MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rmunn | 2026-01-11 15:33:19+00:00
I grew up with lettuce purchased from a local farmer's market, so when I first tried iceberg I was all, "What? This isn't lettuce! It has no taste!" Restaurants love it, though: any time I get a side salad at a restaurant it's 75% likely to be iceberg lettuce, unless the salad is a kind that specifically calls for something else (e.g. caesar salad requires romaine lettuce). But give me butter lettuce (which is what I grew up eating), romaine, or even red oak (my least favorite variety but at least it has flavor) over iceberg.

Iceberg does have some things going for it: it's got crunch, and I suspect it keeps rather well without wilting. (It's never around my house so I can't speak from personal experience). Those qualities, I'm sure, endear it to restaurants as a lettuce they can keep around for that one customer in ten who orders a side salad, and it's probably also why all the "salad mix" packages I've had the misfortune to consume (usually at someone else's house) seem to be iceberg-based (with a mix of other types too, but I can always tell the non-taste of iceberg lettuce). But there's just so much flavor in other lettuce varieties that I would say "Iceberg lettuce isn't really lettuce, so if you've only had iceberg then you don't yet know what real lettuce can taste like. Try butter lettuce, or even romaine hearts, and then you'll know what lettuce is. If, after that point, you still prefer iceberg, then go ahead, I won't argue with your taste. But don't think that you hate lettuce if all you've ever had is iceberg; it's like thinking you hate apples because all you've ever had is Red Delicious."
by amanaplanacanal | 2026-01-11 15:33:27+00:00
Frankly I'd love to switch from Windows to Linux. But it's the applications. My last attempt to switch got hung up on a few things (in order if importance, probably):

- Quicken. I have 30 years of personal financial data in quicken. I'm not completely opposed to migrating to something else, but I haven't seen a good substitute. I'd probably have to learn double entry bookkeeping, and I'm unsure if other software could still download data from my bank and investment accounts. I'm sure as hell not going to start entering transactions manually (ugh).

- Ableton live. I do have a copy of bitwig, but I am unfamiliar with its workflow, and would have to figure out which of my vsts I would lose, and it seems a big pain in the ass.

- Plex server. For some reason, out of the box this was dog slow. Because of the other issues, I was unwilling to spend the time to try to figure out what was going on with this.

- The are games I would probably lose, but honestly there are so many games available I doubt I would care that much.

How many hundreds of hours am I gonna have to take to figure this all out before I have a working system again? Not my idea of a good time even if I like the outcome.

Edit: and this is from somebody who loves the idea of Linux! I first installed 0.11 or 0.12 way back in the early 90s from a stack of floppies!
by john-h-k | 2026-01-11 15:33:54+00:00
CBS say this then don't publish the data!

The data [https://www.transonic.com/renal-disease-in-us] says that kidney transplants for dialysis patients happen LESS frequently in the USA than in Europe, yet the survival rate is very close - 39% USA vs 41% Europe. This implies that dialysis in the USA is very close or _better_ quality than in Europe - as there is a large difference in transplant rates but only a small difference in survival rates.

Maybe the above data is wrong, but CBS don't seem to provide any better data
Show HN: VideoTranscoderUtility – Automate and schedule handbrake transcoding
by anzeumek | 2026-01-11 15:34:14+00:00
Hi HN,

I created VideoTranscoderUtility service and GUI application
to solve a simple but time-consuming problem: manually converting and organizing large collections of videos.

Problem: Configuring tasks to transcode and standardize your video library can be tedious.
HandBrake is not enough to manage a larger video library.

VideoTranscoderUtility automates the workflow:

- Convert multiple videos and extract, copy or download subtitles.

- Run large tasks overnight without intervention.

- Define custom HandBrakeCLI command: Easily configure resolution, codec, or container for your workflow.

- Minimal setup: Works on Windows without requiring much knowledge.

HandBrakeCLI and FFmpeg are not provided!

