MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by its_ethan | 2026-01-19 02:27:12+00:00
Hi, so I generally actually agree with you and your criticisms of this blog post (in your thread with the author). I think there's something pretty true in the blog post you shared from Joel (true in that it applies to more than just the software world) and looked at some of his more recent posts.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/12/19/progress-on-the-bl...

This one in particular reads similar to what this comment section is about, it looks like Joel is basically becoming an architecture astronaut himself? Not sure if that's actually an accurate understanding of what his "block protocol" is, but I'm curious to hear from you what you think of that? In the 25 years since that post, has he basically become the thing he once criticized, and is that the result of just becoming a more and more senior/thinker within the industry?
by fartfeatures | 2026-01-19 02:28:17+00:00
Thanks for answering, makes sense.

Not seeing any reference to Tart at that link. Tart also has registry support for VM images it treats them very much like Docker images, is that what you are doing too?

Is it worth putting a comparison up somewhere other than a Github thread? Seems to be a frequently asked question at this point.

Also worth drawing attention to Tart being source available not open source.
by Rayosay | 2026-01-19 02:28:43+00:00
As someone who has tried this, I agree that Winelib is the way to go. Just don't go into it expecting it to "just work" without any code changes. Since NTFS is case-insensitive, it's likely that you'll have to fix your include paths to use the right case. If you used any MSVC compiler extensions, you'll likely need to modify your code to not use them or add `#ifdef __GNUC__` with alternative implementations for GCC. GCC's `-fms-extensions` can emulate some of them, but not all. Winemaker can help you with some of the more wrote aspects of this conversion, but not all of it. It will also produce Makefiles for you, but if you want a single build system that works on all platforms, I'd recommend that you use CMake with a CMake toolchain file targeting Winelib and `winegcc` instead. Visual Studio has pretty good CMake support these days, so it should look pretty much like any other Visual Studio solution when you open it there too.

Once you do get it working, you'll notice that on first run of your application Wine will create a `~/.wine` directory and populate it just like it would if you created a new Wine prefix to run a standard Windows application in. Other than that, it will feel pretty seamless. You'll even get a native application launcher for it (which is really just a shell script to run your project's `.exe` under Wine, but it's hidden from the user so it feels native if you don't look too closely.) Compiling against Winelib has the added benefit that you'll only be using win32 features that Wine supports, and can use native platform libraries (if you choose to do so when you're compiling your application, as described in the Winelib User's Guide) mixed with Windows libraries from Wine. It's nicer and works more smoothly than just running a Windows application you compiled with Visual Studio under a bundled version of Wine, in my experience.

I'm sure that you'd be able to bundle it as an AppImage, but I haven't actually tried that part myself.

Good luck!
by Brajeshwar | 2026-01-19 02:28:57+00:00
Wow! I used to love doing something very similar. I think it was my last year with Windows (XP). https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-windows-homescree...

Nowadays, I just have as few as visible, and everything is either Keyboard Shortcuts or some form of `CMD + K` or `CMD + Spacebar`, and start typing.
Ask HN: How to find a sponsor?
by TySchultz | 2026-01-19 02:29:32+00:00
Hello, I have a daily digest iOS app. Specifically focused on keeping you up to date on top news stories without spending hours. Think morning brew but more interactive / rich content.

I currently have great numbers for a newsletter type product. 3k Daily, 15k monthly and a 50% daily CTR. Young professionals in metro areas.

I really just need enough to pay to keep things running as it's mostly all automated. A few hundred a month.

Any suggestions on how to find a partner/sponsor?
by danpalmer | 2026-01-19 02:30:10+00:00
I think you have to remove an awful lot of what makes Gastown Gastown to find something sensible – at the minimum you need to restructure and simplify the roles, restructure the memory system, remove tmux, ...

The best bit about it was the agentic coding maturity model he presented. That was actually great.

I don't think it's at all like reading Dune. Dune is creative fiction, Gastown is. Oh ok wait, if you consider Gastown to be creative fiction then I guess I agree. As a software tool though I don't think this analogy works.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-01-19 02:30:39+00:00
Oh man, it's been too long since someone made this prediction. Last one was Eric "Equivalent Series Resistance" Raymond 5 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2k9ph/open_so...

It's not any more true now than it was then. Windows isn't going anywhere.

The author talks about Windows getting worse, and cites someone's low-tier computer taking 5 minutes to start an Unreal game. Nah, not convincing when my NVMe drive works fine.

The author talks about games running on Linux. I guess the author missed the part where half of the most popular PC games have been consistently unplayable for 6+ years because the company doesn't believe that they can make anti-cheat work.

Ironically, based on that theory, the author says that everyone will "follow the gamers". Yeah, they're currently following the gamers... to where the anti-cheat works.
by nl | 2026-01-19 02:32:22+00:00
I think Andrew Ng wrote a great piece on this.

