hacker" Spirit: Since when did the spirit of hacking—understanding things from first principles—get replaced by the spirit of "I want this for free and I want it now"?
I’m not interested in a charity model where the loudest influencer claims my years of work as their own overnight. I'd rather have a constructive dialogue on why we've normalized this parasitic transfer of value.
Is the "community" built on shared growth, or just on the efficient consumption of outliers who don't have a legal department?

I agree, the world has indeed improved for those who consume. But I'm asking about the creators. Or does your 'constructive' worldview require the author's bankruptcy as a prerequisite for progress?
by orsorna | 2026-01-17 22:55:42+00:00
Would you say it's truly dead or that it fails to meet the performance bar you've described?

The reality is that most devs do not consider a holistic picture that includes the infrastructure they will be deploying to. In many cases, it's certainly a skill issue; good devs are hard to find. And to flip the coin, it's hard to find good ops people too.

The reason DevOps continues to linger, however vague a discipline it is, is because it allows the business to differentiate between revenue generating roles and cost center roles. You want your dev resources to prioritize feature work, at the beckon of PMs or upper management, and let your "DevOps" resources to be responsible for actually getting the product deployed.

In essence, it's a ploy to further commoditize engineering roles, because finding unicorns that understand the picture top-to-bottom is difficult (finding /top/ talent is difficult!). In this way, DevOps is well and alive, as a Romero zombie.
by 7952 | 2026-01-17 22:55:44+00:00
There is a good technology connections video about building backup batteries into the actual stove.

I think part of the problem with whole home backups is that they tend to be sized to a maximum load that is unusual or could be avoided with some effort. And that providing a backup for the essentials you actually need is relatively cheap and uncomplicated if you make some modest sacrifices.
by Privavault | 2026-01-17 22:56:41+00:00
The zero-knowledge architecture is clever here. One thing I'd be curious about—how do you handle key derivation from the passphrase? I've been building PrivaVault (encrypted doc management, launching in a week) and spent far too much time on this exact problem. We ended up using Argon2id with high iteration counts, but it creates this tension between security and UX since key derivation on every decrypt can feel sluggish on mobile. I would be interested in understanding the tradeoffs you made in this situation.
by card_zero | 2026-01-17 22:56:42+00:00
Heh.

* HN has a high level of discourse,

* This is ascribed partly to the guidelines,

* The guidelines recommend we avoid the topics that usually result in squabbling,

* But if only we could keep our act together, we have a rare opportunity for high level discourse on inflammatory topics!

I kind of agree with you, but I'm terribly naive and I do a lot of wishful thinking.
by punkmonk7 | 2026-01-17 22:57:51+00:00
Over the past few weeks, We have been going through the publicly available court paperwork and evidentiary files for Jeffrey Epstein.

What stuck out to me was how hard they are to actually look at. It's hard to search since it's broken up, references are hidden, and to comprehend links, you have to move between dozens of PDFs by hand.

So I made a completely free, fake UI that makes it appear as though you're on his very own laptop. You can search through documents, open original sources, and follow links between files. I also made EpsteinGPT for asking questions in natural language and Jordle as a fun little experiment to show names and linkages in a more lighthearted way. I've also kept files that were originally available to the public but were later taken down from the DOJ site, with their sources still intact.

I'm interested in how other people here would go about making tools like this, what they would do differently, and where they would draw the line if they were working on anything similar.
by idopmstuff | 2026-01-17 22:58:38+00:00
> He’s not wrong, but it does make me wonder: even if the code was not the point, what do you do if it was the thing that brought you joy?

You still write the code! We do lots of things that could be done more efficiently. People build their own furniture and make their own clothes and brew their own beer. If you love doing something for its own sake, keep doing it.
by lossolo | 2026-01-17 22:58:47+00:00
Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. You can't even leave North Korea without special permission, which only certain workers get.

I've been to China, and I'm going again this year, I'm from the EU. There's literally no difference between my freedom in the EU and my freedom in China, like, zero (the same for the citizens if they don't go to political protests or try to change their political system online through revolution). The funniest thing is that China's Tier 1 cities are more developed than EU cities and offer a better quality of life.
by lateforwork | 2026-01-17 22:58:53+00:00
The problem with "let the parents decide" is that if all other kids in the neighborhood have phones and are on social media then unless you want your kid to grow up with no friends you don't have a choice but to let your kid also use social media.

The government makes many basic restrictions for protecting children: parents can't give their children drugs or alcohol, porn, guns etc. Social media definitely fits in this category because it has been shown to cause mental harm.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-01-17 22:59:14+00:00
Because the "open source" movement has been co-oped by corporations which promote for precisely this reason.