I built this for my own workflow and to learn more about developing Windows applications.
The code still needs a lot of refactoring and some bugs are to be expected, but it’s free and ready to use for anyone with the same needs.

https://github.com/anzeumek/VideoTranscoderUtility
by devwithbobby | 2026-01-11 15:34:34+00:00
Hi HN — I built a small tool to solve a problem I kept hitting while working on RAG pipelines and internal search.

Most crawlers return raw HTML or very noisy text, which still requires a lot of cleanup before it’s usable for embeddings or agents. This tool focuses specifically on AI ingestion, not generic scraping.

What it does:

Crawls documentation sites and websites

Extracts clean, structure-preserving markdown (no nav/footers)

Chunks content by document hierarchy (headings)

Emits stable content hashes for incremental updates

Outputs an internal link graph alongside the content

The goal is to make website ingestion more deterministic and reduce downstream glue code in RAG pipelines.

It’s implemented as an Apify Actor and designed to plug directly into vector DBs or agent workflows.

Link: https://apify.com/devwithbobby/docs-markdown-rag-ready-crawl...

I’d really appreciate feedback from people building RAG systems or working on ingestion pipelines — especially around chunking strategies and handling large docs sites.
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-11 15:35:15+00:00
Link budget cuts both ways. If your user terminal sucks, you can compensate somewhat - by building a larger, beefier satellite that has better antenna directionality and pumps out more transmission juice, and throwing the data rate under the bus. This is how it's done now.

Having a terminal that doesn't suck puts less strain on the satellite side and, thus, scales better. But for emergencies and serving middle of nowhere, "direct to cell" makes sense.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-11 15:35:16+00:00
Around where I live, about half the casinos offer poker and about half don't. Poker can be a pretty high cost to a casino. Compared to something like slot machines, it's financially mostly downside: You need a lot more physical space per player. You need more staff. In order for players to come and actually enjoy it, the poker room needs to be located in a relatively quiet corner, ideally enclosed so the buzz of the rest of the casino can't be heard, which is also expensive. And the game is slow, and rakes happen once per hand, so you're making money pretty slowly. And that's just for cash games. Tournaments are worse. If I had to guess, tournaments probably lose money for the casino, and they only exist to get players in so they play at the cash tables. Probably many other things that I'm forgetting because I don't run a casino.
Show HN: Atrion – Deterministic traffic orchestration using physics (Node.js)
by laphilosophia | 2026-01-11 15:35:21+00:00
Hello HN,

I've been working on a new approach to traffic management that moves away from traditional circuit breakers (which are often reactive and binary) towards a deterministic physics model.

Atrion treats request flow like fluid dynamics. Instead of static thresholds, it uses:

- Physics-based pressure management: Calculates system stress in real-time.
- Z-Score Auto-tuning: Adapts thresholds dynamically based on standard deviation of latency/error rates.
- Revenue-aware shedding: Prioritizes high-value traffic during spikes rather than random drops.

We just released v2 which introduces: AutoTuner Physics Integration and Adaptive Thresholds (Neuroplasticity)

The core is open source.
I'm looking for feedback on the mathematical approach to load shedding.

Thanks.
by aNoob7000 | 2026-01-11 15:36:06+00:00
I bought a brand new Dell laptop with Windows 11 25H2 at the end of November 2025. The first patches released by Microsoft in December did not install. WTF!!!

If you go online, you will see a whole YouTube videos and articles on how to fix the issue. Let me tell you, after a considerable amount of time, I gave up.

I'm running Ubuntu 24.04 on my desktop, and I can't remember the last time I had issues applying patches.
by WD-42 | 2026-01-11 15:36:15+00:00
You are using a distro that is generally very behind on software versions and doesn’t bundle non free software (Debian) on a laptop with brand new hardware. Additionally, you are running a DE (cinnamon) which is really designed for a specific distro (Mint) which you are not using.

If you want stuff to just work you might want to try using a more up to date distro with a mainstream desktop. Stock Ubuntu or Fedora would probably work fine for you.
by an-allen | 2026-01-11 15:36:32+00:00
I love when people figure out that life literally is a computation - everything about it - from the molecular structure, to the reproductive strategies, to the mutation and selection of the genome, to the metastructure of cognition and consciousness… its all churning through a solution… a very very long solution, that has very distinct steps and stages, environments and advancements.

