MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by morpheuskafka | 2026-01-28 15:37:36+00:00
The confusing part is that in many cases, end users are using NPM, pip, Go packaging, and to a lesser extent cargo etc to install finished end-user software. I've never written a line of JS but have installed all kinds of command line utilities with npm/npx.

Normally with an system package manager you would have a -lib package for using in your own code (or simply required by another package), a -src, and then a package without these suffixes would be some kind of executable binary.

But with npm and pip, I'm never sure whether a package installs binaries or not, and if it does, is it also usable as a library for other code or is it compiled? (Homebrew as you mentioned is source based but typically uses precompiled "bottles" in most cases, I think?) And then there is some stuff that's installed with npm but is not even javascript like font packages for webdev.

The other interesting thing about these language package managers is that they complete eliminate the role of the distribution in packaging a lot of end user software. Which ironically, in the oldest days you would download a source tarball and compile it yourself. So I guess its just a return to that approach but with go or cargo replacing wget and make.
by jdefr89 | 2026-01-28 15:37:43+00:00
Oh.. So you start doing something new and you're top 10% without practicing or being bad at it first? I'd love to test that to see if it's the case... Your logic is "You're not the best ever to do something so you are not doing it" means you have probably never done a single thing your entire life. Maybe you should just stop.
by thijson | 2026-01-28 15:38:13+00:00
I used to not mind my kids watching Youtube on the home TV, but lately when I walk by they are doom scrolling one short after the other. I tell them not to watch shorts, but a day later I walk by and they are back to doom scrolling. I'm finally forced to remove Youtube from the TV. On the phone, Instagram is the same way, I see my teenager doom scrolling it quite often. They claim it helps them relax.
by zabzonk | 2026-01-28 15:38:20+00:00
My Dad had one of them. The first machine I actually purchased myself was a Dragon 32 (6809 processor, 32k RAM) sometime around 1981 - i can remember everything about it, including all the terrible cassette games I bought for it and the money I spent on ROM cartridges (word processor, assembler/debugger). These days I can't even remember what's in my Steam library.
by keyringlight | 2026-01-28 15:38:27+00:00
One aspect I wonder about is not so much about whether the collective gaming-on-linux effort can close the performance/features gap, but keep it closed. The story has been that windows is the main target system for "PC" game development and hardware/drivers (for good reason, it has majority market share), and then linux lags behind as various efforts figure out what's missing and how to implement.

Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.
by leetrout | 2026-01-28 15:38:39+00:00
Quick feedback if you're still monitoring the thread:

I did /imagine cheeseburger and /imagine a fire extinguisher and both were correctly generated but the agent has no context. when I ask what they are holding in both cases they ramble about not holding anything and referencing lemons and lemon trees.

I expected it to retain the context as the chat continues. If I ask it what it imagined it just tells me I can use /imagine.
by teddyh | 2026-01-28 15:38:46+00:00
> The journal grows massively and is unbounded by default.

Wrong. By default, the journals aren’t even saved to disk. And if you do configure them to be saved to disk, they are limited by default to 10% of the file system size, and at the most 4GiB.

> It took me about 30 minutes of googling

Just read the manual. Start with systemd.directives(7) and search for what you want, which will direct you to the correct manual page for that setting.

> Too many things just happen in the background that never used to.

The world is changing. Mounts aren’t static anymore; you must treat a mount just as a running service; run “systemctl stop srv-foo.mount” instead of just yanking out a file system from underneath the feet of any and all services which depended on that mount point.

> I never did figure out how to set the MTU in the configuration either.

“man systemd.directives”, search for “MTU”. Took maybe two seconds.

> Log files aren't where I expect them.

> I had to learn the new systemd way of doing it.

This, I strongly suspect, is your real problem.
by tliltocatl | 2026-01-28 15:38:52+00:00
> * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous me

I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".

> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't.

Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-28 15:39:48+00:00
> It lacks the UNIX philosophy really.

The UNIX philosophy is not a golden rule or inherently good. Nor is it even really well defined (what is a "thing"?). SystemD does one thing and does it well - managing Linux systems.

> It's not "modernity" per se that obviously tops the list of criteria or we'd be using something like BeOS or even Windows.

Just because modernity isn't the only criteria for success doesn't mean it is irrelevant.
by cruffle_duffle | 2026-01-28 15:40:09+00:00
Why though? polars sounds like the rewrite! It’s okay to cycle into a new library. Let pandas do its thing and polars slowly take over as new projects overtake. There is nothing wrong with this and it happens all the time.

Like jquery, which hasn’t fundamentally changed since I was a wee lad doing web dev. They didn’t make major changes despite their approach to web dev being replaced by newer concepts found on angular, backbone, mustache, and eventually react. And that is a good thing.

