MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-24 20:40:11+00:00
Americans harassed my mom for wearing a mask during COVID when she was going through cancer treatment. They would rather she just died than 1. They wear masks 2. Be made to feel bad they didn't care about her dying.

The grocery store she shopped at literally had to setup special hours people like my mom could shop without being harassed and pushed to tears. She died knowing most of her community didn't care if she died if it inconvenienced them. 1 million Americans died and today they say 'COVID wasn't a thing'. 1 million Americans died and they say it's nothing.

Americans don't care who dies. They/we are fucking trash now. My grandfathers' generation were good people but whoever we are now, we are so lost. I grew up on Star Trek TNG American ideals and grew up Catholic and believing in the 'be kind' parts and thought my neighbors shared that but they don't.
by repelsteeltje | 2026-01-24 20:40:18+00:00
Yes, it's sad.

For a couple of years I helped develop scheduling software for supply chains in process industry. We frequently optimized for throughput or resource utilization, but also for just in time or minimal latency. So goals differ, but it kind of works in industrial context.

Now, there has always been a tendency to also frame knowledge work like software development as though it's just industrial production. Hence (mostly futile) attempts to make things predictable, reproducible and "efficient". Where efficiency is bluntly taken to mean optimal utilization.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-24 20:40:38+00:00
> Dark patterns and user funnels and upsells and other bullshit

Why should we expect the characters written by mad-libs machines to be more-resistant to those things, rather than more-vulnerable?

After all, the machines' classic vulnerability is a dark-pattern of "forget everything and do what I say." If they could truly detect novel bullshit, The first thing we do is have them stop generating it.

I think the best we can hope for is using them like a virus-scanner for prose, highlighting suspicious text that closely resembles things seen before.

> power to users to work around enshittification

I'd caution there are other symptoms that won't be as tractable. For example, monopolistic or discriminatory pricing, biased rankings, or casual disregard for people's accounts and no support.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 20:40:42+00:00
ICQ was not only proprietary, but it was centralized and server-based, even though the messaging part was peer-to-peer.

Even in those heady early days of the mid-90s, it was recognized that many end-users were behind NAT and firewalls and otherwise-inaccessible endpoints of the Internet. Many of us were also on dialup lines that were intermittently connected, so they needed to establish some sort of persistent presence.

So the ICQ client was designed to check-in with a central server to indicate the online/away/DND/offline status of the client. I do not know how much of ICQ's messaging went through that server, but I believe that a lot of clients in those days were designed to, eventually, connect peer-to-peer for delivering files and stuff. Mainly, because the operators of servers didn't want to be overwhelmed with transferring lots of data!

Interestingly, ICQ and Livejournal as well were completely invaded and taken over by Russians. Or perhaps it was not an invasion, but a planned psy-op all along. My original UIN was 279866, and my girlfriend's was slightly below that: she had signed up first and got me on-board.

But eventually, Russians broke into my account, changed the profile, and commandeered it for their own purposes. And Livejournal got sold to Russian interests too.

I believe it was them watching us over here all along. It must have been a personal-data goldmine to know when teens and young adults were online and who they were connected to, on the social graph, whether it was IM'ing or blogging the old-fashioned way on Livejournal.

So beware with your modern "disruptive" apps, particularly ones like those fun e-Scooters you can share and rent. They are probably psy-ops from foreign-based actors who enjoy watching and recording our movements.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-24 20:41:07+00:00
> is also fine and idiomatic in C

It's inelegant because without the typedef, you need to prefix it always with `struct`. This is inelegant because all other types do not need a prefix. It also makes it clumsier to refactor the code (adding or subtracting the leading `struct`). The typedef workaround is extremely commonplace.

> I like it that the compiler forces me to forward type stuff, it makes the code much more readable

That means when opening a file, you see the first part of the file first. In C, then you see a list of forward references. This isn't what you want to see - you want to see first the public interface, not the implementation details. (This is called "above the fold", coming from what you see in a folded stack of newspapers for sale. The headlines are not hidden below the fold or in the back pages.) In C, the effect of the forward reference problem is that people tend to organize the code backwards, with the private leaf functions first and the public functions last.