Actually contributing to a common good is done by building Free and Copyleft software, not "open source" which is term that offers no legal protections and the things you're talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
by Privavault | 2026-01-17 22:59:48+00:00
The right to deletion is intriguing, but there's a practical gap most people don't realize: you need to actually know which companies have your data before you can request deletion. That's the challenging part.

I've been building in the privacy space, and the pattern I see is that people forget they uploaded documents to random services years ago (old apartment applications, one-off tax prep services, etc.). By the time you remember to request deletion, the company might have been acquired or gone under, or you can't even recall the service name.

The better approach, IMO, is treating deletion as part of your upload workflow: either use services with auto-deletion built in, or keep a personal audit log of where you've shared sensitive docs. Prevention beats remediation every time.
by dh2022 | 2026-01-17 23:00:38+00:00
Which part of Western Europe is afraid to send weapons? Britain who sent Shadow missiles to Ukraine? Germany who sent tanks? France who committed troops on the ground if there is a peace treaty in Ukraine?

Germany, UK, and France have continuously asked for all territory to be given back to the Ukraine-which is the opposite of wanting to carve up Ukraine. Another one of your posts that is contradicted by reality.
by exmadscientist | 2026-01-17 23:00:41+00:00
None at all, if you're setting them up correctly. 100-150 nits (cd/m²) is just about right. I color-calibrate my monitors and this is one step in the flow. I calibrate to 120 nits and find that it's consistently about 33% brightness. Calibrating this way, I can look at a full white screen (think "blank notepad window") with no particular eyestrain.
by hypeatei | 2026-01-17 23:00:51+00:00
I don't think it's that simple. Since the header mechanism is easy to bypass, there would be:

1) software that makes it easy to do for the layman (browser extensions etc.), and

2) scams and malware that target children offering a "bypass" to access adult websites

Then parents, teachers, and administrators need to be aware of the latest bypass mechanism thus sending them on a wild goose chase.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-17 23:00:55+00:00
The subsidy strategy is strategically reckless and economically doomed. What is it supposed to accomplish? The factories aren't profitable at today's energy prices. Since it's these factories that create Germany's wealth, their being unprofitable makes the country unprofitable, driving down standards of living.

If you subsidize electricity by capping consumer prices, then you have to either cap producer prices (creating shortages) or have the state pick up the difference. The latter option might make individual factories profitable, but it makes Germany even less profitable: now the country as a whole is paying not only to import electricity, but also for administrative overhead of the subsidy and the deadweight loss produced by non-market allocations of a scarce factor of production, electricity.

All these subsidies do is transfer wealth to the industrial and energy sectors from literally everyone else and impoverish the country as a whole.

A subsidy might be justifiable if it covered a temporary market hiccup. These high prices aren't shocks. They're structural. They're foreseeable consequences of state policies that decrease the supply of electricity and thereby make it more expensive than in competing polities.

Imagine the US trying to address oil shocks in the 70s by subsidizing gasoline. Wouldn't have worked. Subsidies cannot create more of a resource.

Also, given the 2028-2030 pension budget crisis you're facing, I'm not sure you guys can afford to impoverish yourselves with subsidies even in the short term.

If you guys want to remain competitive, you need to find ways to generate power under an affordable cost structure and stop lying to yourselves about how, any day now, the Energiewende will produce a cornucopia of electrons. It's just not happening.

Something has to break here. Maybe you accept declining living standards. Maybe you just burn an enormous ocean-boiling amount of barely-not-peat lignite from your western states. Or maybe, just maybe, you see that nuclear power works for others and can work for you too if you get over your atomic phobia.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-17 23:01:01+00:00
> But it's not a secret, the name has been mentioned in mainsteam media on multiple occasions, and even here, in this thread on HN.

Most pseudonyms aren't real secrets either, plenty of people knew the real name or face of people posting under a pseudonym but that doesn't make it OK to post it on Wikipedia.

> Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names

Ah yes, “every other” except for the ones they don't. We've already talked about people with pseudonyms right here!

> Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.

One group that happened to be harassed (and, unfortunately often, assaulted) for having changed their name in the first place, hence the “exception”: the group is exceptionally vulnerable.
by piskov | 2026-01-17 23:01:01+00:00
> My eyes will thank you

Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays.

Sure, if I were to blind myself with 10k lux, I would hate white background to.

But it isn’t supposed to be like that: make it the same brightness as the surroundings and voila.

I’ve never met a person saying he hates books and wishes they were white on black.

Also with glossy display (like 6k xdr) the only way I can deal with reflections is by always using light mode.