MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lkbm | 2026-01-21 18:22:32+00:00
I got tired of fiddling with Ubuntu settings. I got tired with updates making my desktop UX worse and having to battle to get things back to what I wanted. I got tired of struggling to get wifi to work.

Maybe more than any of that, though, I got tired of every laptop having bad build quality. Maybe the Dell XPS is good, but Lenovo and System76 (my last Linux machine) seemed significantly worse than a MBP. (I could maybe just run Linux on a MBP, but it's a lot more effort for little benefit.)

I would like to replicate my 2005 Ubuntu desktop environment, but when Ubuntu shipped Unity, it was a serious downgrade, and at the time I struggled to get back to something good. I'm now in a macOS middle ground without having to fight the damn thing.
by a-dub | 2026-01-21 18:22:36+00:00
it's the commercial unix desktop that has commercial app support, cool looking hardware and great power optimizations that lead to great battery life. (also in the ai era, unified memory is pretty awesome)

personally i choose linux (kde) desktops and laptops where allowed because they've just gotten so good (and seem to only be getting better), but i get it.

honestly though i think it's a little sad. the execution just isn't where it used to be and honestly i think the modern macos experience is kinda trash. i would really like to pick one up and be like "oh wow this is so cool everything is so refined if i wasn't so bothered about needing vms and docker for everything i'd consider this" but instead it's more like "wow this is kinda old and crufty and weird and not all that great to be honest i miss kde it's more refined"
by ddellacosta | 2026-01-21 18:22:57+00:00
Welp not much I can say to that or to RandallBrown's response, seems obvious our experience and way of thinking is pretty different on this matter.

(EDIT: Also fwiw I often use a spoon or whatever to scoop things into the bowl, vs. pouring, which means I have more control but can still offload the measuring part to the scale...)

Whatever gets the delicious baked goods in your mouth I guess
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-21 18:23:31+00:00
I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it.

In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it - if you need to keep the full team of builders around then something is wrong and you may want to seek a refund for the original builders' fees since they did not actually finish building it.

Builders and electricians and tradesmen either work as contractors and take that into account (charging higher rates to compensate for the sporadic nature of the work) or work full-time for companies who then resell their services on building projects (charging accordingly to ensure there is enough revenue to pay a full-time payroll of said tradesmen).

Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product despite it being essentially finished. This gave a lot of engineers the illusion that perpetual "engineering" of a single product/service is a sustainable model and career.

Bending Spoons' business model is to buy finished products, cut off the deadweight and keep operating the product and actually making profit off the finished product, which was always a normal thing in every other industry.

For tech people that see themselves as builders, this should be normal and expected - they should charge competitive rates for their services taking into account the expectation that they're building something for someone else to make money off once it's built and that they won't be part of it once that's done (unless they want to negotiate an actual stake in the company). For tech people that don't, this is a difficult wake up call, but the earlier the better - the old situation was never sustainable to begin with.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-21 18:23:34+00:00
I don't need many newer macOS features myself. I'd be happy with an experience that's roughly adjacent to that of OS X 10.6 or 10.9, but that's not on offer either.

I do need a laptop that's good at its job, though. If a laptop sucks at its defining qualities, I'd be better served by a backpackable ITX build or maybe a one of those trendy mini-PCs, because at that point the form factor's tradeoffs are too great to justify.
by SimplyLiz | 2026-01-21 18:23:34+00:00
This is really well thought out. The git-like versioning approach for memory artifacts is something I’ve been advocating for after spending way too much time debugging agent state issues.

I’ve been working on AI memory backends and context management myself and the core insight here — that context needs to be versionable and inspectable, not just a growing blob — is spot on.

Tried UltraContext in my project TruthKeeper and it clicked immediately. Being able to trace back why an agent “remembered” something wrong is a game changer for production debugging.

One thing I’d love to see: any thoughts on compression strategies for long-running agents? I’ve been experimenting with semantic compression to keep context windows manageable without losing critical information.
Great work, will be following this closely.
by amanaplanacanal | 2026-01-21 18:23:45+00:00
Thank you! I read the article in your edit, and the point about symmetry seems unrelated to the rest of the article, and doesn't mention any science. I'll have to research further.

Intuitively it doesn't resonate with me. The environment humans evolved in (the natural world) doesn't have much of anything symmetrical, unless it was built by humans.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-21 18:24:18+00:00
> My bad. I will be more mindful tomorrow when someone at a big tech company yet again make-a-mistake in the same direction of AI hyping.

Are you mad at them for playing the game, or mad that that's the game they have to play to advance at their company?

> Like journalists that write about a Fatal Storm In Houston and you read down to the eighth paragraph and it turns out the fatality were among pigeons.