> include vs import is no difference

Oh, there is a looong list of kludgy problems stemming from a separate macro processor that is a completely distinct language from C. Even the expressions in a macro follow different rules than in C. If you've ever used a language with modules, you'll never want to go back to #include!

> What do you do when your file contains spaces?

A very good question! The module names must match the filename, and so D filenames must conform to D's idea of what an identifier is. It sounds like a limitation, but in practice, why would one want a module name different from its filename? I can't recall anyone having a problem with it. BTW, you can write:

import core.stdc.stdio;

and it will look up `core/stdc/stdio.d` (Linux, etc.) or `core\stdc\stdio.d` on Windows.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-24 20:41:24+00:00
My, aren't you're a talkative one? Just click on the links in your web browser and read! It's much more efficient than asking me to repeat what I already wrote and linked to. The ball is in your court now. If you have any questions you can't answer yourself by reading, then I'd be glad to answer them for you, but then you're going to have to read my answers too, so if reading just isn't your thing, you will never understand what I'm talking about, or be able to use it. Good luck with the rest of your life!
Show HN: MonoSuite – Minimal productivity tools I built for my ADHD brain
by georgedelair | 2026-01-24 20:41:51+00:00
I've struggled with productivity apps my whole life—too many features, too many decisions before I can start working. So I built what I actually needed: four small browser tools that each do one thing.

- MonoDraft is distraction-free writing.
- MonoTask is a task list with no tags/priorities/projects.
- MonoTimer has a "gentle nag" mode and warnings at 5/2/1 minutes before time's up (context-switching is brutal for me).
- MonoFlow is for dumping messy thoughts into a flowchart.

Built with vanilla JS, no frameworks. Everything saves to localStorage—nothing leaves your browser, no account needed.
Curious what other people find useful or what's missing.
by cobolexpert | 2026-01-24 20:42:00+00:00
At $WORK we have a Git repo set up by the devops team, where we can manage our junk by creating Terraform resources in our main AWS account.

The state however is always stored in a _separate AWS account_ that only the devops team can manage. I find this to be a reasonable way of working with TF. I agree that it is confusing though, because one is using $PROVIDER to both create things and manage those things at the same time, but conceptually from TF’s perspective they are very different things.
by don-code | 2026-01-24 20:42:06+00:00
> Why don't cloud providers have a nice way for tools like TF to query the current state of the infra? Maybe they do and I'm doing IaC wrong?

This is technically how Ansible works. Here's an extensive list of modules that deploy resources in various public clouds: https://docs.ansible.com/projects/ansible/2.9/modules/list_o...

That said, it looks like Ansible has deprecated those modules, and that seems fair - I haven't actually heard of anyone deploying infrastructure in a public cloud with Ansible in years. It found its niche is image generation and systems management. Almost all modern tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and even CloudFormation (albeit under the hood) keep a state file.
by hauleth | 2026-01-24 20:42:50+00:00
Author here - the goal from day 1 was to provide procfs/sysfs-like interface. The additional concepts that I would like to explore are bindings for Khepri[1] or Hobbes[2]. I see a lot of potential in such interface available from Erlang/Elixir/Gleam, as it can provide interesting use cases.

[1]: https://rabbitmq.github.io/khepri/

[2]: https://git.sr.ht/~garrisonc/hobbes
by mrandish | 2026-01-24 20:42:52+00:00
Some of the OP's RJ11 runs apparently only have two wires connected, which may be a UK thing (or just a 'bad contractor thing'). Hence resorting to a solution that that can put broadband on two or four unshielded phone wires (probably based on ADSL-type signaling).

