MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shevy-java | 2026-01-24 16:46:07+00:00
> Feature overload. GitLab tries to be everything.

This is the primary reason I dislike GitLab. It is so complicated to use.

Github issue trackers are so simple to use.

Perhaps GitLab offers more features for project owners, but as a user, I much prefer github. Of course I'd prefer it even more if Microsoft wouldn't control github ...
by mathstuf | 2026-01-24 16:46:14+00:00
I agree that the YAML can get out of hand. We use the `extends` keyword to put together jobs from pieces so that details can live in one place and the job bits and graph description can live in another. The way we've done our pipelines are very difficult to do with GHA as we build a DAG (with splits and forks) that are greatly aided by artifacts being integrated into GitLab-CI instead of separate piecemeal actions.

We also need custom runners anyways because macOS and Windows are important and getting those with graphical session access and/or CUDA hardware in the cloud is either $$$$ or severely limited. Even with our setup, we split the build and test phases so that CUDA hardware slots aren't wasted on running compilers. It also lets us test a single build under different environments easily.

So, yeah, I can see fighting with the feature spectrum, but you need to restrict yourself in most other cases with that kind of stuff too. But at least what we do is possible with GitLab-CI.
by julienbuteau | 2026-01-24 16:46:38+00:00
Hi - Julien here, co-founder of TofuPilot. Thanks for the mention.

You’re right that the open-source hardware test ecosystem is still pretty sparse. Today, OpenHTF and OpenTAP are still the most commonly cited Python-centric frameworks, but both show their age when it comes to orchestration, concurrency, and modern DX.

We recently released TofuPilot Framework (https://github.com/tofupilot/framework) as an open-source (MIT), hardware-agnostic test orchestration framework that’s explicitly designed for hardware testing in lab and production environments.

TofuPilot Framework is a Rust-based test orchestrator that executes Python test steps (with more languages planned based on feedback). It’s meant as a “spiritual successor” to OpenHTF, focused on orchestration, control-flow, and observability rather than locking you into a vendor ecosystem.

What it covers relative to your requirements:

1. Parallel execution & precise control flow: setup/teardown phases, conditional steps, retries, concurrent steps, and multi-device orchestration (PSUs, DMMs, DAQs... basically you come with your Python driver and the framework manages the object lifecycle vs. your test execution).

2. Hardware-agnostic connectors: driver layers are explicitly separated so instruments can be swapped without rewriting orchestration logic

3. Run history & data: local run data management with automatic sync to the TofuPilot dashboard for logs, metrics, trends, and querying historical runs

4. Slack & integrations: we’re about to ship TofuPilot Workflows, a dashboard module that lets you define event-driven flows reacting to test results (Slack/Discord notifications, MES/ERP sync, etc.)

We ship it as desktop apps:

TofuPilot Studio: developer environment for writing and debugging tests (UI editor, step debugging, dry runs, plugin dev)

TofuPilot Station: locked-down production app for lab/production PCs; stations auto-update from a connected test repo via the dashboard

On the business side: we’re an independent team based in Switzerland, coming from robotics and industrial test backgrounds. The framework itself is free and MIT-licensed. Our revenue comes from the hosted dashboard, which is free up to a certain data volume, then ~$50/user or station/month. Most current revenue is from self-hosted enterprise deployments.

Genuinely curious: for teams like yours, is pricing a blocker for adoption? We’d really like to make TofuPilot attractive for smaller teams and are very open to feedback.

Happy to answer any technical questions or go deeper on architecture trade-offs.
by vladms | 2026-01-24 16:46:54+00:00
> But One-drive is essentially a mass-surveillance tool.

There are plenty of people that post clear positions on multiple social networks. I personally doubt that One-drive files will provide much more information for most of the people compared to what's already out there (including mobile phone location, credit card transactions, streaming services logs, etc.).

What I think the danger is for individual abuse. Someone "in power" wants one guy to have issues, they could check his One-drive for something.

