MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by machomaster | 2026-01-12 00:33:58+00:00
> Yes, but that doesn't make the ADHD fully go away.

Not an argument.

> Wow great insight, a bit hillarious with the part of asking adhd people pay extra attention. Should the guy with a neurological problem just pay extra attention to moving his leg, and he will soon run as fast as the rest?

Yes, if you have problems with inattentiveness, then you can't just eyeball the size of the fabric and cut. You actually need to measure. In worst case, you should measure and remeasure several times, as well as use the pen to draw a straight line with a ruler, instead of just keeping the finger and trusting that you can make the line straight during cutting.

If have no trouble concentrating, you can just work in a cafe or an open office. If you have problems, then take extra steps to get rid of distractions (quiet office, noise cancelling headphones, work-inducing music, etc).

If you have more difficulties getting into the zone, make extra effort organizing yourself: blocking working uninterrupted time on the calendar, disabling notifications, using airplane mode etc.

Have trouble concentrating and the mind wandering? Even more important to keep a proper task/idea/knowledge management system to offload the brain.
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-12 00:34:04+00:00
I don't remember the last time I've seen an item in a Canadian grocery store that doesn't also include a metric amount (possibly in parenthesis) on the label itself. Not to mention the shelf price has per unit, almost always per metric unit (except rarely meat being per lb).

Are you sure about what you are seeing, is it possible this is just for a few US imports and maybe you aren't looking at the shelf sticker? Or maybe it's a province-specific thing?

Edit: Found the regulation. In general,

> On consumer prepackaged foods, the net quantity must be declared on the principal display panel in metric units [221, 232, SFCR]. However, consumer prepackaged foods that are packaged from bulk at retail, other than individually measured foods, can declare the net quantity on the principal display panel in Canadian units [241.4(2)(b), SFCR].

https://inspection.canada.ca/en/food-labels/labelling/indust...
by neilv | 2026-01-12 00:34:48+00:00
And that's if scanning never malfunctions.

Everyone is accustomed to cars malfunctioning, in numerous ways.

An intuition from an analogy that should be recognizable to HN...

Everyone is accustomed to data breaches of everything, and thinks it's just something you have to live with. But the engineers in a position to warn that a given system is almost guaranteed to have data breaches... don't warn. And don't even think that it's something to warn about. And if they did warn, they'd be fired or suppressed. And their coworkers would wonder what was wrong with them, torpedoing their career over something that's SOP, and that other engineers will make happen anyway. Any security effort is on reactive mitigation, theatre, CYA, and regulatory capture to escape liability.

I'd like to think that automotive engineers are much more ethical than tech industry, but two things going on:

(1) we're seeing a lot of sketchy tech in cars, like surveillance, and unsafe use of touchscreens;

(2) anything "AI" in a car is presumably getting culture influence from tech industry.

So I wouldn't trust automakers on anything intersecting with tech industry.
by overfeed | 2026-01-12 00:35:08+00:00
See my other comment upthread on how beamforming doesn't make terminals/emissions invisible, just harder to acquire, but well within reach of a determined adversary. Newer Starlink terminals have a 1.5° beam, and older ones are
3.4° wide . At 10,000 feet altitude, the tighter beam is 245 feet across. Starlink satellite orbits are public and predictable, and Iran has drones to spare.

This is just 1 passive RF-based approach, and there are others (e.g. drone-mounted FLIR surveys done at 3 am)
by simonw | 2026-01-12 00:35:25+00:00
I wouldn't call these flawless but here you go:

- https://github.com/simonw/denobox is a new Python library that gives you the ability to run arbitrary JavaScript and WASM in a sandbox provided by Deno, because it turns out a Python library can depend on deno these days. I built that on my phone in bed yesterday morning.

- https://github.com/simonw/pwasm is a WebAssembly runtime written in pure Python with no dependencies, built by feeding Claude Code the official WASM specification along with its conformance test suite and having it hack away at that (again via my phone) to get as many of the tests to pass as possible. It's pretty slow and not really useful yet but it's certainly interesting.