For example, in the US, which do you think uses more water: Golf Courses or Data Centers?

a) Gold Courses use twice as much water as Data Centers
b) About the same
c) Data Centers use twice as much water as Gold Courses

The answer is "None of the above": "Golf courses in the U.S. use around 500 billion gallons annually of water to irrigate their turf [snip] data centers consume [snip] 17 billion gallons, or maybe around 10x that if we include water use from energy generation"

Do you think a Google search or a Gemini query produces more carbon?

> Google had estimated that a single web search query produces 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. [snip] the median Gemini LLM app query produces a surprisingly low 0.03 grams of CO2 emissions), and uses less energy than watching 9 seconds of television

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-336/
by filipstrand | 2026-01-19 02:32:46+00:00
Really cool project! Impressive to see this being done in pure C.

I'm the maintainer of MFLUX (https://github.com/filipstrand/mflux) which does a similar thing, but at a higher level using the MLX framework optimised for Apple Silicon. I just merged Flux 2 Klein support as well and was happy to see this discussion :)

I started out doing this type of work roughly 1.5 years ago when FLUX.1 was released and have been doing it off and on ever since with newer models, trying to use more and more AI over time.

At one point, I vibe-coded a debugger to help the coding agent along. It worked OK but as models have gotten stronger, this doesn't really seem to be needed anymore. My latest version simply has a SKILL.md that outlines my overall porting strategy (https://github.com/filipstrand/mflux/blob/main/.cursor/skill...). Somewhat surprisingly, this actually works now with Cursor + Codex-5.2, with little human intervention.

> Even if the code was generated using AI, my help in steering towards the right design, implementation choices, and correctness has been vital during the development.

This definitely resonates! Curious to hear more about what worked/didn't for you. A couple of things I've found useful:

- Porting the pipeline backwards: This is the way I did it personally before using any coding models. The typical image generation flow is the following:

1.Text_encodings (+ random_noise_latent)
2.Transformer loop
3.VAE decoding

I found that by starting with the VAE first (by feeding it pre-loaded tensors from the reference extracted at specific locations) it was the quickest way to get to an actual generated image. Once the VAE is done and verified, only then proceed backwards the chain and handle the Transformer, etc. I still prefer to do it this way and I like to manually intervene between step 3,2 and 1, but maybe this won't actually be needed soon?

- Also, with the VAE, if you care about implementing the encoding functionality (e.g to be used with img2img features), the round-trip test is a very quick way to verify correctness:

image_in -> encode -> decode -> image_out : compare(image_in, image_out)

- Investing in a good foundation for weight handling, especially when doing repeat work across similar models. Earlier coding models would easily get confused about weight assignment, naming conventions etc. A lot of time could be wasted because weight assignment failed (sometimes silently) early on.
by tdb7893 | 2026-01-19 02:33:15+00:00
So firstly, I'm not in tech anymore so this is just trivially not true for me (I study animals and most of the people I meet are similar fields). Secondly, there's no company where their goal is destroying "western civilization" (though I'm sure they also have a very sketchy "defense" sector). If there is, they are currently being outcompeted by US tech firms anyway.
by pcthrowaway | 2026-01-19 02:33:21+00:00
The difference between light-up arrows pointing the way "forward" for a car turning onto the expressway the wrong way, and doing so with the possibility humans might see and attempt to flag them down before they're too far to turn around.

People will make mistakes, and AI holding their hand and guiding them while they do it can have disastrous consequences.

But it's nice that the arrows will appear to also guide people going the right way I guess.
by miladyincontrol | 2026-01-19 02:33:22+00:00
It always feels such an anti-pattern this kinda stuff. Nothing stops you from having a healthy, limited relationship with the technology you have, however you define that to be.
Buy a dumb phone because you feel some aspect is addicting to you rather than meaningfully addressing it. Get an ipod because spotify is bad rather than learning to play music files in some capacity on your phone. Start buying VHS tapes and dvds because netflix is clearly the only option.

The list goes on, and all too often rather than fixing habits they just consume in a different sense until they lapse and go back to hold habits. By trying to be the opposite of 'thing' they still let 'thing' control them. Although the fact all this author's examples are still posting about it all on tiktok doesnt have me sold one bit on them healthily disconnecting.
by two_handfuls | 2026-01-19 02:33:36+00:00
> explain why "Gaussian" and why "splat".

Happily. Gaussian splats are a technique for 3D images, related to point clouds. They do the same job (take a 3D capture of reality and generate pictures later from any point of view "close enough" to the original).

The key idea is that instead of a bunch of points, it stores a bunch of semi-transparent blobs - or "splats". The transparency increases quickly with distance, following a normal distribution- also known as the "Gaussian distribution."

