MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by leggerss | 2026-01-10 18:15:18+00:00
This is satire, right? Or reasoning by analogy... right??

I looked up "SCP object", and boy that was a rabbit hole. Interesting and entertaining, sure. But if you "fully believe" in anything on that website, please try to confirm your reality with observations or lived experience rather than text from the internet.

Here's an excerpt from SCP's "Guide For Newcomers"[1]:

> This is the SCP Foundation Wiki, a collaborative writing site based around the premise that… in essence, magic is real. It's not exactly like the traditional fantasy style magic you've come to know, but that's the best way we can describe the stuff we have here - Anomalies; items and critters that do not follow the rules of nature as we know them. Staircases that go on forever, mechanical gods from the beginning of time, otherwise regular humans who reshape reality with their mind: these are the kinds of things that, if known to the public, could cause mass hysteria and start wars on scales unprecedented. Due to that, there exists an organization called the SCP Foundation, whose job is to research paranormal activity, keep these creatures and objects concealed from the public, and protect humanity from the horrors of the dark.

[1] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/guide-for-newcomers
by mkozlows | 2026-01-10 18:15:29+00:00
What's funny is, the author is only having these questions because they chose a wacky Arch-based ultra-techie distro that I'd never even heard of.

If they'd just installed normal Ubuntu or Fedora, they wouldn't even know what a bootloader was, and they'd just use whatever desktop environment (probably GNOME, maybe KDE) came with it.
by ttul | 2026-01-10 18:15:34+00:00
I have found significant frustration since the pandemic in the most unexpected place: the new expectation of punctuality for online meetings. In meatspace, in the before times, if a meeting was set for 2pm in the board room, everyone understood this to mean 2pm was the time to come through the door and chat for a bit while everyone got comfortable. The actual meeting would start at 2:05-2:10.

Online, there is no equivalent to walking in the door for a bit of a chit chat. Everyone just materializes instantly and then we’re supposed to be ready to go by 2:01. I miss meatspace for meetings and the more casual, human-matched pace.
by DANmode | 2026-01-10 18:16:03+00:00
These comments (on UHC, Aetna) always strike me the same way as complaining about the lack of inflight meal,

baggage fees,

or lack of WiFi,

on, say, Spirit Airlines.

You looked at the list of insurers/jobs offering health insurance carriers,

selected the cheapest, or second-cheapest option,

and you’re surprised they’re harder to work with?

How?
by supermatt | 2026-01-10 18:16:07+00:00
I think you have some confusion about the role of the Linux Foundation in relation to the kernel. They provide financial, organisational, and infrastructural support and neither own nor control its development.

Linus is the BDFL and lead maintainer and if he wanted to move the kernel development anywhere else he could do so, but Linus Torvalds has stated that he personally agrees with them.

That is not the US controlling him, it is his own decision. Moreover he has dual citizenship and could renounce his US citizenship if he chose. When Greg takes over maintainership things may be different.
by lexokoh | 2026-01-10 18:16:21+00:00
I didn’t arrive at this idea all at once.

It crept up slowly, through small frustrations, awkward workarounds, and moments where I caught myself thinking this feels wrong, but it’s the only way.

Over time, a pattern became hard to ignore:

We’ve gotten incredibly good at designing APIs, but we’ve barely designed access at all.

And now access is starting to behave exactly like an API, whether we intended it to or not.

I’m writing this because I kept running into access decisions that felt small in the moment, but kept shaping systems in ways I didn’t expect, and I didn’t have a good mental model for why.

Check out my thoughts.

https://dantelex.com/blog/access-is-the-new-api
by prezk | 2026-01-10 18:17:59+00:00
Pretty much every laptop on the planet will run Linux. Maybe your optics are tinted because you seem to be a Mac person, and Linux support for newer Macs has known issues with low power modes.

I note how your 12+ hour claim was reduced to 5 hours when you actually put it to real work. It's still impressive, of course, but 5 hours aren't out of reach for Ryzen laptops either.

BTW, I have a RISC-V platform with 8 1.6GHz CPUs that uses under 5W under full load; on your 100Wh battery it would last for 20 hours. It's not a complete system, and performance lags behind Apple/Intel CPUs, but I think in few years RISC-V may take a bite out of both.
by Aaargh20318 | 2026-01-10 18:18:03+00:00
> I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around

I don’t understand this argument, as they seem incredibly impractical for that. There is very little space for ‘stuff’, there is only the uncovered bed which is relatively small. The bed is also at an awkward height so very impractical to get stuff in or out. Since the bed is open, you always have to take all your ‘stuff’ out, you can’t leave tools in there or anything of value or it will get stolen. If you put a hard cover on. it leaves even less space. And since a large part of the vehicle has no roof you cannot have a roof rack.

You do not see these used by people in construction or other trades here in Europe. They use vans. An (extended) van has an ungodly amount of lockable storage space, easily accessible with side and back doors, with a floor at a reasonable height and if that isn’t enough you with a roof rack you can strap a lot to the roof as well.

I really don’t see how something like an F-150 is more practical for ‘hauling stuff’ than something like a Mercedes Sprinter.

I did look up some numbers (used the most capable configuration I could find for each of the vehicles):

Max bed length for an F-150: 247cm
Max cargo space length for a Sprinter: 481cm

Bed/cargo width: F-150: 126cm, Sprinter 178cm
Bed/cargo height: F-150: 54cm, Sprinter: 200cm

Max. payload capacity: F-150 : 1106kg, Sprinter 1477kg for the extra-long version, 2447kg for the long version.
by theropost | 2026-01-10 18:18:05+00:00
I think there is a real issue here, but I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books. The bigger problem is incentives. We built a system where writing docs, tutorials, and open technical content paid off indirectly through traffic, subscriptions, or services. LLMs get a lot of value from that work, but they also break the loop that used to send value back to the people and companies who created it.

The Tailwind CSS situation is a good example. They built something genuinely useful, adoption exploded, and in the past that would have meant more traffic, more visibility, and more revenue. Now the usage still explodes, but the traffic disappears because people get answers directly from LLMs. The value is clearly there, but the money never reaches the source. That is less a moral problem and more an economic one.

Ideas like GPL-style licensing point at the right tension, but they are hard to apply after the fact. These models were built during a massive spending phase, financed by huge amounts of capital and debt, and they are not even profitable yet. Figuring out royalties on top of that, while the infrastructure is already in place and rolling out at scale, is extremely hard.

That is why this feels like a much bigger governance problem. We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way. I am not sure our policies or institutions are ready to catch up to that reality yet.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-10 18:18:13+00:00
Liz Truss was barely in long enough for people to conduct a poll!

Thatcher was controversial but had ardent supporters. Where are Starmer's supporters? There aren't many even within the Labour Party.

No idea whether someone like Pitt the Younger or Canning back over a century ago were less popular. Really the onus should be on people to disprove this. I have not encountered a single live Starmer supporter in the wild but anyway...

https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/starmer-labour-c...

"New polling reveals Sir Keir is the least popular prime minister on record, with a net satisfaction rating of -66, lower than previous lows for Rishi Sunak and John Major."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/27/starmer-leas...
"Starmer is least popular PM on record, poll finds
Only 13 per cent of voters are satisfied with Prime Minister, the fewest of any leader since 1970s."

I suppose you will complain about the Telegraph, but it isn't a tabloid.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/12/wh...

"Keir Starmer is the least popular prime minister on record, less than 18 months after being elected. In this sense, he is making history. Few, if any, mainstream political commentators anticipated this situation before the 2024 election. Of course, many on the radical left predicted it several years ago, but who listens to us?"
by HanClinto | 2026-01-10 18:18:37+00:00
My advice? Stop assuming things are good. Lose the sense of shock at evil existing. Assume it's all evil and there is no aspect of it that is not corrupted in some fashion by depravity. Nothing is new. Nothing is pure.

We should not despair that the world is still evil. It should not surprise us -- any honest reading of history should tell us this. Evil does not shock or surprise me. Instead, I'm surprised and delighted that -- despite its depravity -- any good exists in the world at all.

The world is continually evil all the time, yet I take hope and work to cultivate its redemption. Assume it's all evil, yet seek for pockets of good. Control the controllables and don't lose your head over the rest.

I don't think we can prevent evil from occurring. If all good people walked away from technology today, corporate asshats and totalitarian governments would still continue forward. We can't stop that.

If we want to have any hope of a good ending, we need upright, moral men and women at the forefront of technology working to do good in spite of bad actors existing.

I place a lot of hope in the open-source movement -- it feels like one of the only ways for good to survive and continue to grow.

If you want more encouragement along these lines, the classic article "The world is awful. The world is better. The world can be much better." [0] may be helpful.

* [0] https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-10 18:18:51+00:00
I found that programming concepts map really well to digital electronics. The objects in your object oriented language are real objects with their own internal physical state. A large fraction of what embedded engineers do is just APIs and protocols.

Controversial opinion but you do not need to learn electronics to have a good time. One can have plenty of fun simply writing software and plugging prebuilt modules together on a breadboard. Ohm and Maxwell need not apply.
by tavavex | 2026-01-10 18:18:58+00:00
I think you've hit the nail on the head, but not in the same way as what I was thinking. It's not about impressiveness - as in, a show of wealth or status. It's all about size. This is a relatively small car, but as far as I can tell, back in the day all of them were considerably smaller, even the ones that were pricey and designed to look cool or expensive. Nowadays, the most obnoxious and dangerous car drivers have united with the most hands-off governments and manufacturers willing to pander to them exclusively to create an arms race of building the biggest megatank that can fit within a lane and only occupy six parking spots at once.
by readthenotes1 | 2026-01-10 18:19:00+00:00
That is exactly right as anybody who has done the work in a wrong way recognizes.

In a way, the computer science student may or may not have realized that he has stumbled upon one of the biggest problems in software development--the arrogance of ignorance.

Especially with lawn mowers, turns are highly weighted over distance. Also, if you are regularly mowing, then it's not so obvious what has been mowed and what not. So regularization and simplification of the path is even more important than turns so that you can discard whole plots in the to-do list.

Roomba's (RIP) don't have the same memory and turn weight function that humans do, of course.
by ankit219 | 2026-01-10 18:19:01+00:00
TIL you cant take a joke on the name, and you have to invoke a stated premise to feel better. If you really thing that is the only thing the act is doing (without realizing the carve outs it has for facial recognition etc.) then i have a tower bridge to sell to you.

Rules and regulations always assume it would be used by a rational actor, but should be written such that someone irrational would not be able to misuse it. That is teh premise of 1984. But you do you .
by JohnLocke4 | 2026-01-10 18:19:21+00:00
At first I wanted to write a comment about how cars and sex are apparently very well linked. Upon thinking it over once more, it appears that the real link to sex is privacy, which is of course obvious. Thinking over it once more, we're brought back to the real selling point of cars: total privacy. Public transport is on paper really good, but it is totally devoid of privacy - which means that it is bad in reality. In other more provocative words, public transportation is bad because you can't have sex on the bus
by jijijijij | 2026-01-10 18:19:38+00:00
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool.

I don't think that's true, the car as mere tool is romantic anachronism. Back then, cars were central identitarian elements to the post-war, western promise of salvation. Whole cities were torn down and rebuild to fit the car. The car had ideological significance. I think, identitarian attachment to the car is actually less today, but due to the historic importance and focus, cars have become unconditional necessities in many places.

I think the reason, you frequently see "old cars as tools" in southern Europe still, is the fact most regions there only started industrialization after 1970 and were/are still greatly underdeveloped/relatively poor, compared to eg. early industrialized nations like Germany, which are super car-centric. They suffered less car adaptation at the time and as a consequence e.g. SUVs would be rather impractical in some places with extremely narrow streets. Additionally, (remaining) farmers in e.g. Germany are almost exclusively rather rich entrepreneurs managing industrialized food production on flat, boring lands, than "poor peasants" caring for traditional farms in remote villages living off tourism somewhere pretty.

Probably less due to zeitgeist/mentality, but rather geography, historic economic abilities and availability.
by wolftickets | 2026-01-10 18:19:39+00:00
I use this feature DAILY at work, you built something great here. I tend to write in md locally, this makes sharing the work with others easy. Especially to those less plaintext inclined.

One thing I did notice, I can't seem to find a way to set a default codeblock font format. The default font option isn't totally monospaced and so some ascii art looks weird :/

I don't think that has anything to do with your contribution though.

THANK YOU!
by ipsi | 2026-01-10 18:20:03+00:00
Even then - I have a reasonably nice Brother Printer/Scanner/etc device, and I could never get AirPrint to reliably work until I switched over to using Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. Something to do with it going to sleep and not broadcasting the necessary mDNS stuff, IIRC. I couldn't find any combination of settings in the printer to make it happy, and since it's now right next to a switch, it's not really worth the effort of digging any further.
by eXpl0it3r | 2026-01-10 18:20:24+00:00
In my opinion this is mostly self-inflicted by Microsoft.

Sure some push for web-based solution has moved a lot of people away from desktop applications, but even before that Microsoft muddied the waters of native UI development.

Moving from User32.dll and GDI to GPU based rendering with WPF, might not have been the worst idea - and WPF is still going strong - but it's a clear cut, leaving old apps un-upgradable. So if companies need to eventually rewirte it, will they stick with desktop apps or move to "web apps"?

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't stop there, but we've since seen a bunch of different attempts at new Windows UI libs to the point, where nobody trusts Microsoft anymore (remember Silverlight?) and everyone else is left confused by the chaos of an ecosystem.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-10 18:21:06+00:00
A thought on universal conscription: over here we don't have truly universal conscription (just got voted down), but we do have universal male conscription (with exceptions for objectors and people out of the country), so the male portion of the police force doesn't feel any need to run around in "tacticool" — they get enough of that every year during refresher training. In fact, our police don't even normally wear helmets.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-10 18:21:13+00:00
Hmm with the way people go on about it I always assumed there was more to Org mode than "Markdown for Emacs", but this post makes it sound exactly like that.

He's also not exactly gaining credibility with "Markdown is useless because it's not standardised; there are lots of slightly different implementations"... Well yeah that's mildly annoying but it's still very useful! And then he completely throws away all credibility with "this isn't a problem with Org mode because Emacs is the only implementation!".

Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown?
by matt3D | 2026-01-10 18:21:56+00:00
These strawman arguments lack nuance.

If the person can use AI to lead a noticeably better life, something that may have been impossible previously due to economic circumstance, then the first order benefits outweigh the second order drawbacks.

I’m not disputing what you’re saying, I just think that treating it like a zero sum game every time the conversation comes up is showing an immense amount of privilege.

You, me, the parent commenter; we’re all dying, we don’t have time to optimise for the best outcome.
by just_the_tip2 | 2026-01-10 18:25:01+00:00
In 1996 the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act made it illegal to perform FGM on minors for non-medical reasons, and in 2013 the Transport for Female Genital Mutilation Act prohibited transporting a minor out of the country for the purpose of FGM.

Male genital mutilation on minors for non-medical reasons should also be made illegal. It is amazing Medicaid still pays for it in many states. The American Academy of Pediatrics is failing the United States.
by tw04 | 2026-01-10 18:26:03+00:00
> It feels like we’re getting there with journalism

Huh? Media is less trusted now than it’s ever been and that’s largely driven by Twitter driving people to be “first” instead of accurate.

Not to mention the state sponsored bots promoting lies to try to distract from actual journalism. Combine that with billionaires attempting to buy up all our trusted sources of news to completely control the narrative (a functioning government would put a nail in Ellison) and we’re screwed. And no, there’s 0 chance that individuals are filing the void that will be created. They don’t have the access or the funds to do anything significantly meaningful.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-10 18:26:04+00:00
Indeed nothing other than being the only device that dropped connections on some of my routers, no hardware video decoding no matter what tips from Linux forums I tried, OpenGL 3.3 when the card supported OpenGL 4.1....

And when during 2024 I looked for a replacement after it died, I was so lucky that I got one with an UEFI that refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD, while having no issues loading the same, if it was on external box over USB.
by walterbell | 2026-01-10 18:26:19+00:00
Major LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT) have a copy button for their output, yielding markdown that is already being consistently rendered by other apps, reflecting what was consistently rendered as HTML. Presumably LLM vendors have built a deterministic way of generating spec-compliant HTML and their well-defined dialect of Markdown, otherwise their chat UI output would not render consistently.
by chongli | 2026-01-10 18:27:32+00:00
I love all of these stories of writing new software for Classic Macs. There is something really special about maintaining the usefulness of an old tool that most people have forgotten. Farmers who restore and run vintage tractors know this feeling well. They have built communities around this intersection of hobby and real work.

I have a Mac Classic given to me by my uncle. Last I checked (a few years ago) it booted up just fine. I need to crack it open before trying again because I’m afraid of leaky caps or batteries. Just need to find the time.
by axiologist | 2026-01-10 18:27:50+00:00
Quote: »Prejudice is one reason decades of research got autism so wrong. Researchers measured autistic people against neurotypical expectations and called every difference a deficit. They tested empathy by measuring in-group preference and missed commitment to universal fairness. They measured creativity by counting the number of ideas and missed originality. They saw moral consistency and called it rigidity. They saw deep engagement and called it rigidity. They saw sensory richness and called it disorder.

Most critically, they failed to ask autistic people about their inner experiences. They studied autism without genuinely listening to the autistic perspective. For decades, science examined autistic people through a lens of pathology and deficit, rather than dignity, comparing us to animals while missing our humanity. But autistic people don't lack humanity. Research just lacked the humanity to see it.«
by derefr | 2026-01-10 18:27:51+00:00
> easier to write without using tags

...until you want to write any tabular data. The Markdown syntax for tables might look pretty when you read it, but the only time I've ever bothered to produce it has been with the help of a WYSIWYG Markdown editor (e.g. Typora). And I actively recoil from the idea of modifying one (since that could potentially change the width of a column, requiring carefully adding/removing spaces from the other cells in the column... ugh.)

Meanwhile, I've been hand-rolling + hand-modifying HTML tables with ease since the HTML4 days. HTML tables do not emit ugh-fields. (With the tradeoff that they do not visually read as tables in their source-code representation. But they still do read as cells grouped into records — and for most cases, that's almost as good.)

And yeah, sure, for embedding wholly-plaintext data tables, you could just drop some lines of CSV in a quote-fenced code block. But that doesn't work if you want that table to render with MD semantics itself, such that you can style the contents of the cells using MD syntax. Think "links to additional resources in Github READMEs."

IMHO, a format that's mostly just Markdown, but which deprecates MD's existing table syntax in favor of a much-simpler-to-write "sigil-annotated list-of-lists" syntax, would be a big hit.

(And, now that I think about it, would also probably make it simple for LLMs to spit actual headered tables at you, rather than relying on endless hierarchical bulleted lists.)
by faust201 | 2026-01-10 18:28:11+00:00
With all respect libre office startup times are awful in Linux. UI still needs work over.
Lots of resources. Libre office works poorly if one has 4 or 8 GB RAM.

If there was a minimal footprint libre office (like online with collaboration line or next cloud it will be great but it is very unreliable)

And often people have gotten used to

- simple just open with browser
- needs few resources
- love or hate Android is most popular. So people are able access documents in phone

There are also companies slowing realizing the strong use of Google docs so that definitely design it more compatible with Google docs rather than libre office. And many companies have already bought into Google ecosystem.