MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by napkinartist | 2026-01-07 15:20:57+00:00
I work in accessibility. I'm non binary and queer AF.

The particles are a problem for some sensory processing disorders that cannot tune out motion. This is why the prefer reduced motion attribute exists.

I appreciate that you and I probably agree that some people with anti-LGBTQ sentiments will pick on anything atypical about a website like this to claim some notional moral high ground to punch down, but in the case of the particles specifically there are disability accommodation reasons to consider them something toggleable.

(Though using reader mode is probably sufficient for those users, as the site is developed to support it well.)
by antonvs | 2026-01-07 15:21:22+00:00
I don’t agree that pipes should be in your list, at least for some use cases. Streaming data through pipes gives capabilities that systems written in more traditional ways often simply don’t match. Look at the use of the Stream API in Java for an example of the utility of this outside of the Haskell context.

Pipes also don’t necessarily have “dire performance implications”, but it depends a lot on the implementation. Haskell libraries don’t always emphasize real world performance as a top criterion. E.g. see https://github.com/composewell/streaming-benchmarks for some truly wild variations in performance across libraries (disclaimer: I haven’t investigated or verified those numbers.)
by D-Machine | 2026-01-07 15:21:46+00:00
You won't find any trustworthy papers on the topic because GP is simply wrong here.

That models can be distilled has no bearing whatsoever on whether a model has learned actual knowledge or understanding ("logic"). Models have always learned sparse/approximately-sparse and/or redundant weights, but they are still all doing manifold-fitting.

The resulting embeddings from such fitting reflect semantics and semantic patterns. For LLMs trained on the internet, the semantic patterns learned are linguistic, which are not just strictly logical, but also reflect emotional, connotational, conventional, and frequent patterns, all of which can be illogical or just wrong. While linguistic semantic patterns are correlated with logical patterns in some cases, this is simply not true in general.
by juancn | 2026-01-07 15:21:53+00:00
It's not the "can't" necessarily, it's about friction, I could get it working on linux, but then I'd probably be just fiddling with settings way longer than I do today.

Current Windows gaming experience is almost like a console, just play and forget, (if you just use your machine for that).

Another potential issue is that I have games in all the major launchers (and a GamePass subscription), and the only one that works reasonably well on Linux is Steam.
by enraged_camel | 2026-01-07 15:21:59+00:00
>> Even if there is a "fully vibe-coded" product that has real customers, the fact that it's vibe-coded means that others can do the same.

But that's precisely why you don't hear about these products: the creators don't disclose that they were vibe-coded, because if they do, that invites competition.

I personally know of four vibe-coded products that generate over $10k/mo. Two of them were made by one friend, one was made by another, and the last one by my cousin. None of these people are developers. But they are making real money.
by ndiddy | 2026-01-07 15:22:02+00:00
From the MR comments:

> If we assume the Linux desktop has 4% market share, and assume the highly improbable fact that all of those 4% know how to use middle click paste and prefer it over the alternative autoscrolling, that's still 96% of users that are used to environments where autoscrolling is available and middle click paste doesn't exist

I don't know why they're using familiarity as an argument when GNOME has intentionally behaved completely differently from the Windows/Mac desktop for the past 15 years. I'm sure that having to launch software by clicking an unlabelled button on the top-left of the screen and then clicking the dots in the dock that appears on the bottom, or not having a visible overview of the windows onscreen without switching to fullscreen "activities mode", or not having any application status icons, or not being able to minimize windows, all cause more user confusion than middle click paste.

Of course all of this is completely fine. It's great that people are trying out new ways to use a computer, and I'm sure that there's lots of people that prefer the GNOME workflow. It's just that when you already have to re-learn how to use a desktop in order to use GNOME, I don't see the point in acting like middle click paste is a step too far.

Edit: I also saw an interesting point made by a KDE developer on the Linux Reddit board: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1q4viq9/disable_prim...

> Having an option is fine; we do in Plasma. They can have any default they want too, I don't care.

> What's bad is this MR doing it at a GTK level. It's that lack of even thinking about what inconsistencies that would cause for GTK apps running anywhere outside gnome and other toolkits running on Gnome that comes across quite badly.

> gsettings-desktop-schemas will be pulled in [on other desktops] as it's a reverse dep of many other things, including xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, which is required for use on all desktops to avoid having messed up GTK fonts in your flatpak apps.
by VikingCoder | 2026-01-07 15:22:13+00:00
I think you're very close to being right...

But I think "Fuck you money" implies, "I honestly don't have to worry about money, ever again."