What I personally don’t want is something like angular that basically radically changed between 1.0 and 2.0. Might as well just call 2.0 something new.

Note: I’ve never heard of polars until this comment thread. Can’t wait to try it out.
Show HN: Pi-Foundry – multi user self hosted AI assistant
by PAndreew | 2026-01-28 15:40:24+00:00
I wanted to solve my wife's work-related pain points revolving around Excel formulas and extracting data from PDFs documents by keeping her data locally. I also wanted to be able to collaborate with her if the need arises. So I've been working on this multi user virtual assistant based on the OpenCode SDK that we host on a Raspberry Pi behind Tailscale. The workflow in short
- users upload their work files through the web interface,
- add them to a chat session,
- invite other users,
- they churn the data with the agent,
- then download the resulting assets.
It has some rough edges especially around handling multi-turn conversations but thought maybe someone could find this useful. :) If you like it, please star and contribute to the project.
by stuff4ben | 2026-01-28 15:40:31+00:00
I haven't driven a Windows box since 2010 (and even then it was just a few months at work) and I'm perfectly happy! Except I'm on a Mac and have been at every job since 2006 when they came out with the Intel-based ones. I of course run Linux on VMs at work, but my daily driver has been and likely will forever be a Mac. I don't miss installing/tweaking video drivers or registry settings. Things just work 99.99% of the time for me. No one is perfect and Apple has made mistakes, but for me, I'm 100% satisfied.
by dallen33 | 2026-01-28 15:40:52+00:00
Several reasons:

1. Nintendo is releasing Virtual Boy - Nintendo Classics in February 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVvaCe4esCQ

2. Nintendo are also releasing a Virtual Boy shell compatible with the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 which will allow you to view the games in 3D, although I'm guessing it won't look as sharp or bright as the original. https://www.nintendo.com/en-ca/store/products/virtual-boy-fo...
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-28 15:41:15+00:00
> Say what you want about China's monoparty system, but it enables planning that spans decades.

That's not a trait of a monoparty system, or even any totalitarian autocratic system. There are democratic multiparty systems which have plans that spans decades, and autocratic totalitarian regimes that barely put together a coherent multi-year project.
by chris_wot | 2026-01-28 15:41:28+00:00
I’ve been working at a school that uses a mix of Surfacebooks, HP Elitebooks and MacBook Air M2s (now migrating everyone to M4s!).

I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I’ve never had to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates take forever, reboots aren’t very fast, programs crash, and (not OS related) but the new Outlook is universally despised.

I’ve never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly as I’ve seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to access the one app that relies on Windows.
by oblio | 2026-01-28 15:41:30+00:00
I'm not a big fan of LLMs, but while using it for day to day tasks, I get the same feeling I had when I first started the internet (I was lucky to start with broadband internet).

That feeling was one of empowerment: I was able to satisfy my curiosity about a lot of topics.

LLMs can do the same thing and save me a lot of time. It's basically a super charged Google. For programming it's a super charged auto complete coupled with a junior researcher.

My main concern is independence. LLMs in the hands of just a bunch of unchecked corporations are extremely dangerous. I kind of trusted Google, and even that trust is eroding, and LLMs can be extremely personal. The lack of trust ranges from risk of selling data and general data leaks, to intrusive and worse, hidden ads, etc.
by khat | 2026-01-28 15:41:33+00:00
Everyone says this but I have only ever used arch. Wiped windows and started with Manjaro. No VM to test straight to bare metal. I learned how Linux worked and then installed the base arch distro. If you can read a wiki, you can use arch. It's not rocket science. All the available arch flavored distros make it even easier today. I tried debian once and found it even more cumbersome. Is it apt or apt-get? is it install or update? Never stuck around to find out.
by htek | 2026-01-28 15:41:58+00:00
> Musk driving space technology forward, and I don't see him acting militaristic.

Surely, you jest. He's heavily entwined his companies with the US military. StarLink is used heavily in battlefield communications [1]. He sought to deny the courtesy to one of our allies when Russia disrupted Ukraine's satellite communications, but eventually reversed course over the optics of it [2].

Musk's Grok is going to be used by the Pentagon for the usual pursuits of police states everywhere [3].

1. https://spacenews.com/spacexs-expanding-role-in-u-s-defense/

2. https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/when-a-ceo-plays-presi...

3. https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-gains-favor-as-pentagon-emb...
by burningChrome | 2026-01-28 15:42:08+00:00
Kind of interesting after using Manjaro recently, I had stayed away from Ubuntu for a while and started researching to see if it had gotten any better. I found a bunch of blog and reddit posts about how Linux sucks so bad and how much superior Windows and MacOS are.

