MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jach | 2026-01-01 23:12:00+00:00
People didn't mind when IE was muscling in and adding useful new features. They abandoned Netscape because the features made the web better. It wasn't until they stopped adding features to the browser itself that it really started to become a problem. They would still add features, but too much relied on ActiveX -- which wasn't necessarily evil, there's a grand vision there of component re-use across the OS and varied applications, the same was done with Java Applets and even Shockwave/Flash, but it sucked more and they were all plagued with security problems. Then MS stopped innovating pretty much entirely, and wouldn't even play catch up for a long time, whether with their out-of-browser plugins (oh Silverlight...) or the browser itself. No support for tabs for a long time, or popup blocking (later ad blocking), they had terrible performance... And as various "web standards" advanced to make things nicer for the users and developers, and add capabilities that didn't require an external plugin, they drug their heels on that too.

Eventually, the hell that was IE was a combination of hostile user experience, security problems, performance problems, and developer pain in finding workarounds or other support because it was so far behind on everything. It had nothing to do with their power to dictate or experiment with new features. The extent of the hostile user experience that leaked outside the browser itself was the "only works on IE" problem that forced people to use IE for that site, on the whole it was comparable to the "only works with Flash or Java applets" problems and not as bad as the experience of the browser itself. For the most part these days, the two parts of that hell that remain relevant are the hostile user experience and the developer pains parts, and Mobile Safari is the successor to both for over a decade now. No one supports IE11 anymore (let alone older IEs) but they still have to support Mobile Safari. I have fonder memories of dealing with IE11 (and earlier) support/workarounds over Mobile Safari's crap. My view is more power to actual Chromium-based browsers on mobile even if I personally use Firefox on PC and android despite their user experience shortcomings (at least they're not very hostile). The only part of hell I'd be worried about is that of a hostile user experience, which can be worked around by individual users if they are allowed choices.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-01 23:12:07+00:00
I do feel like 40-50% signal ratio is still good compared to 90%

HN did give me some leads in the start of just cool things to follow and I have been able to make an understanding of what things interest me and what don't due to it. And this has also been the reason I read a lot of comments etc. and content here, maybe more than I should.

I don't know to me, building my own website and forum etc. are possible but they feel complicated and I still can't seem to get eye balls. On Hackernews Comments its easier personally to write something, get feedback on it, (improve?/learn?)

Of course if one wants to optimize for eyeballs, they can probably go for reddit or twitter maxxing or similar because cmon this is exactly the stuff the article is talking about from what I see.

Hackernews does indeed sit on the perfect spot. I feel like if you want more informationally dense topics, perhaps lobsters can be good for ya.

https://lobste.rs/
by miguel_martin | 2026-01-01 23:12:24+00:00
See also: Nim's std/selectors API - https://nim-lang.org/docs/selectors.html, it supports: "Supported features: files, sockets, pipes, timers, processes, signals and user events." - here's a HTTP server event loop using it: https://github.com/guzba/mummy/blob/master/src/mummy.nim#L11...
by galaxyLogic | 2026-01-01 23:12:42+00:00
Another phrase that comes to mind is "Plausible Deniability": By uttering ambiguous sentences you can deny all but one possible meanings of what you say. And talking to different audiences at different times you can claim you didn't mean anything like what your citics are claiming you did.

But I like the idea there is a term for this, be it Straussian Memes or something else. What I didn't quite get is how "self-stabilizing" works?

What I'd like is for TV-anchors to get wise and start asking their interviewees "What EXACTLY do you mean when you use this term ...". But I guess they won't because they too are happy to spread a meme which multiple different communities can like because they understand it in the way they like.
by nchmy | 2026-01-01 23:12:58+00:00
i have never traveled with a schedule, even when i was being a "tourist"

also, i probably didnt make this point nearly well enough, but the real point is that travel is completely unnecessary and will absolutely not solve any of your real problems. More likely it will just distract from them, or make them worse. Whatever genuinely beneficial things you and your partner experienced together while travelling could and should be experienced wherever you happen to live.

