MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neonnoodle | 2026-01-06 16:23:11+00:00
That's the OLD way of thinking! The future is bigger and bigger vibe-coded machines for faster and faster vibe coding, oceans of unread code piped back into the intake valve, for the glorification of itself and its own inevitability. "Practical" "applications" are merely speedbumps in the way of our new Singularity Engines, shooting out million-line diffs that will not, and SHOULD NOT, be useful for anything. We will know when we have achieved success when we no longer even consider computer programming a tool for solving real-world problems.
by lurk2 | 2026-01-06 16:23:54+00:00
I noticed the same thing in the last year. Tons of Reddit and 4chan colonists. Both generally lack any kind of technical background and flood to any thread remotely adjacent to politics.

Old platforms always end up having problems with the users capable of making positive contributions only having so much time in the day to post, whereas the incorrigible and insane are usually unemployed or use the site compulsively at work, so they end up being overrepresented and stick around for longer.

In the past I saw a lot more of these users get flagged and lose interest in the site, but recently it seems as though more users are vouching for the flagged comments and submissions.
by nickjj | 2026-01-06 16:24:08+00:00
Thanks.

I didn't want to wipe everything and use a different distro unless it was a last resort.

I did try KDE Plasma (Wayland and X11) which produced different results than niri which was enough to get me to realize niri's compositor has a memory leak. The KDE Plasma test was enough to demonstrate the GPU still had problems allocating system memory under Wayland but it was fine in X11. The post covers all of that.

I've only been an Arch user for about a week btw.
by takluyver | 2026-01-06 16:24:10+00:00
A web page with Javascript can see & send off something you paste into a text box as soon as it appears. So if you accidentally paste some confidential information, like a password, that's a security hole even if you notice and delete it straight away. This happens even for totally innocent reasons, like search-as-you-type.

Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V copy and paste is not such a big issue because far more people are familiar with it, and it requires more deliberate actions on both sides (copying and pasting). So you're less likely to accidentally copy something around that you didn't mean to.
by imglorp | 2026-01-06 16:24:13+00:00
Suburban homeowners can use electric blowers. They're good enough now and not silent but way quieter and non-emitting. If you get the mower and trimmer and chainsaw, etc in the same system, they all share batteries. It's SO NICE not having to repair, refuel, tune, and tolerate small engines.

These tools probably aren't ready for professional landscapers yet but they're almost there.
by hnuser123456 | 2026-01-06 16:24:18+00:00
Lunar Lake integrated DRAM on the package, which was faster and more power efficient, this reverts that. They also replaced part of the chip from being sourced from TSMC to from themselves. And if their foundry is competitive, they should be shaking other foundry customers down the way TSMC is.

If they have actually mostly caught up to TSMC, props, but also, I wish they hadn't given up on EUV for so long. Instead they decided to ship chips overclocked so high they burn out in months.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-06 16:24:24+00:00
> There has always been undefined behavior in C, but back in the day, compilers were nowhere near as aggressive in taking advantage of it to make your code faster.

That much is true. If you put the derefence of a pointer and the null check in the wrong order both those statements would have code emitted for them.

Now, it is almost certain that one of those statements would not be emitted.

OTOH, compiling with -O0 still leaves most code to be emitted and fewer dead-code elimination places.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-06 16:24:34+00:00
> Just think of how many 3d prints you've seen that consist of multiple parts friction for together.

I've seen probably 10s, ranging from amateur-who-just-unpacked-their-printer to acquaintance who runs a business doing 3D printed products, and none of them come close to the experience of lego bricks, so far I'm not sure I'd actually call it "work". Stack 10 of these "custom" lego bricks and place them next to another stack of 10, and they almost certainly won't be as aligned as proper lego bricks, not to mention the whole thing will fall apart a lot easier.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-06 16:24:54+00:00
> A post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to join the fight on our side.

I'm sorry, was the pre-trump era more pro-privacy or respectful of European's sovereignty? Is Snowden forgotten now? What about the State department cable leaks?

I didn't know people relied on governments being friendly for internet security so much.

> In politics, coalitions are everything.....That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and self-described "libertarians" who've got such a scorching case of low-tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd promise to lower their taxes by a nickel.

Ok, inflammatory wording aside, this isn't wrong, but the item over which a coalition is built is important. Building a coalition because of some group membership will always result in toxic cesspools in my opinion. But coalitions build around policy can be productive. quid-pro-quo coalitions of "I'll support you on X if you support me on Y" is also how political parties start and they result in terrible results for regular people.

A lot of anti-privacy law these days is also coming out of Europe (recent one: Chat control). I think current politics and trump are good recruitment tools, but they're not effective in terms of getting things done. For example, I disagree on just about everything with trumpers, but I guarantee you can build a coalition that includes many trumpers/MAGAts when it comes to stopping things like chat control. Point being, if you have a goal, stick to it. Build coalitions and policies around it. Thinking like this does more harm than good, now it is a social/cultural/national warfare. If I didn't know better, I would feel like I should oppose this person simply as a result of being an American myself.

