MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-15 15:19:24+00:00
Whoa!

/bin/[ as a binary looking for it's own "]" closing bracket!

What a nasty syntax hack!

I wonder what the motivation was for doing this rather than just implementing test expression support directly in the shell?

I just tried and bash also accepts some other odd filenames in place of "[", so you can do:

ln -s /bin/test "-"

ln -s /bin/test "$"

And use either of these in place of "[" (assuming they are on your path). Of course they still expect the closing "]" since that requirement comes from /bin/test.

It's an interesting way to extend bash in a confusing way! You could write a "$" utility that did something else entirely, perhaps looking for a "closing $" too, then write something like:

if $ args $;

then

fi
by ecshafer | 2026-01-15 15:20:14+00:00
Yeah..h as someone in Upstate New York, one of the snowiest places in the country. Snow tires are really what you want. AWD is really nice. BUT end of the day, if you can only go 30 you can only go 30. What really saves you with AWD is when you are dealing with tracks through the snow, AWD makes that a lot easier without spinning out.
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-15 15:20:39+00:00
Calling Nvidia niche feels a bit wild given their status-quo right now, but from a foundry perspective, it seems true. Apple is the anchor tenant that keeps the lights on across 12 different mature and leading-edge fabs.

Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only predictable cash flow. Apple is smart. If the AI capex cycle flattens in late '27 as models hit diminishing returns, does Apple regain pricing power simply by being the only customer that can guarantee wafer commits five years out?
by close04 | 2026-01-15 15:20:51+00:00
I think that's comparing to 3 years of GeForce Now at ~22EUR/month for the Ultimate plan, for a total of ~800 EUR. For someone using in 3h/week then you might as well go for the free plan and pay nothing. But renting has while owning can only have financial cost, renting has a hidden cost on top of that. It leads to "atrophy" of the ownership right and once you lose that option you'll never get it back. That will have incalculable costs.
by dahart | 2026-01-15 15:20:54+00:00
The trend is clear that if we keep using fossil up, then soon nobody will have a good source for it. And it’s clear that for geopolitical reasons in addition to environmental reasons, energy independence will be a core necessity everywhere on earth. It’s handy that the sun is sending us enough energy, directly (solar) and indirectly (wind, hydro), that nobody has a good reason not to be “green focused” and phase out fossil fuels for energy. Any country that leads and shows the rest of the world that it can be done deserves applause.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-15 15:21:12+00:00
> Nvidia not producing consumer cards.

This is a false statement. They’re still producing consumer cards. You can go buy a 5070FE in stock on their web store at MSRP right now. You can buy a discounted 5060 from Best But below MSRP.

They’re changing production priorities for a little while if the rumors are accurate.

RAM prices have always been cyclical and prone to highs and lows. This is an especially high peak but it will pass like everything else.

These predictions that the sky is falling are way too dramatic.
by tmzt | 2026-01-15 15:21:25+00:00
I built a MIT-licensed vite plugin (deadsimpleseo.github.io) to help with SEO for developers of React apps.

It bundles and executes a static HTML pipeline in a node vm executing within the vite process, then outputs that to a folder with an index.html for each of the .md and .tsx in your seo source folder. The result does not rely on javascript or fetching content to render, it's static HTML and there's no rehydration step.

This allows it to reuse your main app layout, headers, footers, etc.

I built it for a one page tool where I wanted crawlable links in the footer served from a standard nginx setup.
by Eric_WVGG | 2026-01-15 15:21:33+00:00
and "the Digital Antiquarian" just did a great, deep two-parter on the history of Looking Glass last autumn. (covers Thief, Thief 2, System Shock, and some forgotten oddities)

https://www.filfre.net/2025/10/a-looking-glass-half-empty-pa...
by hypeatei | 2026-01-15 15:22:15+00:00
The U.S. constitution doesn't do much on its own, though. Sure, you might be able to win a case because of it, but there is no saying how much time you'll spend in prison or how much money you'll spend on lawyers before winning.