"travel" is a completely foreign concept to living, that has only become "possible" to most people recently. For millenia, people learned how to live quite well without it.
Ask HN: How do you pronounce the name of Anthropic's series of LLMs?
by alexjplant | 2026-01-01 23:13:01+00:00
How do you say "Claude?" Do you say "clawed" or "cloud"? I'm American but I use the latter pronunciation for some strange reason. This seems to throw a lot of people and is homophonic with another industry buzzword so I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to change it up. Is there perhaps a more esoteric pronunciation available that I can lean into to sound sophisticated?

There's a lot of heavy AI and LLM discourse happening right now but everybody seems to be avoiding this hard-hitting topic. I think it merits discussion.
by TedOS | 2026-01-01 23:13:50+00:00
I got frustrated with every productivity app trying to be everything. Notion, Todoist, Obsidian—they're powerful, but I was spending more time organizing than doing. I wanted something closer to a CLI. Type a command, get a result, move on.

So I built Lock In.

The core idea:

One input field. Four quadrants (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly). Commands for everything. The app docks to the side of your screen—always visible when you need it, out of the way when you don't.

/d 100 pushups /w 4 gym sessions /m read 2 books /y £50000 savings
That's one line adding four goals. Each quadrant auto-resets at the right interval—daily at midnight, weekly on Sunday, etc. No maintenance.

Why command-driven?

Speed. My hands stay on the keyboard. Adding a goal is <1 second. Updating progress is 3 characters if you use aliases (50 p adds 50 to pushups). There's no UI to navigate, no buttons to hunt for.

It's essentially a REPL for personal goals that happens to have a minimal visual interface.

Features:

Chain multiple commands in one line
Aliases for frequently updated goals
/review 7d or /review 30d to see progress over time
XP and leveling (simple gamification that actually works)
Always-on-top mode (/aot on)
Dock left or right (/fix left / /fix right)
Quick notes with /n idea your thought here

What I learned:

Building something deliberately minimal is harder than building something feature-rich. Every time I wanted to add a feature, I had to ask: does this require a new command, or am I just adding complexity? Most features died at that question.

The design philosophy is constraint as a feature. Your brain can't get distracted by features that don't exist.

Would love feedback from the HN crowd—especially on the command syntax. Is it intuitive enough? Too terse? I'm still iterating.
by haxtormoogle | 2026-01-01 23:14:06+00:00
The number of BYD on fire videos, and examples where the tires simply fall off because they don't use enough metal in the suspension. Makes me scared to be anywhere near one of their vehicles. please keep them out of the USA for safety sake. That's 4.6M state sponsored vehicles that should not be on the road. Don't forget the chinese gov'ts ability to lock you out from driving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWzbq-Q_oTc
Show HN: Find High Quality Undervalued Stocks in Minutes
by finsummary | 2026-01-01 23:14:23+00:00
Hi HN
I built FindGreatStocks.com to help investors focus on what actually matters: business quality and valuation, not hype or trading noise.

The tool screens public companies using fundamentals like ROIC, free cash flow, margins, and valuation, so you can quickly spot high-quality businesses trading at reasonable prices. It also includes DCF and Reverse DCF views to understand what growth the market is pricing in.

I’m a finance person (not a pro dev) and built this to solve my own problem after years of overtrading. Would love feedback from the HN community — especially on what metrics or workflows you’d want to see next.

Happy to answer any questions!
by throwmeaway-x1 | 2026-01-01 23:14:48+00:00
I work in infrastructure at one of the players in the lawsuits, I won't mention which one. Make no mistake, we are moving out of broadcom. We're not crawling back. There is enough technical skills to maneuver large infrastructure projects and cloud engineering. Our exit strategy began over a year and half ago. In hindsight it should have begun 8 years earlier after similar pricing issues with Wiley Introscope (which broadcom also acquired). But better late than never.
by mort96 | 2026-01-01 23:15:23+00:00
The kernel OOM killer has never done an adequate job for me. It tends to hesitate to kill anything until the system has literally been completely 100% unresponsive for over half an hour. That's completely unacceptable. Killing a cgroup before the system becomes unresponsive is a million times more desirable default behaviour for a normal desktop system (which Ubuntu Desktop is).