Only to see this article today. lol

I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.
by e12e | 2026-01-28 15:42:15+00:00
There's indeed an actual toggle at the top to switch on pedantic mode, FYI.

But still a bit odd that the article doesn't show assembly/cuda/opencl output of the compiler - nor show an example of anything parallel - like maybe a vector search, Mandelbrot calculation or something like that?

Something like this 2019 article on cuda for Julia:

https://nextjournal.com/sdanisch/julia-gpu-programming
by hanez | 2026-01-28 15:42:26+00:00
• Yes: isolated state (one VM per embed) is usually the right default. It avoids global locks (e.g., a GIL), makes scheduling simpler, and keeps failure/lifetime boundaries crisp.

• Yes: shared‑memory primitives are the “escape hatch” for when copying/serialization is too expensive, but they should be very carefully constrained.

• GC: If you design shared regions to be untraced (no VM heap pointers inside), each VM’s GC can remain independent and never stop other VMs. If you allow GC’d objects to be shared across VMs, you either need a global safepoint (stop‑the‑world across participants) or a more complex concurrent/barriered scheme.

I added some more information about this to the internals document.
by gortok | 2026-01-28 15:42:29+00:00
I want to switch to Linux for my EOL Windows 10 originally-built-for-gaming rig. It was “new” in 2016, so I hold out hope that there will be few compatibility issues. My biggest concerns are being able to play my library of steam games on it. Overall the problems I have are that last time I tried to put Linux on that machine I tried a dual boot system, and at the time UEFI did not play well with dual booting. I don’t know if it’s gotten better, but as of now I wouldn’t be dual booting anyway so conceivably it wouldn’t be an issue.
by deaux | 2026-01-28 15:42:33+00:00
1. It is. It makes me more likely to use Linux, and I'm not that far from the average. On Reddit r/gaming I've seen people who literally made the step and say exactly this "I installed Linux and when I can't figure something out I ask an LLM and it has done a great job so far".

It's happening right now. Maybe you're so opposed to the concept that you hate to imagine it, but it's the reality.

> or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares

Your concept of people installing Linux is behind because even just over the last 12 months things have changed a lot.
by jchw | 2026-01-28 15:42:42+00:00
Yeah, I personally still have a lot of 60 Hz panels. One of my favorites is a 43" 4K IPS. I don't think I will be able to get that at 120+ Hz any time soon.

Of course, this isn't a huge deal to me. The additional latency is not an unusable nightmare. I'm just saying that if you are particularly latency sensitive, it's something that you can affordably mitigate even when using a compositor. I think most people have been totally fine eating the compositor latency at 60 Hz.
by mariusor | 2026-01-28 15:43:03+00:00
> Nobody says that you will not have alternatives

Maybe you want to reread through this thread.

> Eventually you will not be able to block ads.

That's so far down the slippery slope and with so many other things that need to go wrong that I'm not worried and I'm willing to be the one to get "told you so" if it happens.
Show HN: TuringDB – The fastest analytical in-memory graph database in C++
by remy_boutonnet | 2026-01-28 15:43:07+00:00
Hi HN,

I am one of the cofounders of http://turingdb.ai. We built TuringDB while working on large biological knowledge graphs and graph-based digital twins with pharma & hospitals, where existing graph databases were unusable for deep graph traversals with hundreds or thousands of hops on (crappy) machines you can find in a hospital.

https://github.com/turing-db/turingdb

TuringDB is a new in-memory, column-oriented graph database optimised for read-heavy analytical workloads:

- Milliseconds (1) for multi-hop queries on graphs with 10M+ nodes/edges

- Lock-free reads via immutable snapshots

- Git-like versioning for graphs (branch, merge, time travel queries)

- Built-in graph exploration UI for large subgraphs

We wrote TuringDB from scratch in C++ and designed to have predictable memory and concurrency behaviour.

For example, for the Reactome biological knowledge graph, we see ~100× to 300× speedups over Neo4j on multi-hop analytical queries out of the box (details in first comment).

A free Community version is available and runnable locally:

https://docs.turingdb.ai/quickstart

https://github.com/turing-db/turingdb

Happy to answer technical questions.

(1): We actually hit sub-millisecond performance on many queries
by hansvm | 2026-01-28 15:43:23+00:00
Assuming the binary tree thing is the whole story, that still doesn't sound like a terrible choice on Google's part. Your first few years at Google you won't have enough leeway to do something like "make homebrew," and you will have to interact with an arcane codebase.

For tree reversal in particular, it shouldn't be any harder than:

1. If you don't know what a binary tree is then ask the interviewer (you probably _ought_ to know that Google asks you questions about those since their interview packet tells you as much, but let's assume you wanted to wing it instead).