Like a sibling comment said: you need a culture that rejects this stuff and punishes it quickly.
by palmotea | 2026-01-15 15:22:28+00:00
> then the problem is on the republicans side to bring up better candidates.

Look: the Republicans are terrible, but Democrats have this bad habit of using that as an excuse to cover up their own shortcomings. They blame MAGA, blame Trump for not being better, instead of looking in the mirror and becoming a party that people like enough that it can win.

Any party that can't win handily against Trump, especially after all the scary warnings, is unfathomably incompetent and dysfunctional. IMHO a key part of that is that the party is beholden to ideologues on the far edge of the mainstream who keep it on a losing course.

For instance: we wouldn't be in this mess if "farm state Democrat" was a category that was still allowed to exist. I watched one of the last of those fall, and it appeared she was hemmed in by ideological out-of-state donors who prevented her from adapting to local conditions.
by nerdjon | 2026-01-15 15:22:31+00:00
It will be interesting to see what the long term impact of this will be, the headline misses the biggest part that they (if the phrasing they use is correct) should be producing more of the lower speced (and cheaper) 5060 8GB model.

So while the news is not great, I think it is far from any doom and gloom if we are in fact going to be getting more 5060 cards.

As it is the value of the crazy higher speced cards was questionable with most developers targeting console specs anyways. But it does bring to question how this might impact the next generation of consoles and if those will be scaled back.

We will likely be seeing some stagnation of capability for a couple years. Maybe once the bubble pops all the work that went into AI chips can come back to gaming chips and we can have a big leap in capability.
by gehsty | 2026-01-15 15:22:36+00:00
Chinas policy around energy works and it has allowed them to become the world’s engine for renewable power. They get the benefit of energy efficiency and being a critical trade partner for every country in the world.

My experience is that the UK (for example) doesn’t really know why it is building offshore wind. Is it to reduce bills to consumers (OFGEMS remit), is it to create local jobs in manufacturing (Clean Industry Bonus Scheme), is it to stimulate national wealth by ownership of projects (British Energy). It’s a mess unclear picture for me.

It would be nice if politicians could spend some time trying to work together, cross parties a come up with some sensible resolutions and long term plans instead of trying to score points for soundbites and clips.
by Normal_gaussian | 2026-01-15 15:22:47+00:00
A hard reboot is where the power goes all the way off, a soft reboot is where it doesn't. A fork bomb makes it very hard / impossible to trigger a soft reboot, forcing you to do a hard reboot.

As an extra sting, a hard reboot can be damaging if the software and hardware is not correctly handling power interruption, which was much more likely in the 90's.
by helloaltalt | 2026-01-15 15:22:52+00:00
> Re software and landfill.. true to some extent but there are still ramifications as you pointed out electricity demand and hardware infrastructure to support it. Also in the 80's when the computer games market crashed they literally dumped games cartridges in a hole in the desert!

I hear ya but I wonder how that reflects on Open source software which was the GP request created by LLM let's say. Yes I know it can have bugs but its free of cost and you can own it and modify it with source code availability and run it on your own hardware

There really isn't much of a difference in terms of hardware/electricity just because of these Open source projects

But probably some for LLM's so its a little tricky but I feel like open source projects/ running far with ideas gets incentivized

Atleast I feel like its one of the more acceptable uses of LLM in so far. Its better because you are open sourcing it for others to run. If someone doesn't want to use it, that's their freedom but you built it for yourself or running with an idea which couldn't have existed if you didn't know the details on implementations or would have taken months or years for 0 gains when now you can do it in less time

It significantly improves to see which ideas would be beneficial or not and I feel like if AI is so worrying then if an idea is good and it can be tested, it can always be rewritten or documented heavily by a human. In fact there are even job posts about slop janitor on linkedin lol

> Wouldn't the economy also be in much better shape if more people could buy things such as handmade shoes or suits?

Yes but also its far from happening and would require a real shake up in all things and its just a dream right now. i agree with ya but its not gonna happen or not something one can change, trust me I tried.