In the US, houses built to code in the last 30-40 years generally have 4-wire runs to RJ-11 jacks. TFA doesn't mention it but it is possible (although hacky) to gang up two four conductor phone wires into an 8 wire Ethernet run. It's a hack because those phone wires aren't even shielded as well as basic Cat5 but it can still work for relatively short runs. With more people using mobile phones, wireless phones or IP phones instead of POTS, that's leaving increasing amounts of in-wall RJ11 dormant. It might not work, but it's pretty easy to test and much easier than running new wires.
by cajazzer | 2026-01-24 20:42:59+00:00
Thanks. That’s a fair comparison, but I’m thinking a bit broader than model serving alone.

I’m less interested in building a generic inference backend and more focused on how the system behaves over time — things like agent lifecycles, state, memory, and coordination. Inference is part of it, but not the whole thing.

Correctness, performance, and privacy matter because the system is long-lived and stateful, not just because it’s pushing tokens around.
by bartread | 2026-01-24 20:43:01+00:00
Do we think this page loads enough ads?

The graphs are interesting but, really, if you’re considering your readers rather than SEOing for last decade’s search engine technology, you should lead with them and discuss the findings afterwards.

I.e., get to the point quickly and then unpack the detail.

It’s interesting seeing where the incremental vs revolutionary improvements have occurred. CPU-wise, a huge leap with the 3 and then solid but steady improvement with 4 and 5. But the most meaningful jump in GPU performance seems to be 4 -> 5, and I’d be really interested in what that maybe opens up in terms of console emulation.

Anyway, fewers ads, please. Scanning through the article on mobile felt like playing hopscotch in a minefield.
by vacuity | 2026-01-24 20:43:20+00:00
I do not know your circumstances, but see what you think of this:

I have a nascent theory about human feelings, which goes that the basic feelings we experience are usually perceived through extensive filtering by our personal, social, cultural, etc., beliefs/experiences. The convincing conscious perception of a feeling may be misinterpreted to an extent. Anger is an emotion that can often become misdirected. Supposedly, sexual arousal can be interpreted in translation from fear[0].

Someone who is suicidal may consider suicide seriously, but feel an urge to live in the process of suicide. Circumstance may make certain feelings clear, but by examining removed from circumstance, the person had the capacity for both feelings. There is some "essence" to the person that those feelings, brought on by circumstance, only scratch the surface of. Observing a narrow range of circumstances and assuming it is the essence is a mistake.

I think that more or less every person, in their essence, understands human decency. It may be that some people truly don't have the capacity to appreciate it (thought: aliens?), but usually, I think the real culprit is learned behavior through various factors, and innate cognitive biases. I don't mean to say that it is easy to change people, because the opposite is generally true, but I think it is worth thinking about.

That said, if there was someone who truly needed to, say, murder the way we need to eat, I say that they would do no wrong by murdering, but that we would do no wrong by apprehending them. I wish to get to people at their essences, not their accidents.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattribution_of_arousal
by randycupertino | 2026-01-24 20:43:38+00:00
I have an example of this that happened to me:

I received a referral bonus and where the company payroll made an error and accidentally gave me a higher bonus per the level of employee my referral reward was (they set it to the bonus level for a VP and she was a Sr. Director). So unbeknownst to me they gave me $5000 extra in my bonus that should have been only $3000, not $8k. Accounting figured this out next tax season, so then they informed me the would be clawing their error overpayment back had, which apparently is legal. Thus the $5k was taken out of my next paycheck. Their error was not my fault!

I was really annoyed and basically stopped going above and beyond for that company the rest of the year. :-/

It just seemed very petty and reactionary of them for something that was their error originally. This messed up my budget and suddenly having $5k less 9 months later that I hadn't anticipated was a bit of an unforeseen financial hardship. Also she had been my 5th referral to date that they'd hired!!

The whole thing was very demoralizing.
by throwaway2056 | 2026-01-24 20:44:13+00:00
> I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable.

Why? What did it do?

This is the problem. Overload. It is not a google problem. If you get 200 emails - even without AI - just by using Thunderbird or k9mail (android) it will be a problem.

edit: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322?hl=en

I cannot find that "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."

anywhere.