Best is to make people aware of how it works and let them figure it out. There are so many options (local only, encrypted cloud storage, etc.) I doubt there is an ideal solution for everything.
by lysace | 2026-01-24 16:47:21+00:00
An interesting part of the article:

Most telling is that the US has little in the way of suitable military resources or experience for the Arctic. It is, for once, European Nato allies, especially the Scandinavians and Britain, who have Arctic-ready forces.

One military source noted that in last year’s Joint Viking exercise in northern Norway, American troops struggled.

Exercise commanders had to ask Finnish reservists, the most formidable Arctic warriors, who were playing the role of invaders in the war games, to go easy on the Americans. “The Finns had to be told to stop beating the Americans as it was embarrassing and demoralising for them,” a military source said.
by SkyeCA | 2026-01-24 16:47:27+00:00
People are emotional and react in unexpected ways to even the smallest perceived slights, myself included.

A late birthday recognition might not feel important, but if one already feels like management doesn't care about them? I can easily seeing that as a confirmation of it that causes resentment. I can also see it doing the same for any number of management related issues.

I can tell you personally that the action which most seriously affected my performance at a workplace was being denied a bereavement day because the official policy was to only allow one. I felt more than slighted and every single negative action taken afterwards by HR/management, no matter how small, caused me to resent them more.
by signatoremo | 2026-01-24 16:47:39+00:00
I think you missed the point. From the blog post:

To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch. The agents ran for close to a week, writing over 1 million lines of code across 1,000 files [...]

Despite the codebase size, new agents can still understand it and make meaningful progress. Hundreds of workers run concurrently, pushing to the same branch with minimal conflicts.

The point is that the agents can comprehend the huge amount of code generated and continue to meaningfully contribute to the goal of the project. We didn't know if that was possible. They wanted to find out. Now we have a data point.

Also, a popular opinion on any vibecoding discussion is that AI can help, but only on greenfield, toy, personal projects. This experiment shows that AI agents can work together on a very complex codebase with ambitious goals. Looks like there was a human plus 2,000 agents, in two months. How much progress do you think a project with 2,000 engineers can achieve in the first two months?

> What matters is whether those lines build, function as expected (especially in edge cases) and perform decently. As far as I can tell, AI has not been demonstrated to be useful yet at those three things.

They did build. You can give it a try. They did function as expected. How many edge cases would you like it to pass? Perform decently? How could you tell if you didn't try?
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 16:47:41+00:00
Look, just because an LLM thing is named "agent" doesn't mean it is "legally an agent".

If I were an attorney in court, I would argue that a "mechanical or automatic agent" cannot truly be a personal agent unless it can be trusted to do things only in line with that person's wishes and consent.

If an LLM "agent" runs amok and does things without user consent and without reason or direction, how can the person be held responsible, except for saying that they never should've granted "agency" in the first place? Couldn't the LLM's corporate masters be held liable instead?
by PxldLtd | 2026-01-24 16:48:26+00:00
This is a really good point. Competitors in this space have a lot of resources so there's a tightrope to walk if you go the OSS core route. Any of these competitors could leverage your core and provide many more features than you could reasonably implement.

BSL/BUSL seems like a good fit for licensing here. It's technically source available instead of open source but just adds the layer that a competitor can't be built using your core. Otherwise the core is free to modify and fork. AGPL might be an option but I fear it would scare off a lot of companies in the space who have policies against AGPL licensed code but you'd get to keep advertising as OSS.
by amarant | 2026-01-24 16:48:34+00:00
Similar experience. I just tried Claude for the first time last week, and I gave it very small tasks. "Create a data class myClass with these fields<•••> and set it up to generate a database table using micronaut data" was one example. I still have to know exactly what to do, but I find it very nice that I didn't have to remember how to configure micronaut data, (which tbf is really easy) I just had to know that that's what I wanted to use. It's not as revolutionary as the hype, but it does increase productivity quite a bit, and also makes programming more fun I think. I get to focus on what I want to build, instead of trying to remember jdbc minutiae. Then I just sanity check the generated code, and trust that I will spot mistakes in that jdbc connection. It felt like the world's most intuitive abstraction layer between me and the keyboard, a pretty cool feeling.