Hence, "Gaussian splats".
by nomdep | 2026-01-19 02:34:12+00:00
I think he might be right

The massive amount of legacy .NET and older software still running in many enterprises isn’t a problem, but a huge business opportunity.

My prediction is that Microsoft will push hard their “Azure Virtual Desktop” product: remote, virtualized Windows instances hosted on their own servers to these enterprises.

In this model, the operating system running on the client devices will becomes largely irrelevant.
by williamcotton | 2026-01-19 02:35:19+00:00
> broad copyright violations

You’re probably not going to be very pleased with how this all plays out in court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari...

LLMs work precisely because they converge on the abstract ideas in our languages. Anything verbatim is de minimus or more likely filtered out through the lens of the above doctrines.
by valkmit | 2026-01-19 02:35:25+00:00
Insider trading in stocks are prohibited but not for the reason most people think. It has nothing to do with someone having an unfair advantage in an informational sense, and everything to do with fiduciary responsibility.

The CEO and executive team has fiduciary responsibility to act in the financial best interest of the shareholders. Your broker too.

If you have insider info (Obtained legally) but no fiduciary responsibility you can act on it. That’s why congress members trading US equities based on decisions they’re privy to is not, from a legal perspective, insider trading. They don’t have a fiduciary responsibility to their constituents
by rebeccaskinner | 2026-01-19 02:36:21+00:00
I shared the story as I remember it. Memory is imperfect. It's been years since I deleted my account, and I don't have the luxury of access to server or moderation logs.

What I do remember unambiguously is being an active member of the site, contributing regularly and in good faith, being accused of spamming, and the general feeling of hostility that I got from the site.
by derf_ | 2026-01-19 02:36:35+00:00
And on X, an em-dash (—) is Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen. An en-dash (–) is Compose, hyphen, hyphen, period. I never even needed to look these up. They're literally the first things I tried given a basic knowledge of the Compose idiom (which you can pretty much guess from the name "Compose").
by jhanschoo | 2026-01-19 02:37:04+00:00
> Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person.

I think you need to be more specific than just "avert" the trope without elaborating. Others have commented how a brilliant jerk can slow a project down, but I get the impression that you are thinking of someone who is not sociable, not interested in business goals, very direct and perhaps even pessimistic about others' ability, but hand them a technical task and they can deliver exceptional results. This is opposed to, say, someone who is sociable but can't deliver anything without constant attention or handholding.
by godelski | 2026-01-19 02:37:09+00:00
I'm a machine learning researcher myself and one of the things that frustrates me is that many of my peers really embrace the "black box" notion of ML models. There are plenty of deep thinkers too, but like with any topic the masters are a much smaller proportion. Just a bit of a shame given that I'm talking about a bunch of people with PhDs...

As for my experience vibe coding is that it is not so much vibing but needing to do a lot of actual work too. I haven't watched that video you linked but that sounds to reflect my actual experience and that of people I know offline.
by dbcurtis | 2026-01-19 02:38:37+00:00
Well, these days it seems Linux drivers get enough eye-balls on them that anything meaningful is going to get looked at. Sure, I expect there are some low usage drivers in the repo that just haven't had enough mileage. At least with Linux I can see the driver code. (The second day at my current job, somebody pointed me at a bug with an obscure symptom. A quick check of a log file showed a 0xE exception. A couple hours later I posted a link to the bug in source. Somehow, the universe decided to give me a bug I had seen many times before to get my reputation off to a good start -- it's better to be lucky than smart.)
by dhosek | 2026-01-19 02:40:14+00:00
Generally, I go with wiktionary which is reasonably comprehensive. I remember as an undergrad being stumped by a word in the Septuagint that I could not make any sense of and now I imagine I can search on the inflected form on wiktionary and know exactly where I went wrong. (I would note that as an undergrad I was also pretty thoroughly defeated by Attic Greek. I’ve since learned that the textbook we used, Hansen & Quinn, is pretty rough going, but I’ve also found that the approach taken by the Biblical Greek textbook I worked through (N. Clayton Croy) made what was nearly impossible forty years ago a breeze on the retry nine years ago.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2026-01-19 02:40:18+00:00
I think easy gambling over the internet is terrible, tons of young people are getting stuck in it. People get addicted to it throughout history and ruin their lives, vulnerable people get in trouble with huge losses.

But I don't think we should do anything because religion doesn't like it - that's a foolish thing to use to make your crucial choices or world view. A key reason is pretty much every terrible thing ever was excused as requirement of some religion or forever. Separate from the hurtful things in religious books at times, it's too easy for leaders or authorities to somehow justify actions.

