MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yicmoggIrl | 2026-01-12 00:04:59+00:00
This. The only thing AI will do, at the societal level, if it truly succeeds, is insanely amplify the power imbalance we already suffer under. Thinking that the benefits of AI will be "democratic" is staggeringly naïve.

It's obvious that AI, if it succeeds, will be primarily used to make people, even as physical beings, redundant.

From TFA:

> the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection

This is daydreaming. Just look at the US. "Political pressure" is not a thing.

There will be war.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-12 00:05:06+00:00
I just found their proprietary hardware and being ARM too limiting. I wanted to set up full disk encryption to set up nextcloud on, and found that on the pi this is an incredibly complex process. While on an x86 PC it's just a checkbox on install.

And then you can only use distros which have a raspberry pi specific build. Generic ARM ones won't work.
by gaigalas | 2026-01-12 00:05:10+00:00
Quite cool.

You could distribute it as `.html` only, and use JS to offer a local download link to itself in the correct extension. A polyglot installer, of sorts.

For example, this gist is an HTML that, when opened, offers a download zip of its DOM in whatever state it currently is:

https://gist.github.com/alganet/c904acb57282402fc0bd724f1eeb...

I think you can use something similar to get the entire page contents as a blob, but I never tested with binary data in actual browsers. Perhaps even patch it to avoid the initial windows error.
by LeoPanthera | 2026-01-12 00:06:28+00:00
"Hi, I'd like to hear a TCP joke."

"Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?"

"Yes, I'd like to hear a TCP joke."

"OK, I'll tell you a TCP joke."

"Ok, I will hear a TCP joke."

"Are you ready to hear a TCP joke?"

"Yes, I am ready to hear a TCP joke."

"Ok, I am about to send the TCP joke. It will last 10 seconds, it has two characters, it does not have a setting, it ends with a punchline."

"Ok, I am ready to get your TCP joke that will last 10 seconds, has two characters, does not have an explicit setting, and ends with a punchline."

"I'm sorry, your connection has timed out. Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?"
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-12 00:06:36+00:00
I completely agree with your second point. For your first point my experience tells me the people least afraid to write original code are the people least oppositional to reinventing wheels.

The distinguishing behavior is not about the quantity of effort involved but the total cost after consideration of dependency management, maintenance time, and execution time. The people that reinvent wheels do so because they want to learn and they also want to do less work on the same effort in the future.
by BohdanPetryshyn | 2026-01-12 00:06:43+00:00
Building https://lenzy.ai - helping products built around chat with AI (think Lovable or Cursor) reduce churn and prioritize product improvements by analyzing their user's chats.

I started about 3 months ago, focusing on making my 2 early adopters happy. One of them is ready to start paying soon!
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-12 00:07:28+00:00
Sure, you could. But this isn't my job, it isn't my career. I just want Nextcloud running on a machine at home. I know linux and docker well enough to validate the ideas coming out of Gemini, and it helps me find stuff much faster than if I had to read man pages or read books.

And I find the stuff that the average self hoster needs is so surface level that LLMs flawlessly provide solutions.
by fgonzag | 2026-01-12 00:07:48+00:00
My first switch was to open code + open router. I used it to try mixing models for different tasks and to try open weights models before committing to the hardware.

Even paying API pricing it was significantly cheaper than the nearly $500 I was paying monthly (I was spending about $100 month combined between Claude pro, chat gpt plus, and open router credits).

Only when I knew exactly the setup I wanted locally did I start looking at hardware. That part has been a PITA since I went with AMD for budget reasons and it looks like I'll be writing my own inference engine soon, but I could have gone with Nvidia and had much less issues (for double the cost, dual Blackwell's vs quad Radeon W7900s for 192GB of VRAM).

If you spend twice what I did and go Nvidia you should have nearly no issues running any models. But using open router is super easy, there are always free models (grok famously was free for a while), and there are very cheap and decent models.

