MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tim-tday | 2026-01-22 17:07:09+00:00
A friend of mine transitioned to low voltage electrical. The most satisfying thing I did last week was running some cat6. It’s quiet, physical, and you can see the accomplishment when you’re done.
It feels good to do something well and get it done.

I’ve heard of people who go start a farmstead. I’m not sure I’d like it.

Some people have suggested physical work. I might also suggest introspection. What’s an activity you’ve done that really generates peace and satisfaction in you?

For some people it’s helping people. For some it’s physical activity. For some people it’s animals.

Don’t be afraid to totally turn your life on end. It’s the only one you’ve got.
Show HN: Swish Finance – a zero-click way to watch your portfolio
by trympet | 2026-01-22 17:07:24+00:00
The goal of Swish is to provide a zero-click way to view your portfolio.

I made Swish after finding it too annoying and tedious to check my portfolio in my broker or Google Finance. This app removes the conscious decision to "poll" your portfolio by _always_ showing it on your desktop. While this might not be everyone's cup of tea, I hope that you find it interesting nevertheless.

After graduating high school (in 2020) and first getting started with stocks, I was surprised there were no simple "widget" apps for stock tickers. Somehow, what used to exist in the Windows Vista era ceased to exist. So, I made this app purely to satisfy my own needs, but then I quickly started getting email suggestions from customers to add new features. Even though my initial goal was to create something similar to the widgets in Windows Vista, it has now evolved into a much more refined experience.

I render the widgets using native Direct2D/Direct3D11/DComp APIs. There are still optimizations to be made in the rendering pipeline (hardware accelerated tessellation, using DirectComposition swap chain, etc.). I strive for high performance as I know many folks use my app on their laptop, where battery life is important. There are also a ton of features I'd like to add, but haven't had the time.

Let me know what you think!
by thramp | 2026-01-22 17:07:35+00:00
One of the rust-analyzer co-maintainers (Chayim Friedman) already rewrote it, but we can’t integrate it yet, as about 40 assists (the little lightbulbs?) still rely on mutation. If you want something Rowan-like, I think syntree and Biome’s rowan fork are good options to look into.
by axus | 2026-01-22 17:08:08+00:00
CW: Do you use AI for anything?

GG: I don’t really use it period. I miss the Wikipedia blurbs being at the top of webpages. If I’m looking up a simple math fact that I don’t know—like what the weight of something is—I’ll look at the AI summary, but I never, almost never, hit the expand button.
by hackingonempty | 2026-01-22 17:08:20+00:00
Scala 3 is an excellent language. My only issue is the compiler is slow, especially on my weak ARM laptop. I don't have a legacy Scala 2 codebase to maintain though, and I use mill instead of sbt.

Its the most popular functional programming language. Comparable languages like Haskell or Ocaml are even less popular.
by vld_chk | 2026-01-22 17:08:21+00:00
In my mental model, the fundamental problem of reproducibility is that scientists have very hard time to find a penny to fund such research. No one wants to grant “hey I need $1m and 2 years to validate the paper from last year which looks suspicious”.

Until we can change how we fund science on the fundamental level; how we assign grants — it will be indeed very hard problem to deal with.
by TheJoeMan | 2026-01-22 17:08:23+00:00
I dislike that an executive is quoted as blaming "rising development costs", essentially blaming the workers/salaries, with no rebuttal. This is especially suspect with the timing of closing an office that just unionized.

It might be frequency-bias, but of the companies downsizing/closing in my area I see almost all of the published explanations are blaming wages. And there can't be a really fair counter-view by the journalist because what are they to do, interview a laid-off worker at the business? I doubt someone would go on the record lambasting their former employer, but it would probably turn up the truths such as fraud or waste.
by MarsIronPI | 2026-01-22 17:08:48+00:00
> I hope we never change sustems, and I don’t think we will anytime soon. If we do, however, we should not switch to Celsius because the useful scale of Fahrenheit is far superior 0-100 versus 0-32. Celsius isn’t very Metric-y.

Except that Fahrenheit's extra precision doesn't really matter. Unless you can tell the difference between 72°F and 73°F, or 34°F and 33°F.
by pear01 | 2026-01-22 17:08:50+00:00
US also tariffs Chinese EV makers out of the US market so they can keep peddling the fiction that EV sucks or China can't build anything we can't.