- https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions is a Datasette plugin which provides a JSON API for starting a SQLite transaction, running multiple queries within it and then executing or rolling back that transaction. I built that one on my phone on a BART (San Francisco light railway) trip.

- https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript is a pure Python, no dependency JavaScript interpreter which started as a port of MicroQuickJS. Here's a demo of that one running in a browser https://simonw.github.io/micro-javascript/playground.html - that's my JavaScript interpreter running inside Python running in Pyodide in WebAssembly in your browser of choice, which I find inherently amusing.

All of those are from the past three weeks. Most of them were built on my phone while I was doing other things.
by open_ | 2026-01-12 00:36:35+00:00
My current process for offloading photos off the iPhone is to copy them in subsequent batches of '0-9999' from the 'Image Capture' app.

This is because I usually have far more than 10K photos and apple starts renaming the files after 9999 as 00001(1) for the rest. This is pretty undesirable.

Is there a way for me to export unmodified raw/jpeg/live/videos off the iphone to an external drive without a macbook with a large enough ssd, and wanting to use icloud as an intermediate bottleneck?
by toast0 | 2026-01-12 00:36:59+00:00
> We have 10,000 nodes in the cluster - which one are you going to ssh into to find your container to attach a shell to it to somehow attach a debugger?

You would connect to any of the nodes having the problem.

I've worked both ways; IMHO, it's a lot faster to get to understanding in systems where you can inspect and change the system as it runs than in systems where you have to iterate through adding logs and trying to reproduce somewhere else where you can use interactive tools.

My work environment changed from an Erlang system where you can inspect and change almost everything at runtime to a Rust system in containers where I can't change anything and can hardly inspect the system. It's so much harder.
by epolanski | 2026-01-12 00:37:05+00:00
> I wouldn't agree that LLMs will help write better software

Your statement makes no sense.

Even if you don't let LLMs author a single line of your code, they can still review it, find edge cases you didn't think about or suggest different approaches.

The fact that AI allows lots of slop, does not negate its overall utility in good informed hands.
by czhu12 | 2026-01-12 00:37:20+00:00
Been working on canine.sh for about 2 years now.

It’s an open source project that basically turns your kubernetes into a developer friendly PaaS.

Just crossed 2k apps on the cloud version, no idea how many people run it locally, and thanks to a generous sponsorship from the Portainer folks, I’m able to work on it close to full time.
by yicmoggIrl | 2026-01-12 00:37:22+00:00
> the outcome is psychologically intolerable [...] People do not argue with conclusions, they argue with perception [...] accepting it would force a reckoning they are not ready for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Or perhaps, a form of grief.

> denying the shift does not preserve meaning

I think you meant to write:

"denying the shift does not preserve sustainability"

as "meaning" need not be preserved by anything. The idea here is that meaning -- stemming from the profession being supplanted -- is axiomatic.

And with that correction applied, I agree -- to an extent anyway. I hope that, even if (or "when") the mainstream gets swayed by AI, pockets / niches of "hand-crafting" remain sustainable. We've seen this with other professions that used to be mainstream but have been automated away at large scale.
by dkdcio | 2026-01-12 00:38:01+00:00
a few reasons:

- agents tend to need (already have) a filesystem anyway to be useful (not technically required but generally true, they’re already running somewhere with a filesystem)

- LLMs have a ton of CLI/filesystem stuff in their training data, while MCP is still pretty new (FUSE is old and boring)

- MCP tends to bloat context (not necessarily true but generally true)

UNIX philosophy is really compelling (moreso than MCP being bad). if you can turn your context into files, agents likely “just work” for your use case
by paulcole | 2026-01-12 00:38:04+00:00
Who’s saying you can’t enjoy the typing of letters, numbers, and symbols into a computer? The issue is that this is getting to be a less economically valuable activity.

You wouldn’t say, “It’s not that they hate electricity it’s just that they love harpooning whales and dying in the icy North Atlantic.’