I don't know; I guess I hold people who post on twitter so they can self-promo, or who have attention because they work at $company, to a slightly different standard than I would hold a journalist writing a news article?
by jp1016 | 2026-01-21 18:24:38+00:00
I tried building an RSS library feature for a side project (https://beavergrow.com), mostly as a way to curate feeds I actually enjoy reading. It quickly highlighted how fragile the RSS ecosystem has become Feedburner gone, Google slowly de-emphasizing RSS, and discovery being the hardest part now.

RSS still feels like one of the few genuinely user-controlled ways to follow the web, but keeping it usable today seems to depend almost entirely on community curation. Curious how others here handle feed discovery now.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-21 18:25:02+00:00
> For example to make sure that a company can be held responsible when it breaks the law.

In general this has nothing to do with incorporation documents.

If a company unintentionally causes a large amount of damages, the company is going to get wiped out, but then you're just having the judge order the bank to transfer the company's assets to the victims. The owners of the company aren't particularly relevant except insofar as they now own a company whose value has been zeroed out, and they might be the ones to show up in court to argue against that being what should happen.

If the people at a company intentionally cause a large amount of damages, the corporation is irrelevant. If your "corporation" is in the business of stealing catalytic converters and the police come to arrest you, the person with the sawzall in their hands is going to jail, and if that person was hired to do it they're going to be offered a deal to testify against the person who hired them etc. Pointing to your articles of incorporation at that point isn't going to save you. That isn't what LLCs do, actual criminal enterprises will frequently have not listed the true principals on the documents anyway, and the government is going to try to prosecute the perpetrators rather than the patsies on the documents.

There is no real point in making this a burden for honest people. If they're honest then it doesn't matter. If they're not honest then you'd be a fool to trust what they wrote on a form anyway.
by WhyNotHugo | 2026-01-21 18:25:27+00:00
The statistics in this article sound like garbage to me.

Google used by 90% or the world?

~20% of the human population lives in countries where Google is blocked.

OTOH, Baidu is the #1 search engine in China, which has over 15% of the world’s population… but doesn’t reach 1%?

These stats are made measuring US-based traffic, rather than “worldwide” as they claim.
by kbolino | 2026-01-21 18:25:27+00:00
I don't want partial updates, I want full conflict-free upserts.

At read committed (default) isolation level, INSERT ... ON CONFLICT handles concurrent, conflicting inserts just fine, while MERGE ... WHEN NOT MATCHED (e.g.) does not. This is surprising behavior from the syntax alone, one would assume the two statements, when written with the same intent, would have the same behavior. Of course, this difference is documented, see the last paragraph of the Notes section on MERGE: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/18/sql-merge.html#id-1.9.3.1...

I don't know this for sure, but I believe that the effect of raising the transaction isolation level will just be to turn the constraint violation into a serialization error. That's not any easier to handle gracefully.
by knorker | 2026-01-21 18:25:33+00:00
This is not exactly right. True, $8B is not earth shattering because of the US's enormous debt. But by removing a potential $8B owner, it is a reduction in demand, and thus a tiny reduction in price. This is literally the first rule of pricing: "supply and demand".

Sure, someone else is on the other side of the deal. But their demand is also satiated at a certain price point. Hell, if they wanted to buy from other sellers then it's not like T bills were not liquid.

Would you say the same if Norway's wealth fund offloaded their $181B? At those scales it would be more likely that it'd be visibly price affecting, and therefore affect the US's ability to borrow at existing cost.

So yes, when you sell your one NVDA, you are reducing demand and thus price. Epsilon, but nonzero.
by alibarber | 2026-01-21 18:25:34+00:00
It’s somewhat similar in Finland.

This is why I don’t get what the EU brings to the table at all. I’ve considered starting something, never quite yet pulled the trigger, but I may as well do it in the UK because it’s extremely cheap, gives access to a great number of services, and I can do it all in English there.

It’s not like the company itself is going to be queuing at an airport or whatever.

I’ll have to file in Finland for the company anyway then, but I can skip all the stuff about starting an organisation here.
by ilamont | 2026-01-21 18:25:51+00:00
Searle’s team found that Azorean mice had mitochondrial DNA suggesting an early colonization from the far north of Europe, just as expected if the Norse transported them.

Aren't there other possibilities? Sailing voyages for trade usually had multiple ports of call. Could Mediterranean traders have visited Viking settlements in northern Europe or the Eastern Mediterranean, picked up Norwegian mice in cargo, and then dropped them off at the Azores? Or, the Vikings traded a mice-infested boat to some other merchants which visited the Azores?
by palmotea | 2026-01-21 18:26:14+00:00
> These two things are opposites, in my mind.

Not as I had in mind. By "social issues" I meant the non-economic stuff. That stuff has been key to pushing a lot of people to the Republican side.