2. Spend 5-10min exploring what that means with some small trees.

3. Then start somewhere and ask what needs to change. Clearly the bigger data needs to go left, and the smaller data needs to go right (using an ascending tree as whatever small example you're working on).

4. Examine what's left, and see what's out of order. Oh, interesting, I again need to swap left and right on this node. And this one. And this one.

5. Wait, does that actually work? Do I just swap left/right at every node? <5-10min of frantically trying to prove that to yourself in an interview>

6. Throw together the 1-5 lines of code implementing the algorithm.

It's a fizzbuzz problem, not a LeetCode Hard. Even with significant evidence to the contrary, I'd be skeptical of their potential next 1-3 years of SWE performance with just that interview to go off of.

That said, do they actually know that was the issue? With 4+ interviews I wouldn't ordinarily reject somebody just because of one algorithms brain-fart. As the interviewer I'd pivot to another question to try to get evidence of positive abilities, and as the hiring manager I'd consider strong evidence of positive abilities from other interviews much more highly than this one lack of evidence. My understanding is that Google (at least from their published performance research) behaves similarly.
by kreetx | 2026-01-28 15:43:45+00:00
The "bystander" was walking along with the officers blowing a whistle, and the guy that got between that bystander ("bystander") carried a gun. I don't think it's wise to interfere with police work by walking with them and doing that whistle thing and it's neither wise to bring a gun into this situation.

I'm sure the officers to whom this happened aren't happy either as this turned out, but I don't think they are the the only ones to blame.

Similar with the woman who was shot: should you be doing any police getaways or even driving towards any police officer?
by port11 | 2026-01-28 15:43:53+00:00
Our SFF HP came out at 150€ with flash storage and 16GB of RAM. I see used M1s for 200-250€ where we live. The only drawback of the M1 is you’d be stuck buying a NAS/DAS for the storage part, whereas the HP has 3 internal SATA ports. Neither option is silly, they have different pros/cons. Managing Linux quirks has gotten frustrating, for example.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-28 15:44:01+00:00
> oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming

People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.

I haven't fully switched over yet because the games the combo of the hardware I have + the games I play regularly, still give me issues vs. Windows. Getting them to run isn't the problem, but I haven't been able to solve miscellaneous crashes, lag, lower frame rates, etc.

My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.
by gatchipatchi | 2026-01-28 15:44:02+00:00
Interesting. Thats shockingly low for how long Palm has been out. I wonder what happened? I understand that palm reading is spooky (i saw a lot of paranoid articles when Palm launched and at least one of my friends mistook the tech for being a chip reader and told me that i had gotten the mark of the beast), but convenience is king, and the marketing seemed perfect. Even in tech-forward silicon valley, i cant remember seeing anyone use Palm except me and my spouse.
Show HN: Config manager for Claude Code (and others) – rules, MCPs, permissions
by jtr101 | 2026-01-28 15:44:24+00:00
I use Claude Code across multiple projects with different conventions and some shared repos just as it so happens to be the real world. Managing the config files (.claude/rules/, mcps.json, settings.json) by hand got tedious, so I built a local web UI for it.

This one started out as claude-config but migrated to coder-config as I'm adding others (Gemini, AG, Codex, etc).

Main features:
- Visual editor for rules, permissions, and MCP servers
- Project registry to switch between codebases
- "Workstreams" to group related repos (frontend + API + shared libs) with shared context
- Auto-load workstreams on cd to included folders
- Also supports Gemini CLI and Codex CLI

Install:
npm install -g coder-config
coder-config ui # UI at http://localhost:3333
coder-config ui install # optionally, autostart on MacOS

It can also be installed as a PWA and live in your taskbar.

Open source, runs locally, no account needed.
Feedback and contributions welcome!

Sorry, haven't had any chance to test on other OSes (linux/windows)
by Terretta | 2026-01-28 15:44:51+00:00
the chinese text happened last night in your main chat agent widget, the cartoon woman professing to be in a town in brazil with a lemon tree on her cupboard. she claimed it was a test of subtitling then admitted it wasn't.

btw, she gives helpful instructions like "/imagine" whatever but the instructions only seem to work about 50% of the time. meaning, try the same command or variants a few times, and it works about half of them. she never did shift out of aussie accent though.

she came up with a remarkably fanciful explanation why as a brazilian she sounded aussie and why imagining native accent like she said would work didn't...

i was shocked when /imagine face left turn to the side did actually work, the agent was in side profile and precisely as natural as the original front facing avatar

all in all, by far the best agent experience i've played with!
by ryandrake | 2026-01-28 15:44:54+00:00
> Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy.

That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC. How did we get to the point where applications by default came with all of this shit?