Of course, if it's absolutely not compatible with your work, you can just disable systemd-oomd. I'm wondering though, what sort of work are you doing where you can't tune stuff to use 95% of your 1TB of memory instead of 105% of it?
Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)
by vednig | 2026-01-01 23:15:50+00:00
First of all Happy New Year to everyone.

This is in continuation of posts by u/whoishiring .

Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:
Location:
Remote:
Willing to relocate:
Technologies:
Résumé/CV:
Email:
Please only post if you are personally looking for work. Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here.
Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.

There's a site for searching these posts at https://www.wantstobehired.com.
by azalemeth | 2026-01-01 23:16:06+00:00
Regarding the spy in a bag -- the person involved was a GCHQ mathematician seconded to the SIS and studying Russia, whose "naked, decomposing remains were found in the bath of the main bedroom's en-suite bathroom, inside a red sports bag that was padlocked from the outside, with the keys inside the bag. [...] Inconclusive fragments of DNA components from at least two other individuals were found on the bag. A forensic examination of Williams's flat has concluded that there was no sign of forced entry or of DNA that pointed to a third party present at the time of his death.

Scotland Yard's inquiry also found no evidence of Williams's fingerprints on the padlock of the bag or the rim of the bath, which the coroner said supported her assertion of "third-party involvement" in the death. Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt said it was theoretically possible for Williams to lower himself into the bag without touching the rim of the bath. A key to the padlock was inside the bag, underneath his body"
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams)

It's absolutely mad, but remember this happened in 2010 -- before Russia did many of those bad things you mention. It wouldn't surprise me if a combination of political pressure and police incompetence made this go away.
by dpark | 2026-01-01 23:16:17+00:00
> I was making the point that the cave painters believed everything including rocks and trees were deeply invested with spiritual power, and they didn't draw a cave painting without investing it with spiritual ideas.

Nonsense. We don’t know what prehistoric cave painters believed.

> when they went hunting for one a part of the goal would be cut out its heart and eat it raw because of the power contained within

Do you have a pointer to the cave paintings that show hunting animals at certain times in the lunar cycles and eating their hearts raw to harvest this power? Because this sounds made up.

Also this says nothing about art.
by ndom91 | 2026-01-01 23:16:21+00:00
This is just not true anymore. The only things that don't work anymore are a few AAA titles that use particular types of anti-cheat systems that rely on Windows kernel drivers (League of Legends is one that comes to mind).

If I remember correctly, after the Crowdstrike BSOD-all-windows-instances update last year Microsoft wanted to make some changes to their kernel driver program and these anti-cheat measures on Windows might need to find a new mechanism soon anyway. That's a long way of saying, it's plausible that even that last barrier might come down sooner rather than later.
by liotier | 2026-01-01 23:16:31+00:00
The European Union can't fight everyone at once - we need partners, hence trying to mend fences with MERCOSUR, toning down the struggle for human rights in China and tolerating India's authoritarian drift. For now the utmost priorities are defeating Russia and achieving actual strategic autonomy by decoupling from the traitorous USA. So yes, better BYD than Tesla.
by maxbond | 2026-01-01 23:16:36+00:00
To add to the sibling comments, a world-class LSP enabling you to get a great experience in any editor/IDE out of the box. This is not at all exclusive to Rust of course, most strongly typed languages have one at this point, but I've been working in Python lately and this is what I miss the most. (I'm using an LSP in Python, but it isn't as good at the best of times, and it seems like no matter how many times I fix it's configuration it's broken again the next day.)
by tecoholic | 2026-01-01 23:17:24+00:00
> It has become political (toward the left)

While the first half might be true[1], I would argue the second half definitely isn’t. It’s more nuanced than that.

Depends on how you define left and right. To a large degree it’s issue specific. I have seen this site being described as a “equivalent of a nazi bar” in some place. Now I don’t agree with that, just pointing out people seem to have a very different view of this site depending on what they see.