This requires system wide change that one person is very unlikely to bring but I wish you best in your endeavour

But what I can do on a more individualistic freedom level is create open source projects via LLM's if there is a concept I don't know of and then open sourcing it for the general public and if even one to two people find it useful, its all good and I am always experimenting.
by rpigab | 2026-01-15 15:22:52+00:00
As a gamer and software developer, I've been Windows-free for over two years, no regrets, maybe kernel level anticheat competitive multiplayer games, but I have tons of other games and not much time to spend in multiplayer.
Ubuntu on desktop gaming PC, Ubuntu on laptop, Steam Deck, Debian/Raspbian for servers. GNOME everywhere except on Steam Deck which has KDE, love both.

> Linux won't stop you if you try to use a command that deletes every file on your PC ("sudo rm -rf /").

It will definitely stop you from running that command because of "--preserve-root" that is enabled by default, if you want to break your system you have to opt out of it. Just don't try to put an asterisk after, pathname expansion will be a different case ("rm -rf /*").
by jgrahamc | 2026-01-15 15:23:17+00:00
Today, I am revising Portuguese grammar and so I've mostly been exploring the things I can remember well and those that I can't. Portuguese has a lot of verb forms that I need to get right. But it also has really interesting constructions like "ir ter com" which literally means "to go to have with" but is an idiomatic way of saying "to meet up" (with someone) and I keep remembering and forgetting it.
by keyringlight | 2026-01-15 15:23:35+00:00
My impression for the past decade or so is that Radeon for PC is AMD's way of keeping their GPU division's engine running between contracts for consoles or compute products. At the very least it's a welcome byproduct that provides a competent iGPU and a test bed for future 'main' products. It's been a long while since AMD has shown future vision for PC GPUs or they've led with a feature instead of following what others do.
by gmays | 2026-01-15 15:23:37+00:00
Good point, it's a mix. The "it'll only get harder" is also because things are moving so fast and it takes time to learn (especially across teams) and change habits. No past paradigm has moved this quickly, which makes it hard to grok.

I also fully agree with "don’t overdo your investment into this generation of tools". IMO there are too many "cutting edge" tools trying to do all of this sexy stuff that'll be irrelevant in the next few months.

It's best to keep things simple with tooling. I push the edge on my general approach (99% of everything is AI coded) but conservative with my tools (pretty much only using Cursor now) to have at least some layer of stability. Otherwise stacking too many cutting edge things just feels too fragile, and will decay as AI improves, causing other issues. And this stuff is moving so fast and these companies are sufficiently motivated that the best things will make it into the tools, like plan/debug modes in Cursor.

I also feel that agentic coding is fast enough for now, so I don't even bother with multi-agent workflows. I still get a ton done and it's already at the edge of my ability to design coherently. Sure I could get 10X more code written in parallel with 10X more agents, but I can't design that fast, so it's just hurry up and wait with worse quality. And if that much code is needed I'm probably doing something wrong anyway.
by jihadjihad | 2026-01-15 15:23:42+00:00
A good rule of thumb I've found is that a typical portion is about 4oz of dry pasta per person. Cooking for two people you can easily eyeball what half a box of straight pasta is, for 3 or 4 people just cook the whole box.

For other pasta types, you can measure a single or double serving by pouring into a bowl as if it's cereal.
by 10xDev | 2026-01-15 15:24:04+00:00
Palestine was the training ground, now it is being deployed back at home. Turns out it is a small world and you shouldn't have selective empathy.

"First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me"
by the__alchemist | 2026-01-15 15:24:16+00:00
I have a hunch most people recognize this, but many are ok with it. I have hope (But not confidence) people will see this in the upcoming US elections and more broadly. This is transparent authoritarian behavior.

Edit: Challenge: If you downvoted the parent post here (It's currently grey), I would love to hear why you think this doesn't match the pattern. Are you living in the US? I in general am struggling to understand my fellow US citizens, given the history of our nation.
by apercu | 2026-01-15 15:24:30+00:00
It might be a generational thing.