This has the same corrupt nexus with the anti-renewable mantra. Essentially subsidize oil and gas under the table and punish renewables then tell the electorate that the latter is worse than the former.

Instead of giving Americans free choice American automakers pay American politicians to prop up their uncompetitive prices and subpar offerings. All while they take in huge private profits. American workers could work on foreign automobiles, just as they do with other automakers not from China. It's not about workers, it's not about national security. You don't even have to go into all the environmental concerns that of course disproportionately affect poorer individuals.

It's corporate welfare. And yes, it should be criminal. At the very least, if the American people are going to inflate CEOs salaries they should have seats on the board.

This is actually not a wild idea. You might be surprised to find who one of the largest shareholders of the Volkswagen group is. It's not like that is an obviously mismanaged socialist hellhole company, it's a perfectly competitive and well regarded car company.

Americans need to start demanding more equity or oversight in operations their governments are already paying for. The fact most Americans think this amounts to communism just means more people have to call out the money is already flowing.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-22 17:09:01+00:00
It depends what you mean by "original".

The very first Prince of Persia game came out in the early 90s. It's at least 35 years old. It was noteworthy as being one of the first games (if not the first) to have ragdoll physics for the movement of the player.

It was a game of playing through 12 levels (IIRC) and if you died, you started over completely. I played it for 20 hours straight at one point and ended up beating it. I think it takes like 30-45 minutes for a full run through normally? I'm a bit fuzzy on this part. It was an amazing game.

What you're talking about is the early 2000s "reboot" that launched a new franchise under the old name and really wasn't that similar to the original other than a setting of being loosely Persian/Arabic. But it wasn't a platform game in the same sense.
by EPWN3D | 2026-01-22 17:09:03+00:00
I've wound up just putting the protocol state in a struct and making the "conforming" action to have that struct in the conforming object with a standardized field name. Then just use a macro to get the protocol pointer and pass it to the protocol's implementation functions.

But I really, really wish we could have a lightweight protocol/trait feature in C. It would remove a large source of unsafe code that has to cast back and forth between void *.
by TyrunDemeg101 | 2026-01-22 17:09:05+00:00
I am finding the same thing! I used to use a window management tool long ago called something like Zooom (it lets you press hotkeys and it 'picks up' your window and you can easily move it around). I fell in love with it like 20 years ago, but it was barely maintained. Someone then created a similar app called Hummingbird - which was great, but it had some issues and again maintainability wasn't great.

So I decided to vibecode an app for myself and wouldn't you know? It took me a few hours and it's INCREDIBLE! No more relying on someone else to maintain something, I can simply build my own solutions, whenever I want!
by jchw | 2026-01-22 17:09:50+00:00
Well yes, but you'd be spawning a wineserver and running wineboot and all kinds of baggage on top, all for the very simple task of mapping and executing a PE binary, and of course you would still wind up needing ELF... for the Wine loader and all of the dependencies that it has (like a libc, though you could maybe use a statically-linked musl or something to try to minimize it.)

Meanwhile the actual process of loading a PE binary is relatively trivial. It's trivial enough that it has been implemented numerous times in different forms by many people. Hell, I've done it numerous times myself, once for game hacking and once in pure Go[1] as a stubborn workaround for another problem.

Importing an entire Wine install, or even putting the effort into stripping Wine down for this purpose, seems silly.

But I suppose the entire premise is a little silly to begin with, so I guess it's not that unreasonable, it's just not what I am imagining. I'm imagining a Linux userland with simply no ELF at all.

[1]: https://github.com/jchv/go-winloader - though it doesn't do linking recursively, since for this particular problem simply calling LoadLibrary is good enough.
by baxtr | 2026-01-22 17:09:59+00:00
If you’re interested in this topic I highly recommend Tony Seba’s analyses.

He argues that because solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of new energy generation, they are on an unstoppable exponential "S-curve" that will make coal, gas, and nuclear power obsolete by 2030.