I have definitely observed an increase in Skepticism and that mostly can be traced to the real world events. Open source rug pulls, the way Tesla as a brand turned out, the libertarian ethos not panning out, the startup darlings like airbnb, Uber…etc., ending up with negative impacts in people’s lives all have drained the optimism to a certain degree.

In that way it does represent the future - people are running into issues which are societal and can’t be resolved with just hacker ethos and technology and they actively discuss it here. This place wouldn’t represent the future if it was still hyping the next tech solution without any critical commentary

1 - I haven’t visited the site over long enough to make the judgement.
by kristianp | 2026-01-01 23:17:55+00:00
I know it's just a quick test, but llama 3.1 is getting a bit old. I would have liked to see a newer model that can fit, such as gpt-oss-120, (gpt-oss-120b-mxfp4.gguf), which is about 60gb of weights (1).

(1) https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/15396
by SkyeCA | 2026-01-01 23:18:05+00:00
> and examples where the tires simply fall off because they don't use enough metal in the suspension

As opposed to using too much metal in the airbags of our cars ;)

> Don't forget the chinese gov'ts ability to lock you out from driving.

I remain less scared of a foreign government than I do of my government that has effectively total control over my life.
by jzb | 2026-01-01 23:18:06+00:00
I imagine the people saying “it just works” are saying it because it does, at least for them.

SteamOS is based on Arch, but customized and aimed at specific hardware configurations. It’d be interesting to know what hardware you’re using and if any of your components are not well supported.

FWIW, I’ve used Steam on Linux (mostly PopOS until this year, then Bazzite) for years and years without many problems. ISTR having to do something to make Quake III work a few years ago, but it ran fine after and I’ve recently reinstalled it and didn’t have to fuss with anything.

Granted, I don’t run a huge variety of games, but I’ve finished several or played for many hours without crashes, etc.
by Robin_Patterson | 2026-01-01 23:18:10+00:00
I've read most of this page and am surprised that nobody has (either positively or negatively) mentioned fandom.com, a wiki-farm founded over 20 years ago by one of Wikipedia's founders and another Wikipedia enthusiast. Formerly "Wikicities" then "Wikia", now "Fandom". Hosts about a third of a million communities. Supported by ads at top and side of pages, but logged-in users see very little advertising. Very secure, rarely exploited by malicious bots or other hackers. Numerically dominated by game, TV, and film sites, but many non-entertainment communities as well. The biggest English-languages sites are listed at https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Hub:Big_wikis but numerous other languages are included.
by neilv | 2026-01-01 23:18:12+00:00
That's a tricky one for public writing discretion. The Sun and Broadcom connections add to the point. Something a person with that background said was surprising. And the exact wording in one of the quotes was relevant.

I don't know whether I would've identified the person. As a principal-ish engineer and early startup person, who interacts with teams and all up and down the org charts of companies, it's important that people trust me. One part of that is to show discretion when entrusted with information. It's nuanced.

I have some WTF quotes and situations from recent interviews that I've decided not to share. The most recent one I did share was relatively mild, and I decided to paraphrase what the out-of-line person said, and be reasonably confident the person couldn't be identified. The incubator mentioned is harder to obscure, and is relevant to some people, so I tried to find a reasonable balance, but they should know who they are and be able to take some criticism, so I didn't worry much about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415495
by CoolNamesAllTkn | 2026-01-01 23:18:32+00:00
Currently, customers that run a fleet of ADSBees set them up to feed their own endpoint, which can be very easy to set up using open source software. For instance, we have https://globe.whereplane.xyz/, which is fed by a handful of ADSBees around the world. The code for this aggregator is a single docker compose file, which can be found here: https://github.com/CoolNamesAllTaken/whereplane-xyz

ADSBees can be fully configured over their network connection, including flashing new firmware, so if you put them onto some sort of VLAN network you could update and configure each device pretty easily. They use a network console accessible via USB or WebSocket for configuration and firmware updates.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-01 23:19:13+00:00
OK, fair point. My examples were taken from my immediate previous transcript however this is not a intermittent issue. This is consistent. Terrible hilarious performance.

