MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-17 21:04:51+00:00
China emits 34% of the world’s total carbon emissions, the USA produces 12%.

Since 2000, China has increased emissions by 262%. The USA has decreased emissions by 21%.

If that’s how China is charging ahead, we don’t need it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
by m3047 | 2026-01-17 21:04:55+00:00
Well, strictly anecdata but there was a time when I worked on code which for $reasons had no dedicated test environment, and externalities were not our problem according to management. So we were reaching out to the big bad world for testing, but we didn't own the network between it and us. I ended up writing tests for the network. Caught a lot of problems with the network. Didn't make any friends.

DISCLAIMER: I've been around IT for probably the majority of y'all's lifetimes, so I'm not saying this happens often. But just because something is fundamentally wrong, doesn't mean that all fundamentally wrong things are the same. In my experience they differ more from each other than the possible good ways of doing the same thing. Don't conflate things without a good reason.
Show HN: Rusted Doom Launcher – Bringing Steam Experience to Doom Wads and Mods
by stared | 2026-01-17 21:05:19+00:00
Hi HN!

There are so many wonderful community-made maps and episodes for classic Doom. I wanted to play them, but didn't want to manually download WADs or mods and pass parameters to GZDoom.

The scene is active; see the yearly Cacowards: https://www.doomworld.com/cacowards/2025/.

So, I created an app for bringing the Steam experience to Doom. Since I have been using it for 2 months, I decided to share it here—it might be at a stage where it is useful for others.

It requires the GZDoom source port (or UZDoom) and the main Doom files (you need to get Doom from GOG.com or Steam).

Right now, it works on macOS with builds for Apple Silicon. However, since it is built with Tauri 2, it should be easy to make it work for Windows and Linux (contributions are welcome!).

If you want to play just one Megawad, I recommend Ancient Aliens by skillsaw (https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/87784-ancient-aliens-f...).

Looking for feedback!
by dangus | 2026-01-17 21:05:21+00:00
It’s so funny. My company is basically merger hell and we have both Teams and Slack for similar reasons.

One of the more important acquired companies with a cash cow product basically refused to move to Teams because they hate it and concocted a reason that we just had to keep it.

The reason was total BS but it was crafted to appeal to the higher-ups, and it worked, because nobody was really going to fight over less than ten bucks per person per month.
by ainiriand | 2026-01-17 21:05:41+00:00
I think we are presented with a false dichotomy here, as you can use llm tools for menial tasks and code whatever scratches your itch at the same time. For me, I really do not enjoy writing any frontend, html, javascript, whatever; I just want to bring some website I need to light. I focus on other code and that is what brings me joy.
by eks391 | 2026-01-17 21:05:44+00:00
Trees are not static, unchanging, pop into existence and forget about, things.
Trees that don't get regular "updates" of adequate sunlight, water, and nutrients die. In fact, too much light or water could kill it. Or soil that is not the right courseness or acidity level could hamper or prevent growth. Now add "bugs". Literal bugs, diseases, and even competing plants that could eat, poison, or choke the tree.
You might be thinking of trees that are indigenous to an area. Even these compete for the resources and plagues of their area, but are more apt than the trees accustom to different environments, and even they go through the cycle of life.
I think his analogy was perfect, because this is the first time coding could resemble nature. We are just used to the carefully curated human made code, as there has not been such a thing as naturally occuring, no human interaction, code before
Ask HN: Is discoverability not important to Hacker News?
by blutoot | 2026-01-17 21:06:48+00:00
I'll start with an anecdote that rubbed me the wrong way.

I just came across something called clawdbot (sure - sounds deceptively like claudebot but who cares). I searched for clawdbot on HN and none of these entries had any comments or upvotes. On the other hand, in the Reddit world and on X, https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot has an insane following. And I learned about it from a recent episode in Jessica/Sam Lessin's podcast (More or Less Podcast).

Why the lack of love for this tool? <tinfoil>Deliberate mass-downvoting by the AI-powers-that-be?</tinfoil> Are these category of "wrapper toolsets considered too pedestrian for the high-minded CS fundamentalists? Or were all the submissions made at inopportune times and they each got buried under the ocean of me-too entries.

In general, this is not the first time I have seen such a wide gap in what the HN audience values and what the rest of the tech-friendly world gravitates towards.

It is depressing that so many awesome / interesting submissions don't see the light of the day in HN and yet so many of us are so hooked onto HN because we have formed this collective sentiment that HN represents last true gating from the tech elite about what merits a discussion (or adoption) and what doesn't.

I agree many of us come to HN and go straight for the discussions because more often than not these are intellectually much richer than the story / demo itself.