When I started out as a sysadmin it was all shell and glue and different syntax on the 8 different flavours of *NIX I worked on between '94 and '97, then I found Perl suddenly you could actually build things that felt "real". It took me straight into web application development by '98, and I'm not sure I would have stayed in this field had it not existed (I was also working in neuro-diagnostics at the time and might have stayed there).

I saw some really elegant stuff written in Perl.

I also saw some absolutely unhinged, impossible-to-maintain garbage.
by mncharity | 2026-01-15 15:24:58+00:00
A cautionary user experience report. The default hotkey upon download is ctrl+space. Press to begin recording, release to transcribe and insert. Key-up on the space key constitutes hotkey release. If the ctrl key is still down when the insertion lands, the transcribed text is treated as ctrl characters. The test app was emacs. (x64 linux x11, with and without xdotool)
by pixl97 | 2026-01-15 15:25:17+00:00
>all human intelligence

So, this is rather complex because you can turn AI energy usage to nearly zero when not in use. Humans have this problem of needing to consume a large amount of resources for 18-24 years with very little useful output during that time, and have to be kept running 24/7 otherwise you lose your investment. And even then there is a lot of risk they are going to be gibbering idiots and represent a net loss of your resource expenditure.

For this I have a modern Modest Proposal they we use young children as feed stock for biofuel generation before they become a resource sink. Not only do you save the child from a life of being a wage slave, you can now power your AI data center. I propose we call this the Matrix Efficiency Saving System (MESS).
by projektfu | 2026-01-15 15:25:26+00:00
Here is the part of the test.c source from V7 Unix:

main(argc, argv)
char *argv[];
{

ac = argc; av = argv; ap = 1;
if(EQ(argv[0],"[")) {
if(!EQ(argv[--ac],"]"))
synbad("] missing","");
}
argv[ac] = 0;
if (ac<=1) exit(1);
exit(exp()?0:1);
}

So, if the professor was missing the "[" command, they were missing a link. More likely, they had a weird orthodoxy about using "test" instead of "[" because reasons. One good reason to use "test" instead of "[" in a Bourne shell control statement is if you are running a list of commands between "if" and "then", and the test is the last part of the list.

Another good place to use "test" is if you are not in a control statement and you are just setting $?.

Edit: EQ() is defined as:

#define EQ(a,b) ((tmp=a)==0?0:(strcmp(tmp,b)==0))
char *tmp;
Show HN: I spent 10k hours building the perfect language learning app
by barrell | 2026-01-15 15:25:56+00:00
Hello HN -

Over the last few years, I've been building an app to learn languages. It supports ~85 languages and ~40 dialects, and is optimized for learning and maintaining multiple languages.

Learning a language is a ton of work, but really quite simple. Find text you're interested in, dissect and understand it, and review it often. Grind that every day for a few years, and you'll be fluent.

So I built Phrasing for 4 main reasons:

1. To have an app I would actually be excited to use every single day for years.

2. To do all the research, explanation, prioritization, course planning and management for me, so I could just focus on learning

3. To support learning multiple languages as a first class citizen

4. To have a nice, unified interface to learn languages from Spanish to Arabic to Cantonese

I've been using it daily now for almost a year to learn a variety of languages and I've been loving it. I have an awesome group of users in the Telegram channel who have been using it as well to great success.

If you're a polyglot, an avid language learner, or someone who tried to use Anki in the past but found it wasn't for them — I think you might really like Phrasing :)

EDIT: Phrasing is a paid application, but there are 30 expressions you can try for free in the islands tab (you'll see 10 of them in the onboarding flow as well)

--

PS: Phrasing uses FSRS under the hood, so a huge thank you to the FSRS team and Jarrett Ye for all the amazing work. Phrasing would not be the product it is without you!

PSS: I'm documenting some of the latest updates on the blog this week, they're 50% product and 50% technical, might be of special interest to the HN crowd: https://phrasing.app/blog/launch-week-1
by brendoncarroll | 2026-01-15 15:26:04+00:00
I also wrote a tool for doing this[0], after one of these agents edited a config file outside of the repo it was supposed to work within.
I only realized the edit because I have my dotfiles symlinked to a git repository, and git status showed it when I was committing another change.
It's likely that the agents are making changes that I (and others) are not aware of because there is no easy way to detect them.

The approach I started taking is mounting a directory for the agent into a container.
I also mount any config it might need as read-only.

The standard tools like claude code, goose, charm, whatever else, should really spawn the agent (or MCP server?) in another process in a container, and pipe context in and out over stdin/stdout.
I want a tool for managing agents, and I want each agent to be its own process, in its own container.
But just locking up the whole mess seems to work for now.

[0] https://github.com/brendoncarroll/nnc
by biophysboy | 2026-01-15 15:26:06+00:00
Per the WSJ, as of January 10th this year, ICE has identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles, leaving eight people shot with two confirmed dead. Five of those shot were citizens. According to court records, only one of these civilians was armed and never drew his weapon.

There is a sickness curdling in the dark corners of Silicon Valley. These people need to be humiliated for being the sniveling, authoritarian toads that they are.
by imajoredinecon | 2026-01-15 15:26:38+00:00
That website has some other more
out-there stuff on it. (I love the tone because it’s impossible to tell how tongue-in-cheek it is)

Coffee and wine glass
https://www.toxel.com/tech/2019/10/10/coffee-and-wine-glass/

Sofa made of pillows https://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2024/11/12/sofa-made-of-pi...
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-15 15:26:43+00:00
Why is that a failure of the green agenda as opposed to a failure of Germany?

Edit: I don't have the facts about reliability of green energy (though you didn't provide any evidence against it either), but it's clear the "not knowing where your energy comes from", "having messy grid" and "not investing in nuclear" are unrelated to renewable energy.
by self_awareness | 2026-01-15 15:26:56+00:00
It's not American, it's global. I'm not American, yet I'm judged by the these political culture quirks. The creator of Gleam is not American, he's from UK. Trans-movements aren't American, they're in my country too, and I'm interested somewhat in the politics of my own country. Also parent posts differentiated between BLM and BLM-GN, where one is a "movement", and the other one is supposedly a marxist organization, so I guess there's a difference too.

> Is it really just about language for you?

No. I mean, I'm not a murderer. I'm not a thief. I only do to others what I want others to do to me. I don't want to be treated differently because of my race or my gender, therefore I don't want to treat others differently because of those things. Yet, I actually am treated differently because of it; and it's mostly by those people who "fight racism" and "fight transphobia". Who are virtue signalling left and right how tolerant they are. How inclusive they are. When a black director says "I'll never hire a white main actor" then it's OK. But when I point out he said it, then I'm a racist -- this is how it works today. So:

> If the section was phrased as “We are LGBTQ+ friendly and do not tolerate transphobia or racism” that would feel more welcoming to you?

No, because it's too easy to frame my views as transphobic or racist, like I've written in my previous paragraph. And this is the language part. Using "master" branch in git today is a manifestation of racism. People fork "rubocop" projects because it has a "cop" in the name; and they want to defund the police. I think that police is needed because without it the law wouldn't exist? Then I'm a nazi. When I'm asking questions about whether someone's wheels were spinning during sudden acceleration, I'm being called an ICE-lover.

You might see me being passionate, but I'm merely a product of current political polarity.

> If you join and bring up your feelings about trans women in sports you’ll most likely be asked to stop or removed, as it’s just not a space where that kind of discussion is welcome. But why should it be?

No, I will be removed only when I say that it's not OK. I will be upvoted when I'll say that it's OK. But more generally, that's a good question, but I don't know the answer, ask Ipil, he sees the necessity. I do think that there's no reason why it should be a place for discussion of trans-rights and racism and I wouldn't want to discuss it there (not even here to be honest). So why it's being manifested on the main page, before the language tour and before the newsletter, since it's clearly not a place for these topics?