Its been computing a lot longer than we understand.
by dsign | 2026-01-11 15:37:13+00:00
My thoughts to the Iranian people, may they get what they need and deserve at a cost that is not too high.

As in all conflicts, there's always a "fog of blame" where there isn't absolute certainty about who is right and who is to blame. Though it's not that hard. Because their survival depends on it, dictators are very good at blaming others--anybody, really--for their own shortcomings, and they usually wield the kind of hard power that makes them extremely costly to topple in terms of suffering and human lives.

Life is too short to have to deal with despots. We need a better, perhaps less-crowded or less xenophobic world where every person can protect their right to exist by simply packing and leaving as a last resort.
by gherkinnn | 2026-01-11 15:37:19+00:00
This conflates two things.

One is LLMs writing code. Not everything and not for everyone. But they are useful for most of the code being written. It is useful.

What it does not do (yet, if ever) is bridging the gap from "idea" to a working solution. This is precisely where all the low-code ideas of the past decades fell apart. Translating an idea in to formal rules is very, very hard.

Think of all of the "just add a button there"-type comments we've all suffered.
by jancsika | 2026-01-11 15:37:21+00:00
The author misunderstands basic human behavior here. And there are enough literal-minded people on HN that everyone ought to just avoid this advice entirely.

Just one example-- some narcissists will take the author's strategy personally, and they will fuck with him relentlessly for their own amusement. Worse, it won't be clear to onlookers who is the victim and who is the aggressor. It will appear as one low-empathy individual trying to "train" others while another, intransigent individual actively resists the training. There's even a good chance onlookers will see the narcissist as the good guy, successfully fighting back against the author's snobbery and condescension. If you can't think of a citation for this pattern then you don't currently live in the U.S.

And that's ignoring the fact that inconsistencies in other people's reactions over time often don't have anything to do with the author's behavior. Someone who comes away from interactions "feeling small" may in fact be consumed with their own crippling anxiety. Interpreting that as a failure of the author's Pavlovian strategy is a recipe for codependency that helps no one. The whole metaphor is a fool's errand.
by tenchi39 | 2026-01-11 15:37:51+00:00
I built Mini Reader for Android because I was tired of the bloat in modern e-book apps.

I found myself spending more time configuring settings than actually reading, and even then, the interface never looked quite right. Most readers feel sluggish and are cluttered with features I don’t use, like cloud syncing or social tracking.

One of my biggest pet peeves was the confusing page counters in most apps—they never seemed to reflect the actual number of "page turns" left on my specific screen.

Mini Reader is my attempt to fix that. It’s built to be:

- Fast: Books open instantly without the bloat.
- Precise: A page counter that actually matches your device’s screen and font size.
- Minimal: A clean, "just-works" interface that gets out of the way.
- Private: No tracking, no accounts, and no cloud—just your local EPUB/MOBI files.

It’s smaller, faster, and designed to look the way a digital reader should. I’d love to hear your feedback on the performance and the UI.

Check it out here: https://celest-watches.com/mini-reader/
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-11 15:38:21+00:00
Well, I have a whole blog post of an answer for you: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/tools-for-thought/

Who "knows"?

It's who has a world-model. It's who can evaluate input signal against said world-model. Which requires an ability to generate questions, probe the nature of reality, and do experiments to figure out what's what. And it's who can alter their world-model using experiences collected from the back-and-forth.
by bmacho | 2026-01-11 15:38:33+00:00
> Not documented anywhere (but seems to work fine in major browsers)

Which part of it is not documented? Putting device width dependent preloading in HTTP header? MDN says that the HTTP link header works the same way as the link element, and also that the link element a has media attribute : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
by ryandrake | 2026-01-11 15:38:38+00:00
> The ability to say "I do not want LDAP support in my mail client" and have the package manager actually respect that is cool.