All of this doesn't matter if you aren't paying for your AI usage out of pocket. I was so Anthropics and OpenAIs value proposition vs basically free Gemini + open router or local models is just not there for me.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-12 00:08:07+00:00
> Every time I put anything anywhere on the open net, it gets bombarded 24/7 by every script kiddie, botnet group , and these days, AI company out there

Are you sure that it isn't just port scanners? I get perhaps hundreds of connections to my STMP server every day, but they are just innocuous connections (hello, then disconnect). I wouldn't worry about that unless you see repeated login attempts, in which case you may want to deploy Fail2Ban.
by wrs | 2026-01-12 00:08:32+00:00
Cloud computing is not some new fundamental area of computer science. It’s just virtual CPUs with networks and storage. My CS degree from 1987 is still working just fine in the cloud, because we learned about CPUs, virtualization, networks, and storage. They’re all a lot bigger and faster, with different APIs, but so what?

Devops isn’t even a thing, it’s just a philosophy for doing ops. Ops is mostly state management, observability, and designing resilient systems, and we learned about those too in 1987. Admittedly there has been a lot of progress in distributed systems theory since then, but a CS degree is still where you’ll find it.

School is typically the only time in your life that you’ll have the luxury of focusing on learning the fundamentals full time. After that, it’s a lot slower and has to be fit into the gaps.
by alejoar | 2026-01-12 00:08:45+00:00
I use easy-move-resize [1] to resize windows from anywhere inside the area of the window, using a modifier key. In my case I like using cmd + middle mouse button + drag.

This is standard in Gnome and a must for me back when I switch to MacOS for work.

[1] https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize
by eichin | 2026-01-12 00:10:06+00:00
Part of why these things feel "not fit for purpose" is that they don't include the things Simon has spent three years learning? (I know someone else who's doing multi-LLM development where he uses job-specialty descriptions for each "team member" that lets them spend context on different aspects of the problem; it's a fascinating exercise to watch, but it feels even more like "if this is how the tools should be used, why don't they just work that way"?)
by jacobthesnakob | 2026-01-12 00:10:20+00:00
Maybe because I don’t do SWE for my job, but I have fun writing docker-compose files, troubleshooting them, and adding containers to my server. Then I understand how/why stuff works if it breaks, why would I want to hand that over to an AI?

Waiting for the follow-on article “Claude Code reformatted my NAS and I lost my entire media collection.”
by epolanski | 2026-01-12 00:10:30+00:00
What would be the type of work you're doing where you wouldn't benefit from one or multiple of the following:

- find information about APIs without needing to open a browser

- writing a plan for your business-logic changes or having it reviewed

- getting a review of your code to find edge cases, potential security issues, potential improvements

- finding information and connecting the dots of where, what and why it works in some way in your code base?

Even without letting AI author a single line of code (where it can still be super useful) there are still major uses for AI.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-12 00:10:57+00:00
Straw man response. I didn’t say anything about that.

I’m trying to counter the idea that a consistent heroin dependence is the “least bad substance” when there are clearly numerous drugs that are much less toxic over the long term.

I said nothing about best techniques for dealing with people who have addictions. My goal is to avoid having being read these comments and think that because they’re smarter they’ll be able to handle and benefit from a stable opioid dependence. It’s exactly how one of my friends got started
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-12 00:11:00+00:00
> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista.

Other than that weird resize thing written about here (which I didn't notice, thanks SizeUp for providing me with hotkeys remarkably similar to Windows) - why? Vista and 8 were immediately obvious changes in the UI, but in general it still looks and feels just like macOS has for well over a decade now.

New icons, new fonts, but... that's it?

Oh and HyperSwitch for some reason can't switch to Finder windows any more, but that's probably because HyperSwitch hasn't seen an upgrade in years...
by nojs | 2026-01-12 00:11:12+00:00
This post is spot on, the combo of tailscale + Claude Code is a game changer. This is particularly true for companies as well.

CC lets you hack together internal tools quickly, and tailscale means you can safely deploy them without worrying about hardening the app and server from the outside world. And tailscale ACLs lets you fully control who can access what services.