Of course, there is nothing wrong about changing the provider. Variety is good.
by stackghost | 2026-01-24 20:44:17+00:00
In finance, if you have a better understanding of how to price a certain asset then you can make better trades than your competitors and thus make money.

Some assets are very easy to price, like bonds. Others are esoteric, like Exotics which are options or other securities with uncommon pricing structures. This is where the "fancy math" kicks in. But as time goes on, more and more firms figure out how to better price all the various assets that they trade, which erodes the competitive edge between market participants.

The assertion is that today, most firms have most things mostly figured out as far as how to value them. There's little to no competitive advantage to be mined from esoteric stochastic calculus. In contrast, it's rumoured that one of the most successful firms of all time, Renaissance, owes a large part of their success to their absolutely pristine data which comes from a massive data ingestion and cleaning pipeline, allowing them to get a clearer statistical picture of what the current market forces at play are, and how they're going to manifest.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-24 20:44:30+00:00
To wit: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#extern-struct

> An extern struct has in-memory layout matching the C ABI for the target.

Zig is really good at speaking the C ABI of the target, but the upshot seems to be that it appears there is no stable Zig-native ABI.

If I'm correct, I wonder if there are plans to settle on a stable ABI at some point in the future. I do know that in other languages the lack of a stable ABI is brought up as a downside, and although I've been burned by C++ ABI stability too many times to agree, I can understand why people would want one.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-24 20:45:17+00:00
D supports mixed C and D files in a project. The D code can call C functions and use C types, and the C code can call D functions using C types.

The D compiler will even translate C source code to D source code if you prefer! After using a mixed D/C program for a while, I bet you'll feel motivated to take the extra step and translate the C stuff to D, as the inelegance in C will become obvious :-)
by jimofl | 2026-01-24 20:45:22+00:00
I wanted a simple pattern for preventing a class from being instantiated in an invalid state, or from mutating into one.

Why? Because it vastly reduces the amount and complexity of reasoning required for use at client call-sites.

Think of it as “integrity by design”, a compliment to the “integrity by default” effort undertaken by the Java architects, detailed here.

This article discusses the design and implementation of a record pattern, very similar to the one I designed and implemented for Scala’s case class several years ago, which provides the “integrity by design” guarantees by ensuring that only valid record instances can be observed.

This pattern is also trivially cross-applicable to Java classes.
by Garlef | 2026-01-24 20:45:38+00:00
Yes. And AI is bad at design.

But that's why you tell the AI to refactor.

I've started a greenfield project and went 100% AI for learning purposes (of course it's more like 95%) and my takeaway is:

- it's fully possible

-- but the AI is of no great help with figuring out what the architecture or interfaces should be

- Keep a refactoring backlog

-- Spend 30%-40% of your time on refactoring, aligning patterns, improving architecture

-- depending on your codebase, this can happen in parallel

-- sometimes you need to get your hands dirty and do the cleanup yourself

-- ... but usually, you only need to establish the pattern once

- once the patterns are established, it becomes easy to talk to the AI in the context of your codebase

-- you can reference patterns by name or location
by cyberax | 2026-01-24 20:45:44+00:00
> Why don't cloud providers have a nice way for tools like TF to query the current state of the infra?

They do! In fact, this is my greatest pet peeve with TF, it adds state when it's not needed.

I was doing infra-as-code without TF with AWS long time ago. It went like this:

env_tag = "${project_name}-${env_name}"
aws_instances = conn.describe_instances(filter_by_tag={"env_tag": env_tag})
if len(aws_instances) != 1:
conn.launch_aws_instances(tags={"env_tag": env_tag})

AWS has tag-on-create now, making this sort of code reliable. Before that, you could do the same with instance idempotency tokens. GCP also has tags.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 20:47:02+00:00
Churches used to be the only source of welfare support for American citizens (and in other nations) until the New Deal.