> Things don't become less big or fast when they are focused on economic policy. Heck, even Biden's cancellation of student loan debt (something I consider to be on the technocratic side) was considered a Major Question by the supreme court to justify their reversal of the policy.

I think they should go big and fast on economic policy, especially on the kind of goals Trump campaigned on. For instance: tariff the heck out of China, figure out how to tax offshoring, plow the money made into re-industrialization, cultivate a trade-bloc of established high-income democracies.

But you know, Trump was for tariffs, so they had to be against them. All the sudden they sounded like the re-animated corpse of Milton Friedman.

The student loan debt thing was dumb because it came off as elitist, and it was to some extent. The Democrats need to listen to and serve people they don't like talking to anymore, instead of their staffers with student loan debt.
by Bender | 2026-01-21 18:26:39+00:00
Statistically, if you put enough stupid people into enough spaces with hateful rhetoric being taught consistently, make them immune to consequences, and reward them when they do things that push towards the civil war you want to have, then eventually either you will completely oppress your country or you will have a civil war.

I could not have said it better myself. I still think it would not become a national level civil war but Minnesota could get messy. Plenty of other states would never let things escalate to this level. All of this could have been avoided by having local law enforcement or worst case the national guard get things under control. Minnesota have conflicting incentives delegate counts driving their bad judgement in addition to their governor being in the hot seat at the moment requiring a distraction.

Or from a movie some of us have seen, someone will do something stupid [1].

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnvTo8sLFJo
by scoofy | 2026-01-21 18:27:05+00:00
I mean, it's arbitrary. I've lived in a Fahrenheit country and a Celsius country and both systems work fine. Resolution issues exist for both systems (you can still benefit from decimals in Fahrenheit for coffee and tea brewing)

I prefer Fahrenheit because it's based around the human, but it really doesn't matter, and it's probably better long term to have measurements that are not based around the human condition, but we're talking about benefits to society tens of thousands of years from now, rather than today.
by reaperducer | 2026-01-21 18:27:11+00:00
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art."

Ditto for Picasso, and many artists even going back to the Renaissance when great painters and sculptors sometimes had apprentices finish or duplicate paintings/sculptures for them.

But this isn't that. AI is something else entirely.

I don't recommend using the Warhol argument. It's become a trope used by AI-über-alles people who have little knowledge of and often zero experience in the arts.
by tzs | 2026-01-21 18:27:21+00:00
For C to F you can often simplify the mental math by doing the multiply by doubling then taking off 10%.

E.g., to convert 31℃ to ℉: 31 x 2 = 62. Subtract 6.2 = 55.8. Add 32 = 87.8℉.

If you want to round the result to the nearest integer the subtract 10% step is a convenient place: 31 x 2 = 62. Subtract 6 (rounded 6.2) = 56. Add 32 = 88℉.
by yomismoaqui | 2026-01-21 18:27:22+00:00
One thing I have discovered after using AI chats that include a websearch tool is that I don't want to delve on diferent blogs, Medium posts, Stack overflow threads with passive-aggresive mod comments, dismissing cookie banners... Sorry I just want the info I'm looking for, I don't care for your personal expression or need to monetize your content.

There are other times (usually not work related) when I want to explore the web and discovering some nice little blog or special corner on the net. This is what my RSS feed reader is for.
by Lerc | 2026-01-21 18:27:33+00:00
>*Greenpixie said they have the data (AHA!!) And their data is verified (ISO-14064 & aligned with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol)."

What does this say about accuracy, and I guess ultimately the impact of the emissions?

Whenever I have tried to find a meaningful measurement of environmental impact of power use I have gotten into a quagmire of statistics taking past each other, with arbitrary mixing of units and definitions.
(Like energy/power/electricity being defined differently but used interchangeably. Similarly water usage being blended regardless of whether it is potable or from an area of scarcity)

The end result has to be what harm is caused, because harmless use of something at any magnitude is still harmless.

How do you figure out what that level is with any degree of accuracy. It's a difficult problem, but it seems that easier answers are not likely to be useful if they are not accurate.
by eli | 2026-01-21 18:28:12+00:00
Ironically this is a bad thing for Google from a legal standpoint. If a term becomes "genericized" then it can lose trademark protection.

"Aspirin" is a famous example. It used to be a brand name for acetylsalicylic acid medication, but became such a common way to refer to it that in the US any company can now use it.
by amluto | 2026-01-21 18:28:21+00:00
That’s a weird problem to have. The US has a huge bond market in part because the US has an absolutely enormous amount of debt, and the bonds are the US debt. The EU doesn’t have bloc-wide debt, for better or for worse.