Look up his videos on YT, for example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj96nxtHdTU
by jbreckmckye | 2026-01-22 17:10:04+00:00
I'm doing a project with tree sitter right now

Any tips for keeping the grammar sizes under control? I'm distributing a CLI tool that needs to support several languages, and I can see the grammars gradually bloating the binary size

I could build some clever thing where language packs are opt-in and distributed as WASM, maybe. But that could be complex
by Jgoauh | 2026-01-22 17:10:28+00:00
Hi, i don't often reply to attacks of character but judging by your comment history you have a habit to leave a lot of them, i would probably be a bad president tho, because i don't think its possible to be good at running a bad system, and because i don't think its a good thing for a single person to "run a country".

I don't think my concerns over over Anthropic's honesty should be dismissed based on your perception on my capacity at doing something else.

I also don't see how DoD contracts help Anthropic's goal of "avoiding actions that are inappropriately dangerous or harmful", i also don't see the practical use of a constitution that doesn't see the contradiction. I will not answer to your following comments because you don't seem to be a nice person, goodbye.
by gruez | 2026-01-22 17:10:37+00:00
>Carrying on from that, contrary to your statement, HFCS has absolutely been linked in multiple studies to increased obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

The question isn't whether HFCS causes those ailments, It's whether it's worse than the alternatives. It's not as if for lack of HFCS, coke will disappear from store shelves and everyone is going to drink water, for instance. Otherwise it makes no sense to call out HFCS specifically. It'd be like hemming and hawing about how unhealthy coke is, but turning a blind eye to pepsi.

>but as of 2022, there is no scientific consensus that fructose or HFCS has any impact on cardiometabolic markers when substituted for sucrose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Healt...
by sp4cec0wb0y | 2026-01-22 17:11:01+00:00
Correct me if I am wrong but the only reason nuclear is expensive is because of how costly the facilities are to build and maintain. If we were not setback during the anti-nuclear era, we would have gained economies of scale. The reason why solar is so cheap is for the exact same reason is it not? I am not an expert on this topic so take everything I say with a massive grain of salt as I am willing to be wrong on this.

Edit: After further reading it appears that solar will be the defacto affordable option in energy production, even with SMRs and streamlined construction in the picture. Perhaps a mix of renewables, better battery infra, and SMRs for stable sources of power is the future.
by m348e912 | 2026-01-22 17:11:12+00:00
I agree the shows I named have aged, but I think my point stands. There really isn't anything _like_ those shows on TikTok that I am aware of, and maybe you've made a bigger point that there isn't anything like these shows at all anymore. (To be fair I don't watch much traditional TV anymore -- maybe that was your point all along and I just missed it)
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-22 17:11:14+00:00
Appreciate that writeup. Very detailed insights into the process. However those conclusions left me on the fence about whether I 'liked' the project. The conclusions about 'unlocking scale' and commodity content having zero value. Where does that leave you and this project? Does it really matter that much that the project couldn't exist without genAI? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all. As with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. We're not ready for it. We're not ready for the scale of impact the tech touches in multitude of areas. Including the artistic world. The diminished value and loss of opportunities. We're not ready for the impacts of use by bad actors. The scale of output like this, as cool as it is, is out of balance with the loss of huge chunk of human activity and expression. Sigh.
by btown | 2026-01-22 17:11:32+00:00
If you’re making a bot in which there will be many sub-behaviors, it can be tempting to say “each sub-behavior should do whatever checks it needs, including basic checks for self-reply.”

And there lie dragons, because whether a tired or junior or (now) not-even-human engineer is writing new sub-behavior, it’s easy to assume that footguns either don’t exist or are prevented a layer up. There’s nothing more classic than that.
by nospice | 2026-01-22 17:11:38+00:00
That's a cynical take, so it will probably get upvoted, but what are you basing it on?

Ebay is a pretty eclectic marketplace and I can think of a number of possible reasons that have little to do with ads. For example, they may be worried about high error rates, and thus buyer and seller dissatisfaction. If I instruct an agent to buy X, eBay is almost never interchangeable with Amazon or Target.

They have no problem surfacing their listings on Google Shopping.
by nderjung | 2026-01-22 17:11:44+00:00
Hey! Co-founder of Unikraft here.

Unikraft aims to offer a Linux-compatible environment (so it feels familiar) with the ability to strip out unnecessary internal components in order to improve both boot-time/runtime performance and operational security.

Why would you need a memory allocator and garbage collector if you serve static content? Why would you need a scheduler if your app is run-to-completion?