Let's instead use a goal of treating each other respectfully, stop hating and killing each other. Yeah, that's all naive stuff, we aren't there, maybe we'll never be there. Still a good goal, treat each other with kindness. And yeah, I'm an optimistic sort.
by seiferteric | 2026-01-19 02:40:26+00:00
My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the videos to recreate "real" events. I really doubt that.. it all looks fake. I am just worried about how much divisiveness this kind of stuff will create all so someone can profit off of youtube ads.. it's sad.
by jclarkcom | 2026-01-19 02:42:01+00:00
I do something similar but this only protects secrets at rest. If you app has an exploit an attack could just export all your secrets to a file.

I prototyped a solution where I use an external debugger to monitor my app, when the app needs a secret it generates a breakpoint and the debugger catches it and then inspects the call stack of the function requesting the secret and then copies it into the process memory (intended to be erased immediately after use). Not 100% security but a big improvement and a bit more flexible and auditable compared to a proxy
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-19 02:42:12+00:00
My personal cold take is that it's a forgotten aloe species/hybrid

-has weird succulent morphology as depicted in coinage

Eg https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/75379-Aloe-maculata

-species that grow well (only) in the relevant regions in North Africa

-sap much less sulfurous than hing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloin

-Pliny mentions silphium as laxative/purgative

-Most of all, explains why the leading theory is still so unsatisfactory
by m3047 | 2026-01-19 02:43:24+00:00
> industrial uses of phosphorus

There seems to be a memory hole about what follows. Probably not the "key limiting factor for life" you had in mind.

There have been various incidents where soldiers or people generally in third world countries have developed neurological diseases when machine oil contaminates (or is mistaken for) cooking oil. This isn't new, it's been happening for 100 years. There have also been cases of pilots becoming, or allegedly becoming, disabled due to inhalation of jet engine lubricants which find their way into the cabin air supply (passengers are notably not mentioned in most reporting).

Although intentional use of the more toxic compounds is generally avoided, machine oils are subjected to harsh environments and compounds can change, new compounds created. Kind of like dioxin contamination in herbicides, I don't see much evidence that oil additives are rigorously tested for unusually toxic compounds incidentally occurring during the manufacturing process.

I'm glad they're burning that shit under an exhaust hood in the picture in the article, hope it's turned on!

Apropos the memory hole remark above, here are some articles I found briefly looking around although none of them were ones I remember previously seeing / reading (such as the "famous" case of the British machinegunners in North Africa).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_soldiers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organophosphate_poisoning

https://www.machinerylubrication.com/Read/30448/know-lubrica...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11254977_The_Toxici...
by sanderjd | 2026-01-19 02:44:23+00:00
I think you are misunderstanding the point I'm making. I agree that "writing code" is likely to be commoditized by AI tools, much like past industrialization disruptions. But I think there is going to be more things to do in the space of "doing useful things with computers", analogous to how industrialization creates new work further up the value chain.

Of course it often isn't the same people whose jobs are disrupted who end up doing that new work.
by skeltoac | 2026-01-19 02:45:27+00:00
Advertising is how I learned about lots of things I am glad I learned about.

I am furious about lots of the ads that I see. I want to stop certain kinds of advertising. I live where there are no billboards allowed and I love that.

But I want to live in a world where people can pay to have their messages displayed where they will be seen. Simply because banning that activity would cripple the flow of information. That’s what advertising is.

If you want to ban a particular form of advertising then say what and why. The “ban all ads” thing just doesn’t make sense.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-19 02:45:58+00:00
I don't understand why people are making this so complicated. We have a battle tested SDLC. We don't need to reinvent this shit. We just need to make some affordances in the tools and processes we set up for the majority of the actors in the system to be agents (such as rationing human attention).

Spec your software like an architect/po, decompose it into a task dag, then orchestrate for each lane and assemble all change sets in a merge branch rather than constantly repointing head.
by pdpi | 2026-01-19 02:45:59+00:00
> Speaking of high pixel density, Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly.

Haven't tried Windows 11, but a bunch of Microsoft applications in Windows 10 render text using sub-pixel rendering in 2x high dpi mode, resulting in every character having a two-pixel coloured border around it. That's about as far from "scaling properly" as it gets.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-01-19 02:46:41+00:00
> There's no longer any argument in favor of an ad model when you're paying 20-30 dollars a month already

Sure there is. CEO needs a new yacht. He can't afford to leave money on the table. All those subscribers? They must have a lot of disposable income if they can afford to blow it on "journalism". It would be stupid not to advertise to them.
by ai_critic | 2026-01-19 02:47:15+00:00
> Because no one can do everything. Telling devs to own their code is one thing. (Great.) Asking them to own their code and the entire technological iceberg beneath it is wholly another

A lot of people can do enough of everything as to make no practical difference--don't hire monkeys (and if you do, train them) and empower the people you do hire and you'll be amazed at how much they can do.

As for the rest--maybe the solution is not to build big icebergs!