Now, we all have different definitions for that, but the kind of thing I was talking about is definitely not "Fuck you money," to me.

I think if I had "Fuck you money," my best friends and close family would all have their medical debts paid off. I think my parents and in-laws would have their mortgages paid off.
by trinix912 | 2026-01-07 15:22:17+00:00
The problem with this thinking is that you can never be sure these problems won’t happen to you.

I’m pretty sure it had worked just fine for the users in the article too, until it didn’t.

IMO they should clearly encourage users to keep backups elsewhere in case something happens, but they’re currently doing the exact opposite: encouraging users to back up (and on Windows even store) files exclusively on OneDrive.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-07 15:22:29+00:00
I was struck by this in the abstract: The scaling of these models, accomplished by increasing the number of parameters and the magnitude of the training datasets, has been linked to various so-called emergent abilities that were previously unobserved. These emergent abilities, ranging from advanced reasoning and in-context learning to coding and problem-solving...

In my experience with agent assisted coding, how well it works seems very closely tied to the quantity and quality of training material. It also has some identifiable qualities like verifiability that make it a particularly good target for an LLM. I would not call that surprising or emergent.
by WaitWaitWha | 2026-01-07 15:22:40+00:00
Although this article is about what new hardware got certified last month, I have never heard of this certification and think might have some potential.

According to OSHWA[0], they have 3,197 things certified.
A bit squirly to get to, but here is their Open Source HW definition for the certification: https://oshwa.org/resources/open-source-hardware-definition/

[0] https://oshwa.org/
by pc86 | 2026-01-07 15:22:40+00:00
There have always been hundreds or thousands of companies that want software engineers but simply don't have the revenue to support them. My first dev job was a small private company in exactly this spot. They basically paid me my salary for six months to figure out WordPress and PHP on the job having only ever done very basic programming stuff on my own in high school ~6 years prior.

The median dev salary across the entire US is something like $130k/yr. There are huge numbers of new or self-taught software devs in low cost of living areas of the country making $50-60k/yr.
Show HN: I built a PvP engine for Telegram (TON)
by trackmysitemap | 2026-01-07 15:22:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a solo developer building TON PvP Game, a Telegram Mini App (TMA). I wanted to explore the intersection of instant-settlement blockchains and social gaming.

The Tech:

Frontend: React (TMA SDK)
Backend: Node.js / TypeScript / Redis for matchmaking
Settlement: TON (The Open Network) via a hot-wallet system for instant payouts.

The "Expensive" Lesson: To launch the project, I implemented a complex referral and deposit bonus system. I made a classic mistake in the economic logic: the bonus multipliers were additive rather than multiplicative in a specific edge case.

This resulted in a "negative rake" where the winning payout was slightly higher than the total match pool. For about 5 days, I was effectively subsidizing every match from my personal dev wallet.

Why I’m sharing this: Usually, in the Web3 space, when a dev hits a financial bug, the project "rugs" or vanishes. I decided to take a different path:

1. I kept the withdrawals open to maintain trust.
2. I treated the loss as a "marketing cost" (though an unplanned one).
3. I rewrote the reward engine while the system was live.

The project is now stable and the unit tests for the economic engine have been... significantly expanded.

I’d love to get your feedback on the Telegram Mini App UX and how you handle "financial safety rails" in real-time settlement systems.
by 2Gkashmiri | 2026-01-07 15:22:51+00:00
Oh but mah brave.

How tone deaf can people be?

I talked to brave supporters and they all say "Firefox is a pita to modify" but we have had waterfox and other derivatives, floorp and others for decades.

In the end, Brendan is the one who does not like Firefox for personal reasons and that's why brave isn't based on Firefox. Personal reasons but brave fanboys don't see it
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-07 15:23:57+00:00
With a fiber connection, 5-20 terabytes/month is nothing. I could probably ramp it up, but I'm only looking for 1080p content. The only thing that keeps me sub-petabyte is that my budget doesn't allow for a NAS with enough bays (and 20tb disks going up to $500ish here lately surely hasn't helped).

Really, just start downloading every new release and you wouldn't even have to dip into the back catalog much.
by spoiler | 2026-01-07 15:24:01+00:00
I don't mind the dialogue, but if we're taking about the same author, some of the content gets diminished by the meandering waffling.

I realise it's a stylistic choice but there's been a few posts where I felt tired after reading their articles. And it also feels like one of those YouTube shorts sketches where one person pretends to be multiple people and it starts feeling a bit cheap/meh.