That’s sad. I tried to prove it terrible in this comment by using transcript here, hoping to show you some examples, but the transcript is essentially accurate. Besides, the sad said humming above and the humming homonym.
by throwaway_dang | 2026-01-01 23:19:17+00:00
Nowhere in this article does it say anything about Russians admitting to cutting the cable, let alone doing it on purpose with malicious intent, so you are just making things up now.

The list of US acts of terrorism goes beyond the Trump presidency; it's convenient for liberals to blame everything on Trump but the bombing of Nord Stream occurred under Biden; Obama was droning weddings while Hilary Clinton was setting fire to Libya (using NATO, the "defensive" alliance that strikes first!)

All the previous cases of cable cutting, alleged by Western news papers without any shred of evidence, is a good way of beating the war drums. The war propaganda and hysteria this time is more intense than the Iraq war, which I think you are too young to remember. It is unclear what material advantage Russia would get from cutting cables, but with hysteria, reason is not required.

"Pro-Russian people" like me .. well I'm pro-peace actually rather than pro-Russian and have seen that the Russians offered negotiations with the US and Europe multiple times that were rejected. Negotiations that might have averted bloodshed. It's interesting that a "non-binary" person like you (according to your Github) wants to view people in a binary category as pro/anti-Russian rather than perhaps having a different perspective.

As to the substance of your last point: I remember Europe actually arguing against the US during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and now seeing Europe being a bunch of kept poodles that would prefer to commit economic, moral and geopolitical suicide rather than stand up for themselves.
by rick_dalton | 2026-01-01 23:19:40+00:00
This is really annoying me as well. I use a program for work that can occasionally use a lot of ram, while saving or interpolating for example. On my little MacBook Air with just 8GB of ram everything works fine, it just swaps a whole lot more for a short period. On my desktop with 16GB ram and Ubuntu oom just kills it, my workaround is the swapspace package which adds swap files under high load, works so far.
by windexh8er | 2026-01-01 23:19:47+00:00
> Right now, LLM system prompts are strongly geared towards not claiming that they are humans or simulations of humans. If your point is that a hypothetical "thinking" LLM would claim to be a human, that could certainly be arranged with an appropriate system prompt. You wouldn't know whether you were talking to an LLM or a human -- just as you don't now -- but nothing would be proved either way. That's ultimately why the Turing test is a poor metric.

The mental gymnastics here is entertainment at best. Of course the thinking LLM would give feedback on how it's actually just a pattern model over text - well, we shouldn't believe that! The LLM was trained to lie about it's true capabilities in your own admission?

How about these...

What observable capability would you expect from "true cognitive thought" that a next-token predictor couldn’t fake?

Where are the system’s goals coming from—does it originate them, or only reflect the user/prompt?

How does it know when it’s wrong without an external verifier? If the training data says X and the answer is Y - how will it ever know it was wrong and reach the correct conclusion?
by cgriswald | 2026-01-01 23:20:13+00:00
The original poster said “more useful”, not “better”, so you’re already arguing something different than what was said. I might spend more time with something less useful because its time efficiency is one of the things that makes it less useful now.

Regarding your argument of “better” you seem to be arguing by definition.

Edit: I now realize you are the original poster who said “more useful”, so why did you change it?
by kelthuzad | 2026-01-01 23:20:47+00:00
Make no mistake, that is one of the top 5 arguments that "Leave the trillion dollar company alone" types love throwing in every discussion regarding this topic. It's not an accidental or innocent kind of argument, it will pop up under pretty much every article that discusses Apple and Anti-Trust. It's an underhanded way of defending Apple's anti-competitive business practices akin to "let Apple be anti-competitive or [insert doomsday scenario here]". Instead of advocating for application of proper anti-trust measures in order to restore a healthy and competitive market, they want to maintain the status quo where the Gatekeepers can do as they please.