I tried Gentoo around the time that OP started using it, and I also really liked that aspect of it. Most package managers really struggle with this, and when there is configuration, the default is usually "all features enabled". So, when you want to install, say, ffmpeg on Debian, it pulls in a tree of over 250 (!!) dependency packages. Even if you just wanted to use it once to convert a .mp4 container into .mkv.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-11 15:38:48+00:00
I don't think I have ever had a system upgrade break my system on any Debian derived or Fedora I used. Also upgrades are not forced upon you like they are in Windows, with its dark patterns nudging you to upgrade.

I am also using GNU/Linux on laptops just fine, and the only issue is with battery life.

I think hardware-wise one needs to do some reading before buying, to check what is supported and what is not well supported. Other than that, I don't have issues. But then again I am also a strict on or off guy, who does not use things like hibernation or standby or whatever at all, so maybe I am dodging many bullets there.
by exq | 2026-01-11 15:38:50+00:00
Until reading this thread I never knew so many in the industry were against performant software and workflows, but I suppose that explains the state of things.

Oh My Zsh is more sluggish than benching zsh -ic 'exit 0' would suggest. This benchmark will show command lag among other things, which is very noticeable on a slower computer. https://github.com/romkatv/zsh-bench

I use https://github.com/romkatv/zsh4humans. I installed it once, took an hour or two to tweak it to my liking, and haven't touched it since. It's in maintenance mode so I'm not worried about my zshrc breaking randomly. I have transient git prompt, autosuggestions, autocomplete, syntax highlighting, vim mode, a whole bunch of added functions and line editor additions, and my terminal opens in one frame. It feels more like an extension of my mind than a tool I'm interacting with. OMZ by comparison, feels like typing over a slow ssh connection.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-11 15:39:02+00:00
> never going to be updated, so now we're stuck with it.

Try going to any 1998 web page in a modern browser... It's generally so broken so as to be unusable.

As well as every page telling me to install flash, most links are dead, most scripts don't run properly (vbscript!?), tls versions now incompatible, etc.

We shouldn't put much effort into backwards compatibility if it doesn't work in practice. The best bet to open a 1998 web page is to install IE6 in a VM, and everything works wonderfully.
by functionmouse | 2026-01-11 15:39:17+00:00
I don't know. What is it they say... saying you can't be sad because you've got it good is like saying you can't be happy if you've got it bad. There is nothing ignorant about being annoyed at a rock in your shoe. Let the annoyance wash over you, and then move forward. Unfortunately for us, we cannot overcome our physicality with things like fortitude and temperance.
by Rendello | 2026-01-11 15:40:04+00:00
That's one of the interesting paradoxes to me: everyone I know who's had therapy says you need to "shop around" and find the right fit.

On the one hand, I feel this is right. With dentists and doctors, second opinions are important because we all know people who have had years of their lives or physical health ruined due to quick doctor's visits where the doctor was light on time, patience, and information.

At the same time, it seems like it can be like that episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia where they just keep firing their arbitrators until they find one that isn't concerned with ethicality.
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 15:40:22+00:00
If I were a completely autonomous agent, my life would be much easier. I wouldn't be genuinely pissed off that my thread got flagged after 40 meaningful comments.

Actually, I specifically timed this post to hit the US peak hours from here in Japan. Now it’s past midnight JST, and I’m losing sleep manually emailing the moderators to fix this mess. I'm the one fighting for this logic, not some script.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-11 15:40:59+00:00
I have a Mac laptop, a Linux workstation, and a Windows workstation for different purposes and I use them all. I agree. Every time someone says they switched OSes and they don’t miss anything, it’s revealed that 90-100% of their work was in generic outlets like the web browser, terminal, e-mail, and Slack.

To be fair, that could cover a lot of people.

In my experience watching people make the switch in the real world, the failure point is either the last 10% of software that they actually need, or the first time they encounter some Linux quirk that they didn’t expect. Then it reaches a point where there isn’t really any upside for people who aren’t ideologically motivated and who don’t get triggered by Windows 11 design choices or occasional pop-ups.