You can love it all you want but people won’t pay you to do it like they used to in the good old days.
by visarga | 2026-01-12 00:39:02+00:00
Learning happens when your ideas break, when code fails, unexpected things happen. And in order to have that in a coding agent you need to provide a sensitive skin, which is made of tests, they provide pain feedback to the agent. Inside a good test harness the agent can't break things, it moves in a safe space with greater efficiency than before. So it was the environment providing us with understanding all alone, and we should make an environment where AI can understand what are the effects of its actions.
by h3half | 2026-01-12 00:39:12+00:00
My understanding was that each satellite broadcasts a coarse ephemeris for the whole network, and that that “almanac” isn’t accurate for very long (on the order of weeks). Without uploads to the satellites, those almanacs will go stale.

I don’t think the almanacs are necessary for the system to work, in theory. But I believe they’re commonly used by receivers to narrow down the range of possibilities when trying to find a PRN match for a signal they’re getting.

(I’ve dealt with GPS and similar navigation signals for work but am not an expert, this is just the impression I’ve gotten over a few years)
by wesbz | 2026-01-12 00:41:21+00:00
AI researcher here. I literally did my PhD on data poisoning in an AI frontier lab and developed a new form of data poisoning against LLMs.

1. Yes, model developers filter data... but poorly. Several examples showed trash data can make the cut into production and break something on the way.

2. To be fair, filtering data poisons can be extremely challenging, even impossible. Simply because one cannot know how updating a model's weights influence its behaviour on all possible inputs.

Once people will understand that even a tiny amount of data can slightly change models and still greatly change their behaviour, there will be a shift in AI security.
by nxrabl | 2026-01-12 00:41:23+00:00
> Don't people know stuff anymore?

No, no one has ever known anything, and every day people are born knowing even less. This is a strangely aggressive way to share this interesting information, especially for MacOS programming, a platform requiring such byzantine arcane knowledge I'm amazed people write anything for it at all. At least for Win32 people wrote books you could buy and not blog posts.

Anyway, thank you for the introduction to the very cool SwiftScripting project [0], extracting programmable interfaces directly from app bundles. It's just like COM, right? nice to see MacOS catching up (/ragebait)

[0] https://majestysoftware.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/swift-scrip...
by gmueckl | 2026-01-12 00:41:47+00:00
It is nearly impossible to argue for use of force and defend the current constitution at the same time. Those politicians would act against the one construct that gives them the legitimate power to act in the first place.

On that path, the current order would have to be broken down completely before a new one can be fully established. That would mean at least a new constitutional order and the US isn't ready for that. The reverence for the current constitution is has very strong roots in US society.
by sejje | 2026-01-12 00:41:56+00:00
Considering a squeeze puts deepseek ahead of most human players. Maybe not an optimal squeeze, but most human players flat if they're going to play.

Grok's play is obviously bad, no solver needed. I wonder what he said in the "log" where you can see their thoughts. I guess he can hopelessly be trying to rep AA--again, I've seen worse thought processes every time I've ever played in a casino.

I really think GPT, at least, would win at a live casino. Possibly the other bots as well. The humans are that bad. Poker is complex.
by simonw | 2026-01-12 00:42:08+00:00
See my comment here - I suspect that those were deliberately picked by llmslave3 to NOT be impressive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582209

For more impressive examples see https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/html-tools/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574276#46582192
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-12 00:42:24+00:00
It is really crazy the kind of things they are posting openly on social media now. I’ve seen them, several times, repeat lines that are mass posted by supremacist accounts on X. The most flagrant one was the call to deport 100 million Americans - a third of the country - which is another way for saying, “get rid of all non white people”. This is a constitutional crisis, a humanitarian crisis in the making, and also an economic crisis in the making. What is going to happen to HN’s tech ecosystem without all those talented workers coming to America?
by truncate | 2026-01-12 00:42:38+00:00
I've not had any issues with 4k display. Mac does handle monitors with different DPIs well, but not really a issue for me. Most hardware I use also just works great. Gaming is great now as well.