It also means you can literally host the tools on a server in your office, if you really want to.

Putting CC on the server makes this set up even better. It’s extremely good at system admin.
by tombert | 2026-01-12 00:11:12+00:00
I've been getting into FUSE a bit lately, as I stole an idea that a friend had of how to add CoW features to an existing non-CoW filesystem, so I've been on/off been hacking on a FUSE driver for ext4 to do that.

To learn FUSE, however, I started just making everything into filesystems that I could mount. I wrote a FUSE driver for Cassandra, I wrote a FUSE driver for CouchDB, I wrote a FUSE driver for a thing that just wrote JSON files with Base64 encoding.

None of these performed very well and I'm sort of embarrassed at how terrible the code is hence why I haven't published them (and they were also just learning projects), but I did find FUSE to be extremely fun and easy to write against. I encourage everyone to play with it.
by rykc | 2026-01-12 00:11:41+00:00
Wish I’d seen this 3 days ago. Needed to backup our Shared Library and did the following (about 10K photos/videos at 300gb, had enough space so full downloaded to MacBook, not optimize. 1. Repair iPhoto library, (Wait 24 hrs to re-sync to iCloud) - initially looks like it moved all photos to personal. 2. Select small chunks, by year worked well enough - selecting All gave me the spinning ball. Then export unmodified to external hdd into folders organized by year. 3. Moved entire photo library file to another external hdd. 4. Open iPhoto and select external hdd library as primary library, let it re-sync to iCloud (Wait 24 hrs). iPhoto now running off external HDD library and I’ll backup to separate external HDD monthly. Repair function and wired Ethernet connection were biggest game changers to previous attempts.
by socketcluster | 2026-01-12 00:14:18+00:00
I love the idea of applications which exist in one file which you can run anywhere. I've been working towards this with my serverless platform; you can build complex data-driven apps with just one .html file and mostly declarative HTML markup (thanks to web-components which are loaded from a remote server). With modern browser features, you don't need a bundling system. Once you do away with it; a whole universe is opened up.

The ability to load .html files over the file:// protocol is a powerful, often neglected feature. In practice, it means you can double-click an HTML file and it runs an app in your browser instantly.
by arexxbifs | 2026-01-12 00:14:42+00:00
I don't really care if it's because of bizarro designer hegemony, device unification, cost cutting, bad developers or something else, but it's astonoshing how far the desktop paradigm has fallen (and not just in MacOS). What baffles me the most about things like this isn't that crap slips through, it's that crap accumulates in an alarming rate and that apparently tech-savvy people aren't just seemingly fine with stuff like this, but will happily step up and defend it.
by ximeng | 2026-01-12 00:16:19+00:00
I’ve been doing this recently and for the basics agents had no problem with the API apart from the weird behaviour of shared drives needing a special flag to handle them. This could probably be mapped to a file system in a way that wouldn’t trip up an agent, but at the expense of losing the Google drive specific functionality. A trade off, not much better or worse per se, but with the added complexity of the FUSE layer.
by gjadi | 2026-01-12 00:16:20+00:00
Ok. I also have the intuition that more tests and formal specifications can help there.

So far, my biggest issue is, when the code produced is incorrect, with a subtle bug, then I just feel I have wasted time to prompt for something I should have written because now I have to understand it deeply to debug it.

If the test infrastructure is sound, then maybe there is a gain after all even if the code is wrong.
by brainless | 2026-01-12 00:17:03+00:00
I'm building an agent builder and execution platform. It's a multi model, multi agent system with lots of tools (bash, databases, APIs, crawler...).

Agents are codified for specific goals. Any business process that needs agent based assistance is broken into workflows and steps. Each step is assigned to an agent. Integrations (API or file access) is requested. Then user can try out, tweak and finally deeply.