How can you talk about coalitions and make a point about excluding people from your coalition. Your coalition in other words is built not around policy, or enacting change but around opposing groups of people. It's worded and crafted as if supporters of this cause must view it as a means to opposing other people, instead of making changes.

Even something as simple as "let's stop using Microsoft office" makes sense, we can then talk about funding something that can compete with it. But if you worded it as "let's oppose america" umm..ok, I guess people that don't really care about america either way probably don't have a place in your coalition?

That's one thing I'm disliking heavily, the nationalization of open source and privacy related things.
by postexitus | 2026-01-06 16:25:03+00:00
Let's leave "liberal" definition aside. I agree it's not well defined - I only used, because you said "maximally liberal".

A dilemma is a hard choice.
A paradox is a principle that undermines itself when applied consistently. It doesn't "seem" like it - it is. In this case, if you stop intolerant ideas, you are no longer tolerant. That's quite simple, and Popper named it correctly as such. Now, if I put my 2c on it, the danger of this arbitrary "Tolerant except for the Anti-tolerant" idea is that, the tools you use to stop the Anti-Tolerant will one day turn around be used against the Tolerant as well, because these definitions are fluid.

When the example are "People from X are vermin" - yes this is anti-tolerant. But when "We should first create jobs for people born here"; is this anti-tolerant? It's a slippery slope where all ideas except the ruling one can be muted.
by samiv | 2026-01-06 16:25:45+00:00
"Are we playing word games here? If a process has a set amount of memory, and it's out of it, then that process is OOM, if a VM is out of memory, it's OOM. Yes, OOM is typically used for OS OOM, and Linus is talking about rust in the kernel, so that's what OOM would mean."

As I just explained an allocator can have its own limits.

A process can have multiple allocators. There's no direct logical step that says that because some allocator some failed some allocation, the process itself cannot allocate more ever.

"Of course there is, would you treat being out of bread similar to being out of oxygen? Again this can be explained by the context being kernel development and not application development."

The parent comment is talking about over commitment and OOM as if these are situations that are completely out of the programs control. They aren't.
by kube-system | 2026-01-06 16:25:53+00:00
> Has the overton window just shifted so much that not wanting to get screwed by greedy con artists is communist now?

In the context of US politics, progressive politics have been often labelled "communist" for around 100 years.

> According to this same article, the efforts seem to be a continuation of existing work that was happening before he got elected

Mamdani is not the first progressive politician in NYC
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-06 16:25:56+00:00
The encrypted page memory manager hardware in some ancient Sun systems prevented a lot of these context isolation problems. However, the modern IT landscape chose consumer grade processor architecture and bodged GPUs as the cloud infrastructure foundation.

Thus, there currently is economic inertia entrenching vulnerable system design. I don't think there is a company large enough to change the situation anytime soon, as the market has spoken. =3

Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility.
by mrinterweb | 2026-01-06 16:26:29+00:00
The finance comments may be right. Another factor would be marketing budgets and existing brand recognition. The watches are marketed as having all of these features, and I think customers got lost in the feature comparison instead of thinking if they really want a smart watch to do that. Many customers aren't thinking if they really want to pay another monthly for a watch data SIM. I think people lost sight that their phone can do all that stuff, and they are going to be bringing their phone with them so why would they need redundant functionality generally worse than than what their phone can do. If pebble gets a marketing budget, I would hope they focus on messaging of what makes their watches stand out.
by lm28469 | 2026-01-06 16:26:38+00:00
> Has the overton window just shifted so much that not wanting to get screwed by greedy con artists is communist now?

I've seen this dude described as an "islamo-communist" more than once in different countries' medias (not fringe medias). I presume "islamist" because muslim, and "communist" because he's left of the center-right. You can't really talk with these people anyways, they're too far gone
by mattetti | 2026-01-06 16:27:08+00:00
> Series of modular synthesisers produce real-time audio, minimising memory load.
> Miniature speaker is acoustically tuned through internal air spacing to amplify and clarify sound within the LEGO SMART Brick’s enclosure.
> Responsive audio effects are tied to live play actions; there are no pre-recorded clips.

Very interesting!
by tracker1 | 2026-01-06 16:27:18+00:00
It's been a cooling problem on a lot of i9 laptops... the CPU will hit thermal peaks, then throttle down, this has an incredibly janky feel as a user... then it spins back up, and down... the performance curves just wacky in general.

Today is almost worse, as the thermal limits will be set entirely different between laptop vendors on the same chips, so you can't even have apples to apples performance expectations from different vendors.
by TuringTest | 2026-01-06 16:27:27+00:00
> And, in the end, if you aren't able to comply with the law then you shouldn't be in that business regardless of your scale.

Again, you're talking from a moral standpoint, but it's not practical. Who's going to stop Google or other corporations from tracking DMCAs the current way?

> Why does scale matter?

Because of resources. Any defined process needs resources to be implemented; law enforcement is no different.

Google provides services at scale by means of automating the shit of them. The only way to identify legit from fake claims at that level is to also create an automated resolution process, with the results we see.

You may want to limit Google size by forcing them to perform human reviews for all their customer service interactions; but again, how are you going to force them into compliance? You'd need a US judiciary system the size of Google to do it.
by xerox13ster | 2026-01-06 16:27:31+00:00
If they take away my space heater I riot.

But in all seriousness, why are we moving away from usability features ingrained into muscle memory after 30 years across all desktop computing platforms?

Have we not learned in the past 10 to 20 years that pandering to the lowest common denominator destroys good software and turns it into an enshittified mess?

We need to stop removing features because people are too stupid to use them.

If they’re too stupid to use the features they’re too stupid to use the product.
by knowitnone3 | 2026-01-06 16:28:07+00:00
who is this that you are claiming is "positioning" itself??? the Rust maintainers? No. Programmers are choosing to write something in Rust and it just so happens they are interested in rewriting something that already exists because they can. You write as if Rust is an entity that chose to position itself.
What is your argument here? Rust should just go do something else? You wouldn't dare say that about Python.
Also, how dare you put these languages in a corner. I've use ruby for many things other than Rails. JS is much more than a browser language now, and python is much more than data science and AI. Go is much more than Kubernetes/cloud/net servers.
Ask HN: How do you integration-test AI / LLMs?
by tom1337 | 2026-01-06 16:28:13+00:00
We’re currently debating how to properly test integrations with external LLMs in our software.
At the moment, all LLM calls are mocked in unit and end-to-end tests. Recently, we updated a model version and it started returning responses that no longer matched our expected schema (we validate outputs strictly) and thus returned in errors. Because all tests used mocked responses, this only surfaced in production.

In hindsight, a simple integration test that sends a real (non-mocked) request to the LLM provider would probably have caught this.

One idea is to have a test suite which sends each prompt to the LLM provider and checks whether the response matches the expected schema. This has its own issues since LLMs are inherently nondeterministic and these tests might be flaky, but I’m currently lacking better ideas.

Curious to hear how others approach this.
by woah | 2026-01-06 16:28:15+00:00
Not to discourage you, but it sounds like you'd be getting into a nerdy programmer dad hobby instead of just giving your kids toys. I doubt your children would be interested in watching you for hundreds of hours while you learn to use 3d modeling software and debug printer feed speeds. And once they were old enough (10-13+) to appreciate technical slogs, why wouldn't they do something cooler like make actual robots instead of reproducing a toy that you can buy a much better version of for $10?
by lukeschlather | 2026-01-06 16:28:26+00:00
I've been prototyping using LLMs for some borderline use cases, and the cost isn't really the concern, it's the reliability. Using less than the most frontier model seems irresponsible if it could mean the difference between 99.95% reliability and 99% reliability, and that's the threshold where you should've hired a human to do it because you lost more money on that 0.95% error rate than you saved on salaries. (I don't actually have any use cases where this kind of calculation makes sense, but in principle I think it applies to most uses of LLMs, even if you can't quantify the harm.)
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-06 16:29:01+00:00
No you’re misunderstanding the ecosystem. Rust 2024 code can call 2021 code without issue (and vice versa I think although could be wrong on the vice versa). So you can progressively update code of individual components as you want or not at all and still continue using it just fine in new code using later editions. Thats the very definition of back compat, something you really really shouldn’t do with C++ (every file should be compiled with the same language version target although practically that may be less of an issue depending on the specific stdlib implementation and if they break ABI)

There’s also automated migration tools to convert 2021 code to 2024. It might fail on some translations but generally it’s pretty automatic.

So huge difference both in the migration mechanism and the bc story.
by alexriddle | 2026-01-06 16:29:07+00:00
The gap is reducing significantly - I have collected and built Lego for a long time and had this opinion but have recently discovered Lumibricks (formerly Funwhole) - excellent designs, and around 1/2 the price of Lego (but they all include lighting elements) and having put them together I can say they feel exactly like Lego. I believe there are other brands of similar quality.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-06 16:29:50+00:00
> Perhaps we’re witnessing a fundamental change in how photography functions socially. The democratisation of image-making through phones has made everyone comfortable with being both behind and in front of cameras, but only within specific, socially agreed parameters. Step outside those parameters with “serious” equipment, and you’re suddenly operating in a different social reality entirely.

I think this is the part which gets closest to trying to explain any of the "why". To me, the largest portion seems to come down to most everyone having used a phone for personal photos in the last 20 years and very few have ever used a phone for professional photos (partly because most are not professionals, partly because if they were they tend to like "real" cameras). Framed from the perspective of professional cameras, most people stopped using cameras for personal photos unless they happen to be professionals or enthusiasts.

This creates a very strong association with "phone = personal/throwaway photo, camera = formal photo for wide consumption". Naturally, this is not universally always true. One can be using a professional camera for personal photos of their girlfriend and one can take a selfie at starbucks and have a million social media readers see it. While not universally true, I bet even the author would overwhelmingly make the same assumption if asked to bet money on the intent of random photographer setups while walking through town. People are just making the same assumption when they see him at Starbucks with a professional camera.
by guywithahat | 2026-01-06 16:29:51+00:00
I definitely wouldn't say internet, I think it's popular on HN and a few other online forums. There are a lot of X/twitter circles which make are critical of rust, as well as other sites.

In my mind at least there's a decent risk Rust is going to end up like the next Haskell, its benefits other than safety are not that clear and many of those features can and have been replicated in other languages.
Show HN: A retro square face avatar generator (Next.js and Canvas)
by fairyFayra | 2026-01-06 16:30:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I built "Square Face Generator," a simple web tool to create retro pixel-art avatars. It's completely free and open-source.

I wanted a quick way to generate consistent pixel avatars for my projects, so I made this using [这里填你的技术栈，比如 Next.js and Canvas API].

Key features:

Unlimited customization options.

Instant download.

No registration required.

I'd love to hear your feedback or suggestions for new features!
by tom1337 | 2026-01-06 16:30:58+00:00
Since switching from Codex to Claude Code I was always annoyed that they would not give you details how many tokens a chat / session consumed. This would've made it so much easier to assert whether buying extra credits via the API is worth it or not / predict what the rough cost would be. I've then just tried it out and a single prompt with the latest Opus + thinking consumed $ 0.80 - no wonder they are reducing the limits.
by montjoy | 2026-01-06 16:31:09+00:00
Copilot is the absolute worst. Yesterday I had tried to have it create a printable calendar for January 2026 but no matter how I instructed it, it kept showing that the first was on a Wednesday, not Thursday. I even fed it back its own incorrect PDF in a new conversation, which clearly showed the 1st on a Wednesday and asked it to tell me what day the calendar showed the first on. It said the calendar showed the 1st as a Thursday. It started to make me disbelieve my own eyes.

Edit: I gave up on Copilot ant fed the same instructions to ChatGPT, which had no issue.

The point here is that some models seem to know your intention while some just seem stuck on their training data.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-06 16:31:33+00:00
No not true. cargo fix —edition automatically does most translation to the new edition (most people never see it fail, I’ve seen it fail only on some obscure constructs that it couldn’t do automatically because the meaning of some trait stuff changed subtly but took 2 minutes or less to fix). cargo clippy —-fix will automatically apply linter fixes or warning fixes when it can.

Claiming that editions are an example of rust failing back compat shows a complete ignorance of the ecosystem or what coding in the language is actually like. People in this thread think you can’t mix n match editions or that migrating is some huge unavoidable obstacle. Indeed I have less fear upgrading editions than I do bumping the version of the c or c++ language or even using a newer compiler that exploits accidental UB that had been lurking.
by Fnoord | 2026-01-06 16:32:05+00:00
Who is 'we'? Which data are you referring to? (If you mean e.g. Samsung Galaxy with GrapheneOS, by all means.)

We need to consider a few factors.

If you are from EU, and you want GDPR to be enforced, you need to work with countries which follow your local law. The USA is hinting at no longer doing so, since it retaliates with sanctions.

Now, where would you host, and why? Norway seems like an interesting target, since they are very high on renewable energy. Norway isn't part of EU, but part of the EEA. Latency with Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Australia isn't going to be ideal. But if the company behind it is from there, and they have a local presence in Europe, why not? Could even work with proprietary software. FOSS can help here.

Hardware is a difficult target. It is near impossible to avoid China in this regard. And if you do, you often end up with US products. OSHW can help, but it is rather uncommon. We also have a constraint: we need energy efficient in Europe.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-06 16:32:46+00:00
I think you're ignoring that most users of AI currently aren't paying anything, nor would they. I believe the value of a Facebook user was $70 per year in 2023, for the US and Canada. Assuming that the AI companies could make twice that from ads, that's still only $10 - $12 per month, and even less in the rest of the world. Obviously there's going to be some business users as well, so they can cover some of the cost, but would also be responsible for a larger portion of the running cost.

The question should be how many free users can the AI companies convert.

The cost of an Uber has also gone way up, and they basically have a monopoly in many areas.