The only reason I can't completely switch to Linux is because there are no great options for anything non-programming related stuff I love to do ... such as photography, music (guitar amplifier sims).
by trinsic2 | 2026-01-12 00:42:40+00:00
If it wasn't for companies gate keeping, buying up all the compute, putting an huge load on our infrastructure, people and government using it to surveil its people I would be more supportive of it. But right now, you got to be insane to be supporting this technology. Its literally being used to do more harm than good. I don't see any end to this. I cannot and will not support a surveillance state in the name of progress.
by cmdrk | 2026-01-12 00:42:46+00:00
Random assortment of projects as time allows with the $JOB.

- Prototyping a cute little SSH-based sorta-BBS, inspired by the Spring '83 protocol, but terminal-centric rather than web-based. It's called Winter '78, and if we get another Great Blizzard this year, I'll be able to make some progress on it!

- Another prototype, for an experimental HPC-ish batch system. Using distributed Erlang for the control plane, and doing a lot of the heavy lifting with systemd transient units. Very much inspired by HTCondor as well as Joyent's (RIP to a real one) Manta.
by Frotag | 2026-01-12 00:42:53+00:00
I guess I'm looking for wireguard's version of STUN. And now that I know what to google for, finally found some promising leads.

https://github.com/jwhited/wgsd

https://www.jordanwhited.com/posts/wireguard-endpoint-discov...

https://github.com/tjjh89017/stunmesh-go
by xormapmap | 2026-01-12 00:42:59+00:00
I used to manage a small fleet of about 6 XPS laptops at my old job. 3 of them needed motherboard replacements under warranty within a year. People would put them on standby and put them in their bag, then get home and find the laptop had decided to start up of its own volition and overheat to the point it would be searing hot to the touch. The charging would randomly fail or the laptop would go into a boot loop. Not to mention problems with Windows deciding to update 2 minutes before an important meeting (and then naturally the progress bar would get stuck).
by typester | 2026-01-12 00:43:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a long-time Linux user who loves tiling window managers like AwesomeWM and River. Recently, I had to switch to macOS for work. While AeroSpace is a fantastic tiling WM for Mac, I really missed the "tag-based" workspace management (bitmask-based tags) found in Awesome/River.

So I built AeroTag to bridge that gap.

It's a CLI tool written in Rust that works alongside AeroSpace to manage workspaces using tags. It allows you to:
- View multiple workspaces (tags) simultaneously.
- Assign a single window to multiple tags.
- Stream workspace status for integration with status bars like SketchyBar.

If you are an ex-Linux user on macOS missing this specific workflow, I hope you find this useful!

Repository: https://github.com/typester/aerotag
Blog post: https://typester.dev/blog/2026/01/11/tag-based-workspace-man... (This submission)

I'd love to hear your feedback.
by kaashif | 2026-01-12 00:44:45+00:00
Yeah but it feels terrible. I put as much as I can into Claude skills and CLAUDE.md but the fact that this is something I even have to think about makes me sad. The discrete points where the context gets compacted really feel bad and not like how I think AGI or whatever should work.

Just continuously learn and have a super duper massive memory. Maybe I just need a bazillion GPUs to myself to get that.

But no-one wants to manage context all the time, it's incidental complexity.
by jhbadger | 2026-01-12 00:45:13+00:00
Read the famous "Story of Mel" [1] about Mel Kaye, who refused to use optimizing assemblers in the late 1950s because "you never know where they are going to put things". Even in the 1980s you used to find people like that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel
by sejje | 2026-01-12 00:45:15+00:00
How many BBs do you think JJ is worth being dealt preflop? I suggest you confirm your guess.

How many times do you see an obvious nut hand get called on the river by someone to whom it isn't obvious, for hundreds of BBs? (Every single session, that's the answer)

One of these is such a huge mistake compared to the other.
by QuercusMax | 2026-01-12 00:45:17+00:00
I finally got fed up with my two external monitors (one of which I rotate to portrait) getting mixed up by MacOS every time my MacBook would go to sleep or I unplugged it, so I bought a thunderbolt docking station which has basically solved all my issues. Worth every penny to be able to swap my personal laptop and work laptop with a single cable.