Linux gives you the safety-net of generality and if you want to do anything remotely performant, you by-pass/hack it altogether.

In the article, Unikraft cold-boots in 150ms in an emulated environment (TCG). If it was running natively with virtualization hardware extensions, it can be even shorter, and without the need for snapshots which means you don't need to store this separately either.
by gcr | 2026-01-22 17:12:05+00:00
I'd personally like to see top conferences grow a "reproducibility" track. Each submission would be a short tech report that chooses some other paper to re-implement. Cap 'em at three pages, have a lightweight review process. Maybe there could be artifacts (git repositories, etc) that accompany each submission.

This would especially help newer grad students learn how to begin to do this sort of research.

Maybe doing enough reproductions could unlock incentives. Like if you do 5 reproductions than the AC would assign your next paper double the reviewers. Or, more invasively, maybe you can't submit to the conference until you complete some reproduction.
by davely | 2026-01-22 17:12:08+00:00
I've been using GLM 4.7 alongside Opus 4.5 and I can't believe how bad it is. Seriously.

I spent 20 minutes yesterday trying to get GLM 4.7 to understand that a simple modal on a web page (vanilla JS and HTML!) wasn't displaying when a certain button was clicked. I hooked it up to Chrome MCP in Open Code as well.

It constantly told me that it fixed the problem. In frustration, I opened Claude Code and just typed "Why won't the button with ID 'edit' work???!"

It fixed the problem in one shot. This isn't even a hard problem (and I could have just fixed it myself but I guess sunk cost fallacy).
by mort96 | 2026-01-22 17:12:10+00:00
I just took all PDFs I had in my downloads folder (55, totaling 47M). These are invoices, data sheets, employment contracts, schematics, research reports, a bunch of random stuff really.

I compressed them all with 'zstd --ultra -22', 'brotli -9', 'xz -9' and 'gzip -9'. Here are the results:

+------+------+-----+------+--------+
| none | zstd | xz | gzip | brotli |
+------|------|-----|------|--------|
| 47M | 45M | 39M | 38M | 37M |
+------+------+-----+------+--------+

Here's a table with all the files:

+------+------+------+------+--------+
| raw | zstd | xz | gzip | brotli |
+------+------+------+------+--------+
| 12K | 12K | 12K | 12K | 12K |
| 20K | 20K | 20K | 20K | 20K | x5
| 24K | 20K | 20K | 20K | 20K | x5
| 28K | 24K | 24K | 24K | 24K |
| 28K | 24K | 24K | 24K | 24K |
| 32K | 20K | 20K | 20K | 20K | x3
| 32K | 24K | 24K | 24K | 24K |
| 40K | 32K | 32K | 32K | 32K |
| 44K | 40K | 40K | 40K | 40K |
| 44K | 40K | 40K | 40K | 40K |
| 48K | 36K | 36K | 36K | 36K |
| 48K | 48K | 48K | 48K | 48K |
| 76K | 128K | 72K | 72K | 72K |
| 84K | 140K | 84K | 80K | 80K | x7
| 88K | 136K | 76K | 76K | 76K |
| 124K | 152K | 88K | 92K | 92K |
| 124K | 152K | 92K | 96K | 92K |
| 140K | 160K | 100K | 100K | 100K |
| 152K | 188K | 128K | 128K | 132K |
| 188K | 192K | 184K | 184K | 184K |
| 264K | 256K | 240K | 244K | 240K |
| 320K | 256K | 228K | 232K | 228K |
| 440K | 448K | 408K | 408K | 408K |
| 448K | 448K | 432K | 432K | 432K |
| 516K | 384K | 376K | 384K | 376K |
| 992K | 320K | 260K | 296K | 280K |
| 1.0M | 2.0M | 1.0M | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| 1.1M | 192K | 192K | 228K | 200K |
| 1.1M | 2.0M | 1.1M | 1.1M | 1.1M |
| 1.2M | 1.1M | 1.0M | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| 1.3M | 2.0M | 1.1M | 1.1M | 1.1M |
| 1.7M | 2.0M | 1.7M | 1.7M | 1.7M |
| 1.9M | 960K | 896K | 952K | 916K |
| 2.9M | 2.0M | 1.3M | 1.4M | 1.4M |
| 3.2M | 4.0M | 3.1M | 3.1M | 3.0M |
| 3.7M | 4.0M | 3.5M | 3.5M | 3.5M |
| 6.4M | 4.0M | 4.1M | 3.7M | 3.5M |
| 6.4M | 6.0M | 6.1M | 5.8M | 5.7M |
| 9.7M | 10M | 10M | 9.5M | 9.4M |
+------+------+------+------+--------+

Zstd is surprisingly bad on this data set. I'm guessing it struggles with the already-compressed image data in some of these PDFs.