Just for fun, once I had played a bit with it like that, I just told it to finish the application with some vague Jira-epic level instructions on what I wanted in it and then fed it the errors it got.

It eventually managed to get something working but... Let's just say it's a good thing this was a toy project I did specifically to try out Claude, and not something anyone is going to use, much less maintain!
by lifetimerubyist | 2026-01-24 16:49:55+00:00
> For instance, many engineering teams estimate work in t-shirt sizes instead of time, because it just feels too obviously silly to the engineers in question to give direct time estimates. Naturally, these t-shirt sizes are immediately translated into hours and days when the estimates make their way up the management chain.

This is mostly fine when it’s the tooling that does the translating based on rolling historical averages - and not engineers or managers pulling numbers out of their rear.
by 46493168 | 2026-01-24 16:50:15+00:00
>But that has nothing to do with the reality that the best response is to stop doing heroin.

This is medically inaccurate. The best response is medically supervised detoxification. Stopping heroin without medical supervision can cause severe dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, cardiovascular issues and aspiration pneumonia. To say nothing of the likelihood of relapse overdose.

You should never, ever tell a person addicted to heroin to "just stop doing heroin" (or, to be more charitable to the original claim, "just" tell them to "stop doing heroin") and them continuing do heroin is not the same as "refusing to help themselves."
by Tadpole9181 | 2026-01-24 16:50:23+00:00
> this video will likely be glad just instantly

Again.

Anyway, the video shows that we've unequivocally entered open-air brownshirt executions.

This person was pinned to the ground by three people while another was just wailing against their head from above. Hard to tell what object they're using as a cudgel to their face.

Then the subsequent mag dumping just to be extra sure they're dead.

We really need that lady in the back to release her video.
by bossTheCross | 2026-01-24 16:50:48+00:00
I created a simple terminal-based tool that uses a consumer Gemini, which is free, and turns it into a local AI agent that runs entirely on your system. The tool allows you to create, edit, and manage files, as well as code, and other system-related actions, such as opening applications, adjusting volume and screen brightness, and even system sleep, using plain language through a terminal interface.

It works 100% locally, with no backend and no need for a backend API key. It just leverages your existing Gemini web session. So nothing actually gets sent off to a server.
by em-bee | 2026-01-24 16:51:07+00:00
yeah, the reviewer completely missed telling us about the first one and what effect the second one had on it. i'd also like to see a few repeated reviews because the utility of a baby changes drastically once they can walk and speak and express a will of their own. i found it very difficult to engage with my own until they reached that stage. the smiles that the reviewer seems so excited about did nothing for me.
by OptionOfT | 2026-01-24 16:51:57+00:00
No, I'm tired of AI being pushed as this amazing way to make everybody go 100% faster, while being able to lay off 90% of the people.

And for some reason the CxO suite and upper management has completely drunk the cool-aid.

In the past new technology was adopted sparingly, to figure out whether the juice was worth the squeeze.

However with AI it feels like a lot of places are (trying to go|going) all in, both in their work, and integrating it into the products, regardless of whether it makes sense.

But most importantly, I think pushback is needed because if AI succeeds in the way it is currently advertised and sold, it's a lot more people than 'just' the Software Engineers that are going to lose their jobs.

Which is great for all those companies who currently have a lot less people on payroll.

But on the other hand, a lot of the money spent on these companies is discretionary spending. Guess what's the first thing to be cut when you lose your job?
by otterley | 2026-01-24 16:51:59+00:00
That's where "scope of agency" comes in. It's no different than if Amy, as in my example, ran amok and started signing agreements with the mob to bind Global Corp to a garbage pickup contract, when all she had was the authority to sign a contract for a software purchase.

So in a case like this, if your agent exceeded its authority, and you could prove it, you might not be bound.

Keep in mind that an LLM is not an agent. Agents use LLMs, but are not LLMs themselves. If you only want your agent to be capable of doing limited actions, program or configure it that way.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-24 16:52:09+00:00
When I was at a large financial news company circa 2018, we were fully bought into developing in public on github. (they still are to a lesser extent)

The problem is that organising it on github was really really hard. Trying to find and group projects was notoriously difficult and the CI/CD offering was shit.

I joined a startup and it was on gitlab. The server was hosted by the runner was local. We could make arbitrary projects and CI/CD was a dream. Very simple but powerful.

The downside was at the time, it was offline every other week. However to administer, it was far far easier.

Github has improved, you can have organisations and chain them together. But its a motherfucker to administer. They move everything about monthly, and make it very difficult to work out which child org has which power.

The CI/CD has vastly improved, we have private runners. But.

They are really nasty to administer and monitor, and the language you use to make jobs is not that intuitive. It doesn't feel like a shell script with a docker wrapper.

If I had a choice, I'd move us over, but its a lot of faff, and we have so many work arounds.
by xp84 | 2026-01-24 16:52:16+00:00
I really doubt those motives are "evil." They're in the business of selling and supporting an OS. Most people couldn't safeguard a 10-byte password on their own, they're not going to have a solution for saving their encryption key that keeps it safer than it'd be with Microsoft, and that goes for both criminals (or people otherwise facing law enforcement scrutiny) and normal grandmas who just want to not have all their pictures and recipes lost.

Before recently, normal people who get arrested and have their computer seized were 100% guaranteed that the cops could read their hard drive and society didn't fall apart. Today, the chances the cops can figure out how to read a given hard drive is probably a bit less. If someone needs better security against the actual government (and I'm hoping that person is a super cool brave journalist and not a terrorist), they should be handling their own encryption at the application layer and keeping their keys safe on their own, and probably using Linux.
by jcovik | 2026-01-24 16:52:17+00:00
The last time I've installed windows, bitlocker was enabled automatically and the key was uploaded without my consent.

Yes, you can opt out of it while manually activating bitlocker, but I find it infuriating that there's no such choice at the system installation process. It's stupid that after system installation a user supposed to renecrypt their system drive if they don't want this.
by TurkTurkleton | 2026-01-24 16:52:24+00:00
GOG has a Steam-like client application that you can use instead of downloading the installers (which, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, would be more convenient because its installer is in 28 parts, with another 11 for the Phantom Liberty expansion). It may be that if you install games through that, GOG can remove them if they revoke a license for any reason. I don't know that for sure, though. Just pointing out that they may, in fact, have the ability, at least in principle. But to be clear in case there's any doubt, I think we're on the same side: I think if nake89 had downloaded and installed CP2077 manually instead of through GOG Galaxy, and had continued to play it even after GOG decided the license was fraudulently acquired, they would have been in the right in every way that matters, and at least from a moral perspective, GOG could go pound sand.
by rincebrain | 2026-01-24 16:52:46+00:00
Something that should also be factored in, IMO, is the gap between "on paper" and "reality", and how it varies by area.

That is, my friends in rural areas report a lot more cases of hostile workers in medicaid/etc processes actively doing their best to screw people over, to an extent that I, as someone who's always lived in the suburbs or cities, would have expected someone to get fired over. "Misplaced" paperwork, "oops, I told you to submit the wrong thing and now the deadline is passed, too bad so sad", "refer you to another doctor with no openings for 3 months...who then refuses to see you because the referral was malformed, and now you need to get in again at the first place because they refuse to do paperwork without an appointment..." ...the list of ways that you can be malicious in the gap is very large.

But in larger environments, my experience is those people get fired or transferred out of those positions once a stink is made, because regardless of the organization's feelings as a whole, they don't want the attention the stink caused. In smaller settings, that response is harder to trigger.

So that would be, I suspect, a major reason this can work better in urban settings - because the people who actively sabotage the use of these services are better filtered out.
by dchuk | 2026-01-24 16:52:48+00:00
I prefer 1 hour/1 day/etc but yes, this is the only method that I’ve found to work. Be very clear what result you’re trying to produce, spec out the idea in detail, break down the spec into logical steps, use orders of magnitude to break down each step. There’s your estimate. If you can’t break it down enough to get into the 1 day/1 week range per step, you don’t actually have a plan and can’t produce a realistic estimate
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-24 16:53:11+00:00
Back when it was fashionable to complain about how every Electron application has 30 MB of bloat I did an eval of all the options for x-platform applications that weren't Electron and came to the conclusion that "they all sucked" except for maybe JavaFX -- and not everybody likes Java as much as I do.

Building up to Win 8, Microsoft pushed for grid and flexbox which are the bees knees for laying out applications in HTML.

Compare the annoying nag dialogs in MacOS and Windows. MacOS nags you to buy into Apple Music and other unwanted services with 2025 reskins of the 1999 reskins of the modal dialogs from the 1984 Mac Classic. Windows does the same with ads that look like advertising which I find more visually appealing even if the services are unappealing.

Every time I think about writing a GUI application that's not a web application I think "this is a waste of time" whereas my web applications keep finding new lives as mobile applications, VR applications, etc.
by chrisfosterelli | 2026-01-24 16:53:16+00:00
Yes, my claim is absolutely not that they're good at it haha.

Estimation is a real problem in a lot of industries, including ours, and I think that's probably common ground here -- I suppose my differing position is that I think the solution is to get better at it, not to refuse to do it.

I've been on projects where I've seen the budget explode and projects where I've seen the budget kept tight and on track. The latter is very hard and requires effort from ALL sides to work, but it's almost always achievable.

I actually empathize a little bit more with megaprojects because generally the larger the budget the harder it will be to keep on track in my experience. Most estimates we're asked to give in our day jobs are not even multi-million dollar estimates.

Also I'm using budget and estimate interchangeably but these are of course different things -- that's one of my nitpicks is that we often treat these as the same thing when we talk about estimating being hard. A lot of individual estimates can be very wrong without affecting the ultimate budget.
by conductr | 2026-01-24 16:53:26+00:00
Strongly dislike can also mean you just prefer to avoid those people or limit your interactions. It doesn’t mean hate.

If you want people like this to stop avoiding you, it’s an internal adjustment that needs to be made. That’s the responsibility for yourself part. Ignoring you is not hurting the other person one bit, actually they are benefiting from it as they skip dealing with your personality they dislike. It’s not to say they are biased against you, if you were more compatible they may change their stance without thinking about it. That wouldn’t happen if they hated you.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 16:53:46+00:00
I once worked for an ISP where our routers and servers were co-located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

So I would visit the machine room on occasion to go fix things with the SunOS 4 systems we had.

For a while, I considered requesting that my assigned desk be moved into the machine room, because our servers occupied two ordinary tables in a far corner of the place that was about as far from humanity as anyone could go. It was, of course, noisy with white noise and chilly with air conditioning to keep the machines more comfortable than the staff.

I never made my request and it never would've been granted. I imagine they couldn't even run a phone line into that place to get a hold of me.
by kllrnohj | 2026-01-24 16:54:13+00:00
Rust is better here (by a lot), but you can still ignore the return value. It's just a warning to do so, and warnings are easily ignored / disabled. It also litters your code with branches, so not ideal for either I-cache or performance.

The ultimate ideal for rare errors is almost certainly some form of exception system, but I don't think any language has quite perfected it.