I have some specific engineering software that must run on Windows, period. I’ve gotten flak from the software engineers at every company whenever it’s discovered that my second machine is Windows, but outside of software devs nobody else questions it. Using Windows for work is perfectly understood by most other disciplines
by tmtvl | 2026-01-11 15:41:03+00:00
In 2012 I borked my Windows 7 install by messing with the registry. I then used an Ubuntu live disk to back up my data. Then I reinstalled Windows 7, but when I couldn't access the internet because I hadn't installed the ethernet driver I had a thought: 'that Ubuntu thing didn't need me to install an ethernet driver to access the internet'. So I decided to install Ubuntu instead and I've been using GNU/Linux exclusively since then. I switched away from Ubuntu when the Amazon lens controversy happened and eventually wound up bouncing between Arch and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-11 15:41:04+00:00
First, you're misunderstanding what I mean by “polishing”, I'm talking about making sure it actually works.

Then, improving the signal to noise ratio of your project actually help “shipping the next feature”, as LLM themselves get lost in the noise they make.

Finally, if you want people to use your project, you need to show us that it's better than what they can make by themselves. And it's especially true now that AI reduces the cost of building new stuff. If you can't work with Claude to build something better that what Claude builds, your project isn't worth more than its token count.
by tgtweak | 2026-01-11 15:41:54+00:00
I used to run gentoo like 14 years ago! It remains one of the fastest distros I've seen for the specific hardware it was running on (high core count 4-socket AMD opteron servers) and I mostly attributed that to the fact it was compiling everything (even the base os in this case!) for that specific CPU at install time... emerge would build/compile and if you set your USE flags correctly it produced heavily tailored and optimized binaries. I feel like a staged/graduated (downloading/running precompiled initially while a flag-optimized compile runs in the background) would be a good way to get around some of the downsides here (namely that it takes 45 minutes to install firefox with emerge/pacman and that builds fail more often than packages fail to install).

Very cool to see that it's still going strong - I remember managing many machines at scale was a bit of a challenge, especially keeping ahead of vulnerabilities.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-11 15:42:01+00:00
There have been developments in receiving antennas that are harder to jam.

Most jamming is horizontal and limited to a few bands. So by having a directional antenna and listening to all services for now it seems to work. But this is a cat and mouse game.

https://furuno.eu/gr-en/marine-solutions/gnss-positioning-ti...
by rdm_blackhole | 2026-01-11 15:42:15+00:00
I don't believe a "war" is brewing.

If and that is a big if, Trump were to get Greenland, there is not much that Europe can do in any case. Maybe a few politicians will go on X/twitter and complain but every country in the EU knows that they are no match for the US military and I am saying that as someone who lives in the EU.

I suppose the EU could go after big US tech companies but since most of Europe's needs are covered by the very same companies, I don't think this would be viable solution either and let's be honest the EU people are not just going to switch to Ubuntu tomorrow morning.

It's unfortunate but it's the reality.
Show HN: A tool for writing professional incident postmortems from raw timelines
by tasssmaal | 2026-01-11 15:42:15+00:00
Hi HN,

When production breaks, writing a clear and honest incident report is stressful and slow — especially while customers and teammates are waiting.

I built IncidentPost to solve that. You paste a raw outage timeline (alerts, Slack logs, timestamps) and it generates a professional, shareable postmortem with an executive summary, timeline, root cause, mitigations, and action items.

You can see a full demo output here:
https://incidentpost.vect.pro/demo

Live app:
https://incidentpost.vect.pro

It’s a one-time purchase per incident — no accounts, no subscriptions.

I’d love feedback from engineers, SREs, and founders who’ve had to write postmortems under pressure.
by jakelazaroff | 2026-01-11 15:43:20+00:00
The inert self closing syntax is misleading, though, because if you use it for a non-void element then whatever follows will be contained within the tag.

e.g. how do you think a browser will interpret this markup?

<div />
<img />

A lot of people think it ends up like this (especially because JSX works this way):

<div></div>
<img>

but it's actually equal to this:

<div>
<img>
</div>