The aim is to build a diy platform work configuration, tracing and evals in one place. Code generation is used internally. User doesn't need to write any code.

https://github.com/brainless/nocodo
by visarga | 2026-01-12 00:17:06+00:00
> because the crucial change with LLMs is that you don’t use a formal language anymore to specify what you want, and get a deterministic output from that

You don't just code, you also test, and your safety is just as good as your test coverage and depth. Think hard about how to express your code to make it more testable. That is the single way we have now to get back some safety.

But I argue the manual inspection of code and thinking it through in your head is still not strict coding, it is vibe-testing as well, only code backed by tests is not vibe-based. If needed use TLA+ (generated by LLM) to test, or go as deep as necessary to test.
by dmurray | 2026-01-12 00:17:10+00:00
I was asked in an interview to explain the difference between TCP and UDP.

I knew about enough to fill an index card: enough for an adequate interview answer, but not enough that I would relish getting follow-up questions.

While deciding what to say I started with this joke. The interviewer laughed and moved on to the next question. I got the job offer.
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2026-01-12 00:17:27+00:00
I've spent the past ~year compiling a US nationwide land parcel dataset. I posted it to kaggle a few days ago: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye....

I'm around 99% coverage of the US. Learned a lot about land records and GIS along the way.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-12 00:17:34+00:00
> I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.

Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets, most in the Android ecosystem is e-waste four or five years in, while Apple stuff can still be re-sold for actual money at that time assuming you didn't bust your screen.

For laptops, Apple is so far ahead it can't even be described. Most Windows laptops physically break apart before macOS ceases to support any Apple laptop.

Only thing we can maybe talk about is desktop PCs ever since the switch to M that basically made meaningful upgrades impossible, but eh, in my attic there's a 2009 Mac Pro still chugging along as my homelab server + gaming rig.
by simonw | 2026-01-12 00:17:46+00:00
What does quadratic attention mean?

I've so far found that intuition travels between models of a similar generation remarkably well. The conformance suite trick (find a 9,200 test existing conformance suite and tell an agent to build a fresh implementation that passes all those tests) I first found with GPT-5.2 turned out to work exactly as well against Claude Opus 4.5, for example.
by eek2121 | 2026-01-12 00:18:00+00:00
My dude, It's been more than capable for years. I have an ultrawide OLED monitor (3440x1440@165hz) paired with a 4K@144hz monitor. Both HDR, different capabilities. Both have different DPIs set, 125% for one, 200% for the other. My setup required less configuration than Windows does. Right click -> Display Configuration -> Set Alignment (monitor position) -> Set refresh rate -> Set HDR -> Set DPI -> Apply. Done.

Don't knock it unless you've tried it.

This was CachyOS btw. Windows actually required MORE work because I had to install drivers, connect to the internet during setup, get nagged about using a Microsoft account, etc.

CachyOS was basically boot -> verify partitions are correct -> decide on defaults -> create account/password -> wait for files to copy -> done. Drivers, including the latest NVIDIA drivers, auto installed/working.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-12 00:18:03+00:00
The idea of Claude having "anterograde amnesia" and the top-rated comment there by Noosphere89 really resonated with me:

"I would analogize this to a human with anterograde amnesia, who cannot form new memories, and who is constantly writing notes to keep track of their life. The limitations here are obvious, and these are limitations future Claudes will probably share unless LLM memory/continual learning is solved in a better way."

This is an extremely underrated comparison, TBH. Indeed, I'd argue that frozen weights + lack of a long-term memory are easily one of the biggest reasons why LLMs are much more impressive than useful at a lot of tasks (with reliability being another big, independent issue).

It emphasizes 2 things that are both true at once: LLMs do in fact reason like humans and can have (poor-quality) world-models, and there's no fundamental chasm between LLM capabilities and human capabilities that can't be cured by unlimited resources/time, and yet just as humans with anterograde amnesia are usually much less employable/useful to others than people who do have long-term memory, current AIs are much, much less employable/useful than future paradigm AIs.
by kaashif | 2026-01-12 00:18:03+00:00
I switched from Windows 11 to macOS after a disastrous upgrade experience and drastic downgrade in performance on my Windows laptop.