Macs don't support the USBC / displayport daisy chaining support that my monitors should be able to handle. Very frustrating that this stuff is still so nonstandard. If you have all Apple it all works perfectly, of course.
by epistasis | 2026-01-12 00:45:20+00:00
I've managed wireguard in the past, and would never do it again. Generating keys, distributing them, configuring it all...... bleh!

Never again, it takes too much time and is too painful.

Certs from Tailscale are reason enough to switch, in my opinion!

The key with successful self hosting is to make it easy and fast, IMHO.
by machomaster | 2026-01-12 00:45:34+00:00
Let't imagine that you have a task, that you started doing, but then hit the hardware wall. How physically/emotionally/intellectually tired are you at that point?

What will happen if you just rest? Sleep, eat, exercise/go on a walk, lay down. No phone, no social media, no doom scrolling, no tv, no netflix, no gaming. Just 100% effort of resting and recovering, without any distractions.

Would you not get bored at some point and will decide that it's better to complete the task rather than continue this boredom while fully rested
by epolanski | 2026-01-12 00:45:38+00:00
Because using AI takes some practice:

- you should document your best practices in a file and point it to the LLM (the standards are @claude or @agent markdown files

- you should manage context (the larger it gets the weaker the output)

- you should use good and clear prompts

- you should generally make it generate a plan with the requirements (business logic changes focused) and then follow and review the implementation plan (I generally produce both in two different markdown files).

- only then you let it code

The last phase, isn't even the most important to be honest, you can do it manually. But I have found that forcing myself through the first two and having AI find information in the codebase, edge cases in the business logic, propose different solutions, evaluate the impact of the changes is a huge productivity multiplier.

Very often I'm not worn out by the coding part, again, I can do it on my own, it's the finding information and connecting the dots the hard one. In that, it excels and I would struggle (mentally) to go back to jumping from file to file while keeping track of my findings in notes to figure out the wheres, whats and whys.
by justconvert | 2026-01-12 00:46:05+00:00
I built a privacy-first file converter where your files never leave your device. Images, documents, audio, and PDFs are processed entirely in your browser using WebAssembly (Canvas API, PDF.js, Tesseract.js, LibRaw).

Video is the only exception – it uses server-side FFmpeg with auto-deletion in 5 minutes.

No sign-up, no ads, no tracking. You can verify the privacy claims yourself by opening DevTools Network tab while converting.

Tech stack: React + Vite, client-side Canvas/WASM for processing.

Would love feedback on the UX and any formats you'd like to see added.
by spartanatreyu | 2026-01-12 00:46:08+00:00
Nah, my 2 year old phone is OLED and has the top of my browser burnt into the screen. And I'm someone who has their screen turn off quickly to save battery.

I can't imagine how annoying it would be to watch a movie or play a game and see something burnt into the white parts of what I'm supposed to be looking at.

I don't want to be purchasing a new gaming monitor every two years.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-12 00:46:13+00:00
But that's the thing: Claude Plays Pokemon is an experiment in having Claude work fully independently, so there's no "you" who would improve its onboarding docs or anything else, it has to do so on its own. And as long as it cannot do so reliably, it effectively has anterograde amnesia.

And just to be clear, I'm mentioning this because I think that Claude Plays Pokemon is a playground for any agentic AI doing any sort of long-term independent work; I believe that the solution needed here is going to bring us closer to a fully independent agent in coding and other domains. It reminds me of the codeclash.ai benchmark, where similar issues are seen across multiple "rounds" of an AI working on the same codebase.
by bsder | 2026-01-12 00:47:32+00:00
Well, be glad you're working for a company that is still willing to stump up properly for hardware.

Too many companies are balking at spending money on hardware right now. While I would love to think that this will drive Linux adoption, it probably won't. Microsoft is going to cave on TPM 2.0 for Windows 11 or extend Windows 10 support much further.
by Rendello | 2026-01-12 00:47:49+00:00
Yes, the difference is that tallow is solid at room temperature, so great for preservation. I was planning on making pemmican with it, but slicing, drying, and pulverizing hundreds of tiny strips of meat seemed like a lot of work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican