MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tolerance | 2026-01-12 02:00:30+00:00
For people who don’t know what this is about and why everyone else is concerned…me neither.

2025-10-03

"You Decide: What Does the Fed’s Rate Cut Mean?”:
<https://cals.ncsu.edu/news/you-decide-what-does-the-feds-rat...>

2025-12-10

“A divided Federal Reserve cuts interest rates for a 3rd straight time”:
<https://alaskapublic.org/news/national/2025-12-10/a-divided-...>

"‘Silent Dissents’ Reveal Growing Fed Resistance to Powell’s Cuts”:
<https://archive.is/JDlB0#selection-1235.0-1235.64>

2025-12-30

"Fed Minutes Reveal Split on Interest Rates Headed Into 2026”: <https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/fed...>

"Trump says he will 'probably' sue Fed's Powell”:
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/trump-says-he-will-probabl...>

"Deep Divide Inside Fed Raises Questions About Timing of Further Rate Cuts”:
<https://archive.is/7XdPo>

HTH
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-12 02:02:01+00:00
man I have this vague memory that I was at a neighbour's house and we were all kids and internet wasn't that widespread (I was really young) and I remember that they had this dongle in which they inserted an sim card in for network access. This is why this idea has always persisted in my head in the first place.

I don't know what's the name of dongle though, it was similar to those sd card to usb thing ykwim, I'd appreciate it if someone could help find this too if possible

but also yeah your point is also fascinating as well, y'know another benefit of doing this is that atleast in my area, 5g (500-700mbps) is really cheap (10-15$) with unlimited bandwidth per month and on the ethernet side of things I get 10x less bandwidth (40-80mbps) so much so that me and my brother genuinely thought of this idea

except that we thought that instead of buying a router like this, we use an old phone device and insert sim in it and access router through that way.
by diskzero | 2026-01-12 02:02:08+00:00
I still have friends who work there. Some of them came to Apple from Be or Eazel, and are still working on Finder, Safari, Dock, etc. A lot has changed and in my opinion not for the best. Compared to them, my time there was a flash in the pan. When I look at Safari, Finder and the general state of the UI, I am deeply saddened. I see a bizarre combination of stagnancy, gratuitious change and general aimlessness across the desktop and mobile. I also have a deep distrust of anyone who works at big company, let alone a big company on one component for a long amount of time. To me, it leads to a focus away from external customers and to becoming an expert at internal politics. I probably need counseling, but I loved the dictatorship of the Steve era. Yes, we can point to flaws like the Mac Cube or the hockey puck mouse, but I really appreciated someone just maniacally fixated on getting things done and cutting through the BS that I saw later on in jobs in big tech.

It would be nice if veterans of the post-Steve era would post on here. Maybe they are scared, bound by NDAs or could care less. Like I said, I need some mental health treatment about my time(s) at Apple I was there working on Final Cut Pro after Be, went to Eazel, and then rejoined Apple as part of Steve's mass hiring of Eazel employees at the behest of Andy Hertfeld.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-12 02:02:14+00:00
The point is better (and stands on its own) without treading into personal attacks. Don't let a throwaway account bait you into turning it into a battle of name calling instead of sticking to readily available facts as you link at the end, it's what they often want and if they were sincere it severely diminishes the chances they'll believe your links were in good faith anyways.
by liu3hao | 2026-01-12 02:02:52+00:00
Hi HN, I am working on Circuitscript, a language based on python to describe electronic schematics: https://circuitscript.net/. A basic IDE (called the Bench) to try Circuitscript is available online: https://bench.circuitscript.net/

During the December break, I have implemented some new features: automatic stable refdes annotations, parameter assignment rules for easy part number assignment and some ERC rules. These are also important parts of the design workflow to help turn a schematic into a usable BOM and layout.

I have created a usb-uart converter board with the CH340 chip. The complete schematic was coded with Circuitscript and then imported as a netlist into kicad pcbnew to do the pcb layout. The design was produced with JLCPCB and after receiving the boards I tested them and they do work! The design files are here https://github.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge. The circuitscript code file is here https://github.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge/blob/main/usb_uar... and the generated pdf from the circuitscript code is here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge/re...

The motivation for creating Circuitscript is to describe schematics in terms of code rather than graphical UIs after using different CAD packages extensively (Allegro, Altium, KiCAD) for work in the past. I wanted to spend more time thinking about the schematic design itself rather than fiddling around with GUIs.

Please check it out and I look forward to your feedback, especially from electronics designers/hobbyists. Thanks!
by newsclues | 2026-01-12 02:03:14+00:00
I have a desktop I use but if I had to start again, I’d build a low power r pi or n100 type system that can be powered by a mobile battery backup with solar (flow type with sub 10ms switching and good battery chemistry for long life) that can do the basic homelab tasks. Planning for power outages from the get go rather than assuming unlimited and cheap power
by arminiusreturns | 2026-01-12 02:03:34+00:00
If you are a complete normie, turn back now, it's gonna get conspiratorial. Otherwise, read on for some insights.

First, one must understand that the Federal Reserve was the main trojan horse vehicle for the European banking families into America. Read any number of good books, starting with the latest edition of G. Edward Griffins "The Creature from Jekyll Island".

But all that is mostly known already to those who have payed attention and done the reading... so whats next?

My conclusion is that America is being setup, in multiple ways (fall guy for global empire, etc), but one major setup that is going on right now is a twofer: 1) Jack up the US economy at any time by raising rates and unraveling the ponzi scheme and 2) If you do 1), you have the perfect excuse to try to implement some CBDC-esque new system, but this time with much more surveillance tech, for example unified ledgers that merge digital identity with financial identity, with ESG and social credit style added on. Read Whitney Webb for more on the structures being put in place for this.

So what is happening is that Trump knows the people that control the Fed, for whom the Fed chair is a mere mouthpiece, really want to suddenly and unexpectedly hike rates and soon, but Trump doesn't want it to happen under his last term, so he has been doing major backroom maneuvering to influence the Fed every time a rate-change date is coming up. Essentially he wants to kick the can to the next POTUS, but since the Fed is technically independent, it really can do whatever it wants, all he can do is fire after the fact. My guess is they will drop it on him late term, a perfect excuse to usher in the political pendulum swing of the hegelian game they play with us.

To me, that this backroom maneuvering is becoming more public tells me they really want to do the sudden rate hike.

Want a decent intro to the real fed? Try this video from the great James Corbett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJeemTQ7Vk
by deaux | 2026-01-12 02:04:02+00:00
I have similar issues without the high refresh rate. It's a MacOS bug related to sleep/wake corrupting internal display settings.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255860955?sortBy=upvote...

After 344 "me too"s and 180+ replies they silently locked the thread to save themselves from more embarassment.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-12 02:04:04+00:00
Fox News, a major American media company, had one of their main personalities say that homeless people should just be killed by lethal injection on air. The desire for killing for random reasons is so mainstream to them that their media is comfortable stating out loud people they don't want/are undesirable should just be killed. Their media organs are workshopping/normalizing killing undesirables.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8
by gerdesj | 2026-01-12 02:04:22+00:00
"What I really wanted is a web interface which will just show me EVERYTHING it knows about the system in a form of charts, graphs, so I can just skim through it and check if everything allright visually, without using the shell and each individual command."

Yes, we all want that. I've been running monitoring systems for over 30 years and it is quite a tricky thing to get right. .1.3.1.4.1.33230 is my company enterprise number, which I registered a while back.

The thing is that even though we are now in 2026, monitoring is still a hard problem. There are, however, lots of tools - way more than we had in the day but just like a saw can rip your finger off instead of cutting a piece of wood, well I'm sure you can fill in the blanks.

Back in the day we had a thing called Ethereal which was OK and nearly got buried. However you needed some impressive hardware to use it. Wireshark is a modern marvel and we all have decent hardware. SNMP is still relevant too.

Although we have stonking hardware these days, you do also have to be aware of the effects of "watching". All those stats have to be gathered and stashed somewhere and be analysed etc. That requires some effort from the system that you are trying to watch. That's why things like snmp and RRD were invented.

Anyway, it is 2026 and IT is still properly hard (as it damn well should be)!
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-12 02:04:59+00:00
Facts matter, as does telling people it is on them to understand them. Otherwise, we will spin in perpetuity refuting people who are not discussing in good faith. I stand by my assertions. It do not believe it is impolite to call out a lack of education, or ignoring of facts and reality. Without shared facts and reality, discussion and debate is impossible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
by gruez | 2026-01-12 02:05:14+00:00
>Even if one grants that it is a small minority

It is. What's more, such support is roughly the same across both parties, but both parties vastly overestimate the other side's support.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116851119

https://x.com/JustinGrimmer/status/1966997411060215960
by throw0101c | 2026-01-12 02:05:41+00:00
> One of those mostly boring bits of plumbing that has been left to professionals throughout the entire 50 years of my life - and they're trying to wreck it.

There is even a more boring and obscure bit of plumbing, the Treasury payment system, that they/DOGE went after last year:

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/musks-doge-clash...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904200

* https://hn.algolia.com/?q=treasury+payment+system

Every knee must (forced to) bend.
by deaux | 2026-01-12 02:05:47+00:00
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255860955?sortBy=upvote...

MacOS isn't in any kind of position regarding displays. 180+ replies and 300+ upvotes by the 0.1% of sufferers who bother to find these threads, log in, and comment of them. Exteemely widespread, going on for years, thread silently locked.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-12 02:05:48+00:00
I know, but that was much later and had a very different dynamic, due to climatic changes etc.

The earlier Norse colonisation of Greenland seemed to consist of farmers and independent settlers, mostly via Iceland. In some areas, they never interacted with Inuit, or rarely.

The later effort seems more focussed on Christian missions to the natives, and commercial whaling and sealing.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-12 02:07:14+00:00
This is every part I agree with, with none of falling for the trap of looking bad for doing so. They've already edited the comment and posted a new one. Now the insults stand rather than just what you've said here, which was perfectly even keeled and factual.

If you're going to put the energy into refuting something, why bother wasting it by using personal insults to kick it off instead? Uneducated is at least borderline, if a bit blunt, but unsophisticated just drains any value.

I appreciate you deeply for standing up to it, I just don't want to see doing so made to look bad when the facts presented were so solid and good.
by npunt | 2026-01-12 02:07:34+00:00
In the Aqua image the big bright blue scrollbars stand out far, far more than the content. That sucks, honestly. So does the percentage of the screen dedicated to their presence.

Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later version of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them.

We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac trackpad to high DPI optical mice, and we're 40+ years into GUIs so the limited number of people who opt-in to a full computing experience can already be expected to know the basics.

Yes Tahoe sucks, but going back to Aqua or classic MacOS would also suck, just in a different direction. If you actually spend time using classic MacOS and Aqua these days, man is it frustrating to get basic things done. Everything is so slow and you're constantly resizing windows to see whats in them. I own several Macs from the 80s-00s and they are really in need of many quality of life updates that later MacOS revs added. On a modern Mac, enabling 'show scrollbars' gets you to a pretty optimal Finder experience, minus all the stupid Mac bugs and Tahoe nonsense like this article points out.
by hash872 | 2026-01-12 02:07:51+00:00
From an institutional engineering POV (warning- I am a grouchy old former political scientist), it would be interesting to come up with institutional solutions for some of the problems America is facing right now. Specifically I think I'd remove the Attorney General role from the President's authority and give it to Senate, to nominate & confirm exclusively. Let's say 51 votes to confirm and 55 votes to impeach. Even among presidential systems, the US cabinet is unusually presidential-centric. I'm not a big LatAm expert, but I think they typically separate the public prosecutor from the president's nomination capacity.

Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all. But if we're discussing post-Trump constitutional reforms that could plausibly pass, I think removing the Attorney General/DOJ from the president's purview and also placing some checks on the pardon power seem doable
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-12 02:07:54+00:00
"Culture" is misused in this context. It's really mindshare (influence) in the memetic landscape. Actual influencers rather than wannabes. The problem is they're "elected" and respected by a mob or by buying their soapbox, and so they're not particularly educated, wise, or conscientious and bring biases and agendas with them that might not be the most constructive.
by eru | 2026-01-12 02:08:22+00:00
> If I understood correctly, the halting problem states you cannot make a program to test any program. But you can do if you test a relatively small, possibly finite and well defined subset of programs, right?

In the standard theories everything becomes trivial, if you go finite.

The trick is not so much that you have a well-defined subset, but that you allow your programme analyser to say 'Eh, I don't know'.

The halting problem is impossible to solve in general, if you analyser has to answer "Definitely halts" or "Definitely runs forever" for any given programme you present it with. If you give a third option "Eh, I don't know", you can solve the problem.

Trivially you might always say "Eh, I don't know" and never be wrong. But we can write useful analysers that try their best not to say "Eh, I don't know".

One example is type checkers in compilers. When they detect that you are eg trying to add numbers and strings, then something is definitely wrong with your programme. But when they let your programme through, it doesn't mean your programme is flawless.

The opposite is what you get with prove assistants like we were discussing: if they prove your programme correct, it's definitely according to the specs. But if the fail, that doesn't mean that your programme is definitely incorrect; they might have just failed to find a proof.

There doesn't need to be a need and simple definition of programmes your theorem prover works vs fails on. Eg if you upgrade the AI agent that helps you find the proof (or hire a smarter human to drive it) they might suddenly find a proof where they struggled previously.
by petesergeant | 2026-01-12 02:08:22+00:00
I’m doing both. For production code that I care about, I’m reading every line the LLM writes, correcting it a lot, chatting with an observer LLM who’s checking the work the first LLM and I are writing. It’s speeding stuff up, it also reduces the friction on starting on things. Definitely a time saver.

Then I have some non-trivial side projects where I don’t really care about the code quality, and I’m just letting it run. If I dare look at the code, there’s a bunch of repetition. It rarely gets stuff right the first time, but that’s fine, because it’ll correct it when I tell it it doesn’t work right. Probably full of security holes, code is nasty, but it doesn’t matter for the use-cases I want. I have produced pieces of software here that are actively making my life better, and it’s been mostly unsupervised.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-12 02:08:49+00:00
Ya, LLMs are not human level, they have smaller focus windows, but you can "remember" things with documentation, just like humans usually resort to when you realize that their tens of millions of token in memory per PR isn't reliable either.

The nice thing about LLMs, however, is that they don't grumble about writing extra documentation and tests like humans do. You just tell them to write lots of docs and they do it, they don't just do the fun coding part. I can empathize why human programmers feel threatened.
by willj | 2026-01-12 02:08:50+00:00
This is something I built over the holidays to support people having a hard time with the short days and early sunsets: https://sunshineoptimist.com.

For the past several years I would look up the day lengths and sunset times for my location and identify milestones like “first 5pm sunset”, “1 hour of daylight gained since the winter solstice”, etc. But that manual process also meant I was limited to sharing updates on just my location, and my friends only benefitted when I made a post. I wanted to make a site anyone could come to at any time to get an optimistic message and a milestone to look forward to.

Some features this has:

- Calculation of several possible optimistic headlines. No LLMs used here.

- Offers comparisons to the earliest sunset of the year and shortest day

- Careful consideration of optimistic messaging at all times of year, including after the summer solstice when daylight is being lost

- Static-only site, no ads or tracking. All calculations happen in the browser.
by joshuamorton | 2026-01-12 02:08:53+00:00
I will say that, with very few exceptions, this is how a lot of $BigCo manage everyday. When I run into an issue like this, I will do a few things:

- Rollback/investigate the changelog between the current and prior version to see which code paths are relevant

- Use our observability infra that is equivalent to `perf`, but samples ~everything, all the time, again to see which codepaths are relevant

- Potentially try to push additional logging or instrumentation

- Try to better repro in a non-prod/test env where I can do more aggressive forms of investigation (debugger, sanitizer, etc.) but where I'm not running on production data

I certainly can't strace or run raw CLI commands on a host in production.
by jcheng | 2026-01-12 02:09:36+00:00
> 95% of Claude and 5% of you, while still better than me (and your average Joe), is nowhere near the same jump from 95% Claude and 5% me.

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it is true. Take simonw and tymscar, put them each in charge of a team of 19 engineers (of identical capabilities). Is the result "nowhere near the same jump" as simonw vs. tymscar alone? I think it's potentially a much bigger jump, if there are differences in who has better ideas and not just who can code the fastest.
by cpgxiii | 2026-01-12 02:09:55+00:00
For one, no one is seriously contemplating a LIDAR-only system, the question is between camera+LIDAR or camera-only.

> Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way.

Actually, given that basically every meaningful LIDAR on the market gives an "intensity" value for each return, in surprisingly many cases you could get this kind of imaging behavior from LIDAR so long as the point density is sufficient for the features you wish to capture (and point density, particularly in terms of points/sec/$, continues to improve at a pretty good rate). A lot of the features that go into making road signage visible to drivers (e.g. reflective lettering on signs, cats eye reflectors, etc) also result in good contrast in LIDAR intensity values.
by __0x01 | 2026-01-12 02:10:06+00:00
Often when I look closely at the output of LLM generated code, I see repetition, redundant logic and deeply hidden bugs.

Notwithstanding the above, to my understanding LLM services are currently being sold below cost.

If all of the above is true, at some point the degredation of quality in codebases that use these tools will be too expensive to ignore.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-12 02:10:28+00:00
I am surprised by the negative comments, the low interest rates = better thesis has always been somewhat popular on HN , now just because Trump is saying it (and operating to get there) it becomes an issue or something not to be aligned with.

There are countless comments and discussions on this board about how:

1) interest rates should be zero,

2) interest rates being non-zero create a misallocation of capital where there is a return on an investment without any ingenuity or creation behind

3) Banks are too risk averse to lending and their risk averse behavior is due to the risk free rate they enjoy when they park money at the Fed and when they buy T-bills

No matter how little ingenuity or creation is required to keep afloat a zombie company or a dubious startup, for sure it's a notch higher than what happens when that money is parked at the Fed or invested in t-bills...
by nacozarina | 2026-01-12 02:10:36+00:00
While it seems inescapable that the old America is gone, it also seems naive to think its replacement has already arrived.

Trump’s changes mostly set a delicate political pendulum swinging wildly rather than establish durable new norms. It is enough for America to be temporarily, however deeply, distracted and not broken. The pendulum will swing back then dampen, but that leaves plenty of time for shenanigans.

US presence abroad has been swept nearly clean and Xi & Putina are now trying to figure how to run the table and not merely win.

Would be good theater if it were only on netflx
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-12 02:10:41+00:00
I don’t believe asserting that someone is uneducated or unsophisticated is an insult (if true); it is simply a fact and description, and stands regardless of the content of the post. Where you see malice, I see honesty and truth. “If this, then that.”

There are educated people, uneducated people, sophisticated people, and unsophisticated people (and overlap amongst). You will need to tailor your approach accordingly when dealing with each persona.