Going by only compression ratio, brotli is clearly better than the rest here and zstd is the worst. You'd have to find some other reason (maybe decompression speed, maybe spec complexity, or maybe you just trust Facebook more than Google) to choose zstd over brotli, going by my results.

I wish I could share the data set for reproducibility, but I obviously can't just share every PDF I happened to have laying around in my downloads folder :p
by stronglikedan | 2026-01-22 17:12:27+00:00
> It's easy to get started

Funny - that's the hard part for me. I have yet to figure out what to use it for, since it seems to take longer than any other method of performing my tasks. Especially with regards to verifying for correctness, which in most cases seems to take as long or longer than just having done it myself, knowing I did it correctly.
by jleyank | 2026-01-22 17:12:37+00:00
Losing WFH puts pressure on two-professional couples that limits geographic choices. A job switch tends to become two… It also loses access to talent that for whatever reason doesn’t like where you’re located, but is willing to work for you. It also exacerbates the cost of housing, as people can’t relocate to afford it. It’s also harder on the environment and workers due to commuting time and hassle.

It’s also a sign that you don’t and won’t trust your workers. Especially when managers are able to do it.
by antonvs | 2026-01-22 17:12:57+00:00
The language and style of Beowulf is Old English, though. Old English was a West Germanic language, already closely related to the North Germanic Old Norse and mutually intelligible to a high degree.

But it doesn't make sense to say "such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale" without some sort of explanation for the focus on "Nordic" languages. Subsequent comments have made it clear that the commenter is under the mistaken impression that Old English was a Nordic language. It was not.
by lxgr | 2026-01-22 17:13:01+00:00
Is there even still one today?

For example, Starlink's "direct to cell" uses terrestrial-assigned 4G/5G frequencies which are already not globally coordinated.

Serving a given market from space already needs a national license anyway, and with today's small and region-dependent spotbeams for both GEO and LEO, I feel like we're going to move to a frequency regime more similar for terrestrial networks than for legacy communications satellites covering a whole hemisphere with one beam.
by Olivia8 | 2026-01-22 17:13:10+00:00
PersonaPlex is an impressive advance in full-duplex conversational AI, especially in how it combines natural turn-taking with flexible persona and voice control. Compared to systems like Coldi AI, which emphasize persona consistency and role adaptation primarily at the language level, PersonaPlex stands out by tightly integrating voice, prosody, and real-time interaction. Together, they highlight two complementary paths toward more human-like conversational agents.
by theahura | 2026-01-22 17:13:16+00:00
At risk of piggybacking off someone elses post, my team just published noriskillsets.dev. It's maybe not as polished as this beautiful vercel site, but I think it solves a bigger problem: every skill in noriskillsets.dev is something that we've personally battle tested and evaluated as best in class for that particular task.

I love vercel, but I think the 'collect a bunch of random skills' approach just isn't it. You need versioning, linking between skills, an easy install client...basically a full package manager, which this is not.

If any of that is interesting, check out noriskillsets.dev. Would love to get feedback!
by godelski | 2026-01-22 17:13:21+00:00
Not to mention that you can catch double voting across state lines. It's not common that people do this but it does happen and people are really looking for it.

Hell, the fact that so many people have been looking for massive voter fraud for about a decade now and haven't is pretty telling. People aren't good at keeping secrets and if it's being done at scale it would be uncovered or leaked. Accidents and stupid people happen, but that works both ways
by NoGravitas | 2026-01-22 17:13:48+00:00
> Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either).

It's a more-or-less intentional equivocation between different meanings of AI, as you note, machine learning vs generative AI. They want to point at the real but unsexy potential of ML for medical use in order to pump up the perceived value of LLMs. They want to imply to the general public and investors that LLMs are going to cure cancer.