I mean Windows 10 wasn't great but I got used to the taskbar searching the web somehow and the dual config menus everywhere and so on. But 11 was just terrible.

macOS has its pain points but man oh man what a disaster Windows is.

I have had Linux on my personal desktop and laptop forever so that hasn't been an issue, only used Windows for work.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-12 00:18:10+00:00
> None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.

I am. If it isn't broke, I don't fix it. And I suspect others are as well. The problem is that too many people are not immune, so it doesn't matter if some are.
by epolanski | 2026-01-12 00:18:14+00:00
I have found that using more REPLs and doing leetcodes/katas prevents the atrophy to be honest.

In fact, I'd say I code even better since I started doing one hour per day of a mixture of fun coding and algo quizzes while at work I mostly focus on writing a requirements plan and implementation plan later and then letting the AI cook while I review all the output multiple times from multiple angles.
by wakawaka28 | 2026-01-12 00:18:45+00:00
I agree about names in general but I know how fraught the topic of free speech is these days. I am a free speech absolutist in the same spirit as Voltaire.

>The "Free Speech Union" don't just have "controversial views", they are actively spreading disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

The whole point of free speech rights is to protect speech that is disagreeable! COVID-19 "misinformation" censorship is a major pet peeve of mine. Just as with your point about names, people lie all the time about what constitutes "misinformation", "harmful", etc. Doctors and researchers were paid off and had their careers threatened for daring to question government policy in this case. Everyone else was threatened to force them to comply. This is not how science or freedom works. We're not talking about some zombie virus. We're talking about a disease with a very low mortality rate even at its peak, and a vaccine that objectively did not stop the spread. If a researcher did want to criticize the vax, they'd risk their career. So get f'd or get paid, some hard decision right? If politicians can be bought then so can researchers.

Some of the powers that be would love you to give them the authority to censor people to influence your pet issues. They would declare your views to be misinformation or hate speech just as soon as you become inconvenient to them.
by RayVR | 2026-01-12 00:19:17+00:00
I think the key thing here is in point 2.

I’ve wanted a good markdown editor with automatic synchronization. I used to used inkdrop. Which I stopped using when the developer/owner raised the price to $120/year.

In a couple hours with Claude code, I built a replacement that does everything I want, exactly the way I want. Plus, it integrates native AI chat to create/manage/refine notes and ideas, and it plugs into a knowledge RAG system that I also built using Claude code.

What more could I ask for? This is a tool I wanted for a long time but never wanted to spend the dozens of hours dealing with the various pieces of tech I simply don’t care about long-term.

This was my AI “enlightenment” moment.
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-12 00:19:24+00:00
One last thing: make no mistake. I didn't start with an algorithm. I built the algorithm out of necessity, purely to ensure that my 'Constitution' would never be dismissed as mere empty theory. The architecture exists to give the vision its teeth.

But I’m done now. I’ve realized that having a meaningful dialogue with the world at this stage is harder than I thought. I’ve planted the seeds in the network. Now I’m walking away. When the future unfolds exactly as I’ve predicted, just remember this moment.
by reactordev | 2026-01-12 00:19:31+00:00
Or… you build a container, that runs exactly what you specify. You print your logs, traces, metrics home so you can capture those stack traces and error messages so you can fix it and make another container to deploy.

You’ll never attach a debugger in production. Not going to happen. Shell into what? Your container died when it errored out and was restarted as a fresh state. Any “Sherlock Holmes” work would be met with a clean room. 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?
by xoa | 2026-01-12 00:19:46+00:00
Yep, though you can mitigate it a little bit in various ways. For one weird example, I keep my main user Home folder on my NAS and mount it via iSCSI. Mostly that's for data integrity/size/backup purposes, but it does also make it free to snapshot before trying out a system upgrade. If I hate it I can rollback my entire set of user data along with the OS.

Though amongst many other wonderful things lost in the mysts of Mac history I still desperately miss NetBoot/NetInstall and ultra easy clone/boot with something like CCC and TDM. It's so fucking miserable now in comparison to do reinstalls/testing/restores.