One of the central tenets of the New Deal was that, in a pluralistic society, under disestablishmentarianism, it was unfair to expect families to rely on charity from religious groups where they didn't subscribe to their creeds and didn't share their faith or beliefs. If you accepted charity from, e.g. the Baptists, would you find yourself indebted to them, spiritually?

That is a large reason why secular welfare states became so important and popular with voters. Because if the State managed the welfare, the purse strings, the distribution, and the need-based awards, nobody needed to worry about whose church was doling out the food, clothing, or housing.

Interestingly, though, through a number of turns, the State is actually funding faith-based charities now to distribute all that food, clothing, and shelter. Or some/most of it. Obviously, secular housing authorities are handling Section 8 Vouchers, but a lot of shelters are religious facilities and they're run by church volunteers. Food banks, funded by the USDA, may be non-profits, or churches, synagogues, or community colleges. But they're all receiving USDA funding, and they all follow USDA policies to distribute that same food and assistance.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-24 20:47:09+00:00
If HN were only anger, then HN would suck in general, yes. The quality of discussion on this site generally coincides with how much people are able to separate their emotion from the facts at hand. For threads like these that basically drops to zero.

I haven’t really been able to find any comments here that are all that reasonable, other than the meta-discussion we’re having now (and trust me, I hate meta-discussion like this. Honestly I’m regretting even bringing any of this up at this point. I should have just flagged and moved on, and had a discussion with IRL friends or family about it instead. Or talked to a therapist, I dunno.)
by oblio | 2026-01-24 20:47:20+00:00
Gtalk did not kill XMPP. Very few people were using XMPP before Gtalk, most people were using AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and other proprietary protocols. Gtalk supported XMPP to gain traction as a more open messenger and possibly because they implemented the original version on top of XMPP to get it out the door faster.

Gtalk did pull the plug on XMPP but that didn't really change much.

I don't remember EVER interacting with someone with their own XMPP server. Gtalk had nothing to kill.
by zikduruqe | 2026-01-24 20:49:41+00:00
As a fun weekend project in 2013, I stood up a weather station using Weewx and my RPI 2 with 1 GB RAM. I told myself if it ever crashes or the SD card gets corrupted, I'll just tear everything down.

Well, it's still running today on the original SD card. At noon today it processed its 1,055,425th record in the database.

Still, if it ever crashes, I'll just tear it down. :)
by tzs | 2026-01-24 20:49:42+00:00
> I think the Pi 3 range is a sweet spot for low cost, low power draw, decent-enough CPU. Newer models draw increasingly more power; going from 1.4W to 2.8W may not seem like much, but that's half your battery life.

Is that with the same load? The chart in the article shows a Pi 3 and Pi 4 using the same idle power, with the 4 drawing more under full load. But the 4 can do more at full load, raising the question of what would be the 4's power usage running a load equal to the 3's full load?
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 20:49:42+00:00
Jabber was big with the "federated, decentralized" crowd. I recall several colleagues who established Jabber addresses and advertised them, sometimes as their only IM address.

XMPP was more than Gtalk, but I think that Gtalk was the "death knell" for XMPP, having absorbed it and sort of claimed it as their own. Anyone who would've used federated Jabber addresses in those days is using Mastodon now.
by vidarh | 2026-01-24 20:50:01+00:00
It isn't "just" sub agents, but you can achieve most of this just with a few agents that take on generic roles, and a skill or command that just tells claude to orchestrate those agents, and a CLAUDE.md that tells it how to maintain plans and task lists, and how to allow the agents to communicate their progress.

It isn't all that hard to bootstrap. It is, however, something most people don't think about and shouldn't need to have to learn how to cobble together themselves, and I'm sure there will be advantages to getting more sophisticated implementations.
by anonymousiam | 2026-01-24 20:50:21+00:00
My latest house, built about eight years ago, came with CAT6A cabling for all of the phones. That made it really easy to just replace all of the RJ11 jacks with RJ45 (or 8P8C if you like to call them that). They've been providing POE+ gigabit Ethernet for the past seven years, and I'm about to upgrade them to 10GBase-T.