As an interesting thought experiment, imagine a central bank associated with a debt-free country issuing bond-like instruments. They would set an interest rate (perhaps with no auction, because they have no actual obligation to sell a predetermined amount, although an auction could still be used), sell bonds, delete the money used to buy the bonds, and issue new money to repay them with interest when they mature. This could be used as a way to act efficiently as a reserve currency and to exert a degree of control over inflation and the economy, kind of like how the Fed does it. The bonds would likely be considered extremely secure on account of the issue being entirely debt-free.

I would be surprised if the EU did this as such, since the EU probably does not want to be in the business of competing for capital with its own members, who do have a fair amount of debt that they need to finance.
by mghackerlady | 2026-01-21 18:28:23+00:00
I'm convinced the next windows GUI will just be an electron app that runs copilot as the desktop, forcing you to argue with it to open a file or run a program. Doesn't even have titlebars or window buttons or a task bar, just one big copilot bar at the bottom that you can ask whats already running or to close an app. All of this written in JavaScript of course
by cogman10 | 2026-01-21 18:28:37+00:00
Temperature is the worst metric unit to pick for this. Both the imperial and metric versions of temperature are completely arbitrary. It's really baffling to me that THIS is the one that most people talking about metric superiority cling to. Where metric shines is when you talk about subunits like mg vs g vs kg. You don't do that with temperature almost ever. So so what if water boils at 212F vs 100C? Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse.

Otherwise I agree with you. I just wish stronger arguments would be made. Measuring distance, speed, weight, volume in metric makes a lot more sense and is more intuitive. It's easy to relate 300mL to 1L. or 1cm to 1m to 1km. And that is where most of the value of metric comes from. The fact that we basically never think in terms of kC or mC is why using temperature is very weak.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-01-21 18:28:49+00:00
It's easy to forget this place is populated with upper-middleclass skilled professionals that probably haven't lived economically precariously in years, if ever.

For some folks out there, planning ahead is "will I have enough money for groceries next paycheck?". There are cheap phones, and I agree that folks are careless. But there is also a concerted effort to encourage this kind of behavior because the economy is built on this kind of dumb consumer spending and debt.
by cmdrk | 2026-01-21 18:28:52+00:00
bcantrill gave a great talk many years ago about compute-data locality. would be nice to know if those ideas panned out for some customers, but it seems the world has by-and-large continued to schlep data back and forth.

it's too bad too. The concepts behind Manta were such a great idea. I still want tools that combine traditional unix pipes with services that can map-reduce over a big farm of hyperconverged compute/storage. I'm somewhat surprised that the kubernetes/cncf-adjacent world didn't reinvent it.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-21 18:29:17+00:00
> What is going to happen to the tech world that lies in the periphery but depends on services provided by these companies?

Not just the tech world. Think of all the businesses below "huge enterprise" that rely on SaaS for most of their tech stack, many don't even have internal dev teams. Maybe a lot of them bought contracts with any number of "AI SaaS" tools to run their businesses.

When all those go under, all these companies have major disruptions and have to scramble to find replacements, get their data out if they even can, etc. It's going to be very messy.

Not to mention the trillions of dollars of unregulated, non-bank lending that's funding all of this build out. It's a black box, there's no visibility into true valuation and because the credit isn't public, the rot can be hidden for years until its too big to fix and finally snaps, taking the rest of the economy out with it.
by treetalker | 2026-01-21 18:29:39+00:00
Where essential functionality can be trivially reproduced and customized to specific lawyers' needs or tastes, it seems to me that the way software engineers can be of most use is by offering to review the vibed code for security concerns, and to suggest refactoring for efficiency (maintenance now being less of a concern). Still, most lawyers' use of vibed software will not be on so grand a scale that efficiencies would be much of a concern either (large discovery reviews or legal-corpus processing as exceptions, perhaps).

Furthermore, it seems like a disincentive to create and offer software to the broad legal market: even a description of the idea of the functionality, let alone a video or trial version, would be enough to copy and tweak the software. We may end up with a Cold War and Balkanization of software: FOSS on the one hand, and much non-FOSS in the form of "homemade" (vibed), unshared, unsold custom software siloed in each firm.

As everyone learns to eke out decent results from LLMs, which should become commodities themselves, the real differentiators for law firms will be creativity in designing workflows and, as always, human legal acumen.
by samus | 2026-01-21 18:29:51+00:00
> When I walk outside unless it's really cold I don't ever think about what temperature water freezes or boils, I want to know whether I am going to sweat, whether I'm in California, or whether I'm going to freeze my butt off when it's 14 degrees out.

In either system that's just a matter of remembering a few numbers. And it anyway doesn't give the full picture since humidity and wind speed play a huge role in how it actually feels like and what clothing one should wear.