I am really hoping YC has plans to improve the discoverability aspect without sacrificing gating quality.
by jijijijij | 2026-01-17 21:06:57+00:00
The president who is willing to fix this will have to bend the knee. The US behavior is straight insulting and caused major economic damage. If your drunk uncle pointed a gun to your head, a simple "Sorry!" won't do.

Quite frankly, considering the wide diplomatic damage and collapsing influence, paired with its deep social, cultural and economic internal issues... I can totally see the US failing. They depend so much on power projection and economic influence, I don't see how they could possibly manage on their own. What will happen to the dollar if the US isn't guaranteeing stability anymore? The debt will explode and former allies may call on their stake. Due to the AI bubble, the American economy is worse than it looks. It may all come down together.

Is California going to hold the bag for Florida? What's being American other than an international embarrassment and a bully, at this point? How strong is the shared identity when it comes to it? With ICE and all, can they get over the differences in "opinion" about who's deserving human rights and who doesn't?
by dh2022 | 2026-01-17 21:08:26+00:00
The high prices due to Donnie's policies absolutely impact me. I paid $5 for a piece of plastic that before used to cost $2. I paid $55 / fire alarm - this used to be under $30. I paid $55 for 2 dishes at a "cheap" Chinese take-out. At these prices I balked at buying some Chinese food for myself - I only bought these dishes for my son to eat.

So yeah, it's bad.
by DiskoHexyl | 2026-01-17 21:08:29+00:00
All the great QAs with whom I've worked would have made good developers (and they actually WERE good developers, only with a QA name and salary).

The problem is that a great QA earns less than a mediocre developer within the same company. And has a much lower status. And also fewer career opportunities elsewhere.

No wonder most of those guys switched at one point or another
by marcyb5st | 2026-01-17 21:08:43+00:00
Yeah.

Spain in the 1500s, the Netherlands in the 1600s and the British empire in the 1800s are good examples of countries considered too big to fail that they eventually crashed and burned and lost their world leader statuses rather fast.

In all three cases over reliance on new debt to fund stuff, disappearance of the middle class, and abusing their dominance (military and/or economic) made them crumble as other countries steered away from dealing with them.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-17 21:08:50+00:00
I think most are totally unaware. The ones that could become victimized by the administration are quietly terrified and worried about their future. But they can’t speak up because their CEOs are fans of the administration. One disappointing pattern I see is many tech workers downplaying what’s going on - I think it’s hard for them to imagine what the impact is when it doesn’t threaten them specifically.
by tailspin2019 | 2026-01-17 21:09:29+00:00
Being from the UK - one of the privileged few to be tariffed - I couldn’t give a fuck about this.

The thing that makes me viscerally angry in my soul though is reading about Greenlanders who are now stocking up on food and/or making plans to leave their country if the worst case happens.

What the actual fuck. I can’t believe this is the reality we’re living in.

So, tariff away. As someone else said, it’s a badge of honour at this point.
by Ylpertnodi | 2026-01-17 21:09:35+00:00
Europe is pretty big and varied.

>The problem in Europe isn't keeping warm in the winter but keeping cool in the summer. In part thanks to their near-total lack of AC in residential buildings,

The times they are a-changing. Every house on my 21 year old estate came with ac. I'd assume the same for newer constructions.
People rarely use it due to the price of electricity. Temps get well over 30C for a couple of weeks in august.
by nikcub | 2026-01-17 21:09:46+00:00
Clickhouse are on a bit of a roll. acquired peerdb and are doing a hosted postgres product[0]

Acquired hyperdx[1] for their clickstack[2] observability platform and adding langfuse to a bunch of other llm related acquisitions and products

They're really building out a snowflake / databricks alternative

[0] https://clickhouse.com/cloud/postgres

[1] https://clickhouse.com/docs/cloud/manage/hyperdx

[2] https://clickhouse.com/use-cases/observability
by andrewflnr | 2026-01-17 21:09:56+00:00
> Nearly all employees have studied at a university, so the people are very used to writing texts (papers, seminar papers, lecture notes, thesis, ...).

I wish. Most people I've known in universities seem to read and write the absolute minimum to get by.

But I tend to agree that writing is preferable to meetings in most cases. I want to try out a policy that all meetings of more than two people must produce a written artifact, or clarifying edits to an existing document, that explains whatever ambiguity required a meeting to clear up. But you also need people to read. People don't read.
by amlib | 2026-01-17 21:10:18+00:00
> given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.

> "Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."

You really haven't given desktop linux a chance in the last two to four years have you? I will agree its not "ergonomic" enough _yet_ for many casual and intermediary users but I assure you a competent intermediary user or advanced user can do all those tasks without much fuss nowadays. I've been using desktop linux for almost 20 years now and its so much easier nowadays to throw random programs (flatpaks, snaps, appimages, distroboxes and whatnot helps a ton) and have them work correctly, build up a generalist linux workstation that does just about anything you want.

> Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.

I wish this could be communicated more clearly to prospective desktop linux users but usually what you want is to be using the bleeding edge. Arch is too bloody and complicated for most users, Fedora strikes a nice balance but will leave you with some cuts and Ubuntu is usually the safest choice, but can be a bit stale.

> Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.

Try a gnome based distro (without all the prejudice like "eww it looks like a tablet ui") and tell me if it isn't a damn good, modern and intuitive UI. It has it's faults and own goals I wished the knucklehead gnome devs would fix but its a far cry from anemic linux desktop environments of yore.

As far as linux supporting everything under the sun... I just don't think thats a prerequesite for it to be a good windows alternative and amass a critical mass of users. Maybe once it has 20% market share being everything to everyone will be a goal but for now the best you can do is give it an honest try every few years and see for yourself if it's good enough for your use case. See if existing FOSS software is adequate for your needs or weather it's possible or you are willing to run some of the niche windows apps in wine.

There is no chance of linux becoming more popular if even the crowd here at hacker news isn't willing to give it chance once in a while.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-17 21:10:25+00:00
Stallman was right?

Seriously, I like these ideas a lot. But/and also, the GNU Manifesto strikes me as ultimately "extremely similar but perhaps clearer," with the added bonus of having arguable "real life teeth," given that it was the inspiration for the GPL.

Cue somewhat understandable, yet still perhaps annoying, discussions of "Stallman the person."
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-17 21:10:39+00:00
Not wrong, but "right wing populist" are your words. I did not use them. What I described above is not specifically "right wing populist", just kakistocratic. And the rational response from EU and others is the same regardless of who is and who isn't "right wing populist", EU members included.

Being "right wing populist" won't change that response. The caveat is that populists are not very rational.
by lukan | 2026-01-17 21:11:12+00:00
The weird part is, calling women gatekeepers of sex. When it is also men who gatekeeps.

The gross part is, that this reminds of older times, when men had the legal right to have sex with their wife whenever they wanted (it is a quite new thing, that there can be rape in marriage, the current chancellor of germany famously opposed this legal change). In short, patriarcharical BS that women are objects owned by men and that this is the natural order.
by rcMgD2BwE72F | 2026-01-17 21:12:11+00:00
>In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT

I don't use any of these except YouTube (if only I could find the content elsewhere…) and I still pay for them when I purchase anything advertised on these properties because, of course, the companies advertising on Google makes all their customers pay for the free (lol) services. All advertising expenses are included in the price of the products, even if you never saw any ads.

We could easily charge for each of these services and still have them. Advertising is not necessary at all. It's just a way to make others pay for your services. It's a free riding problem to externalize costs on those who don't partake in the scheme.

Pay your share and don't call free what others will subsidize. Unless if a public service and we collectively agree on the split (vote and taxes, which we can debate publicly)
by hvb2 | 2026-01-17 21:13:13+00:00
> Also, fucking over our farmers in unstable world does not seem like a smart thing to do.

Everyone can solve this for their own farmers. Just buy local, problem solved.

Does that mean some things might be a bit more expensive? Yes, you're paying to keep them around just like you might want someone to pay for you to be employed.

If we don't it's a race to the bottom for everyone.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-17 21:14:16+00:00
AI assisted coding (and broader idea exploration) is 100% bringing me joy in this way.

I don't code for a living in any way, but I teach IT. And for years and years I've had little script ideas and tasks (e.g. music organization) that worked decently, but also life got in the way and I have that thing where I want it to work just right etc, and now that the pipeline is orders of magnitude shorter, man this stuff is FUN for me again.
by yummypaint | 2026-01-17 21:14:17+00:00
These people aren't temporarily insane, they have always been this way. The same hatred and stupidity have been prevalent in US dinnertable discussions for decades, but much less in the actual halls of power because we used to have more collective sense to not grant people like that authority over others in general. If the rest of American society regains its agency, the toxic %25 will just go back to corroding the country as they were before. They are secure in knowing they will not be treated in the way they would treat others if given the opportunity.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-17 21:15:39+00:00
Agreed that a huge part of effectively using LLMs in education will be teaching proper evaluation of sources and what does/doesn't constitute a primary source.

A lot of this feels like the conversation when Wikipedia was new. (Yes, I'm from that grade-school generation)

The key lesson was Wikipedia isn't a primary source and can't be used to directly support a claim. It can absolutely be used to help locate a primary source in the research process though!

Granted, LLM use is a bit trickier than Wikipedia, but fundamentally it's the same: if a paper needs citations, and kids understand that LLMs aren't valid sources, then they'll figure it out.

To me, the more critical gap will be in the thinking process, and I expect "no computer" assignments and in-class exercises to become more popular.
by metalman | 2026-01-17 21:16:47+00:00
there is absolutly no possibility of injecting enough of anything into the atmosphere in such a way as the CO² cost of doing so dosn't cause more heating than the "airosol" reflects into space, which in itself is purely conjectural, there bieng, absolutly zero engineering paractice or experience to go from,.... well, not counting an unlimited supply of hubris
by kbos87 | 2026-01-17 21:16:56+00:00
As a technology company scales up, making great software becomes one of a hundred things the company needs to do right in order to survive and grow. Doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely essential, but so is having a strong GTM machine, finance competency, operational rigor, HR, and a long list of other essential functions.

It’s only the tech industry where the voice and ego of small companies hold outsized share of voice and love to claim the contrary.
by lukan | 2026-01-17 21:17:32+00:00
"I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect""

My understanding from reading the bible while I was still christian is pretty much, that in the older parts, god was indeed not almighty. He was just the god of a desert tribe. And of course a stronger god than the other gods of the inferior tribes ... slowly evolving to obviously the strongest god up to the point that there was only one god. And there can be only one god if he is almighty. Or, so powerful that the difference does not matter anymore.

Anyway, the logical fallacy of the "almighty" thing was the main thing for me to give up on the concept. I cannot accept a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven), eternal damnation (or salvation) for being who I was made to be, influenced by an environment also totally controlled by the creator.
by whispem | 2026-01-17 21:17:49+00:00
minikv implements an S3-compatible API, so you can use S3 clients/tools to PUT and GET objects through its HTTP endpoints—just like a real S3 server.

However, all storage is managed locally (in-memory, RocksDB, or Sled) by minikv. It does not use AWS S3 or any cloud storage as a backend; minikv itself stores your data on local disks.

So: applications can use minikv as if it were S3, but minikv stores data locally (not in S3).
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-01-17 21:18:02+00:00
And I think the Trump cabinet noticed, because they pivoted!
(The actual analysis is at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46630190 btw)

Edit: see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affair_of_Epidamnus#The_Atheni...
by razingeden | 2026-01-17 21:18:19+00:00
Many of the advertising targets (you) will have confessed or indirectly revealed many of their aspirations, interests, hobbies, health, life and relationship problems and preferences in “chat”

In a way they can’t get due to increased use of ad blockers or tightening restrictions on data brokers (California and EU GPDR) etc.

So it’ll be very competitive for an advertiser to go with your ai “friend” who knows all about your hemmorhoids, booze and sex problems. All of which Google and Meta can infer or at least pin on you via guilt by association.

Meta screwed that one by breaking up known connections and communities and putting AI slop and promoted content front and center . They can infer less from who you know or interact with because they stopped caring about connecting you to real humans you actually know, years ago.

Banning all your friends and breaking up all those core groups for voting wrong or thinking wrong or whatever more closely suited their interests and agendas at the time.

It might know what I do for work or living based on what I ask for help with etc.
by tosapple | 2026-01-17 21:18:26+00:00
This is a good point but may be moot. Our consumer-facing LLMs speak C, Python, and JavaScript.

'Decompilers' are work in the machine code direction for human consumption, they can be improved by LLMs.

Militarily, you will want machine code and JS capable systems.

Machine code capablities cover both memory leaks and firmware dumps and negate the requirement of "source" comprehension.

I wanted to +1 you but I don't think I have the karma required.
by devsda | 2026-01-17 21:19:13+00:00
In what twisted imaginary world is saying that a serial killer was fair to all his victims by being equally brutal with all of them means killing was the desired ideal. I'm not sure who proposed going backwards or what it even means.

Everyone is acknowledging the hypocrisy because it is hitting their bottom line this time.

I would like to see links to your opinions where you pointed to the "longstanding normalized hypocrisy in the systen" as a problem before the tariff nonsense.
by throw0101c | 2026-01-17 21:20:16+00:00
> Patents (what protects inventions) have nothing to do with copyright.

Besides sibling comment, see "The Spies Who Launched America’s Industrial Revolution":

> Long before the United States began accusing other countries of stealing ideas, the U.S. government encouraged intellectual piracy to catch up with England’s technological advances. According to historian Doron Ben-Atar, in his book,[1] Trade Secrets, “the United States emerged as the world's industrial leader by illicitly appropriating mechanical and scientific innovations from Europe.”

* https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution-spies...
by peterfirefly | 2026-01-17 21:20:32+00:00
> 200k people per year die of heatstroke in Europe

Extremely doubtful. Even Teh Grauniad disagrees.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/17/human-ma...

Note that the Grauniad figures include some very unusual heat waves. There's no way the normal average could be a lot higher in years that were a lot colder.