I think it would be fine if it they toned down on the interjections/interruptions
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-07 15:24:03+00:00
Rendering Unicode was always this complex. Emoji don't do anything that some other language in real use doesn't also do. What emoji does is bring that visually to the forefront among contemporary English text. The assumption that 8-bit character sets of simple bitmaps are all you need mostly only ever worked for English (and then only if you didn't need nice print-like typography, or math formulas, or…).
by kevindamm | 2026-01-07 15:25:12+00:00
Pure functional programming and lazy evaluation.. sure, you could create classes and a meta-function that selectively eval's thunks at a time, but the call site of that kind of library would look atrocious..

You might be able to hack on some of the datatype semantics into JS prototype-based inheritance (I'd rather start with TypeScript at that point, but then we're back at the "why isn't it a library" debate) to keep those ontologies from being semantically separate, but that's an uphill battle with some of JS's implicit value conversions.

I consider Logic Programming languages to be the go-to counterargument to TFA but yeah, anything with lazy eval and a mature type system are strong counterexamples too.
by duesabati | 2026-01-07 15:25:21+00:00
No I wasn't, it was a really interesting read thank you, but that blog post seem to me like an argument for me not the OP point of view, because if you refuse to understand how things work by blindly delegating to libraries and frameworks (like RoR) you become a "Blub" programmer that thinks in the way of constructs and decisions that the library/framework authors made.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-07 15:25:23+00:00
One answer to the question, from Bryan Cantrill:

> The thing that is remarkable about it is that it has this property of being information—that we made it up—but it is also machine, and it has these engineered properties. And this is where software is unlikely anything we have ever done, and we're still grappling on that that means. What does it mean to have information that functions as machine? It's got this duality: you can see it as both.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHPa5-BWd4w&t=4m37s

> We suffer -- tremendously -- from a bias from traditional engineering that writing code is like digging a ditch: that it is a mundane activity best left to day labor -- and certainly beneath the Gentleman Engineer. This belief is profoundly wrong because software is not like a dam or a superhighway or a power plant: in software, the blueprints _are_ the thing; the abstraction _is_ the machine.

* https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2007/07/28/on-the-beauty-in-bea...
by flumpcakes | 2026-01-07 15:25:37+00:00
> It’s a bit strange how anecdotes have become acceptable fuel for 1000 comment technical debates.

It's a very subjective topic. Some people claim it increases their productivity 100x. Some think it is not fit for purpose. Some think it is dangerous. Some think it's unethical.

Weirdly those could all be true at the same time, and where you land on this is purely a matter of importance to the user.

> Yet, I’d love to see less discussion driven by anecdotes and more discussion about productizing these tools, where they work, usage methodologies, missing tooling, KPIs for specific usecases. And don’t get me started on current evaluation frameworks, they become increasingly irrelevant once models are good enough at instruction following.

I agree. I've said earlier that I just want these AI companies to release an 8-hour video of one person using these tools to build something extremely challenging. Start to finish. How do they use it, how does the tool really work. What's the best approaches. I am not interested in 5-minute demo videos producing react fluff or any other boiler plate machine.

I think the open secret is that these 'models' are not much faster than a truly competent engineer. And what's dangerous is that it is empowering people to 'write' software they don't understand. We're starting to see the AI companies reflect this in their marketing, saying tech debt is a good thing if you move fast enough....

This must be why my 8-core corporate PC can barely run teams and a web browser in 2026.
by linsomniac | 2026-01-07 15:25:56+00:00
>nobody cares that the generated code is shit

That is the case, whether the code is AI generated or not. Go take a look at some of the source code for tools you use ever day, and you'll find a lot of shit code. I'd go so far as to say, after ~30 years of contributing to open source, that it's the rare jewel that has clean code.
by RiverCrochet | 2026-01-07 15:26:12+00:00
I haven't had too many issues with it that I couldn't resolve myself, but I understood what it was and what it was doing on my system. I opted in. I wonder if most of the people who don't like OneDrive didn't know it was enabled.

> OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive

No, it's a 1TB storage account accessible via the Internet, and wholly dependent on a good Internet connection, especially if you actually use most of that 1TB. Non-tech people will take misrepresentations like this at face value, which further makes tech a disempowering force.
by everforward | 2026-01-07 15:26:18+00:00
I'm not so sure, I've had a similar-ish issue on a W10 PC. I vaguely suspect a race condition on one of the drivers; I've specifically got my eye on the esp32 flashing drivers.

Sometimes it boots fine, sometimes the spinning dial disappears and it gets hung on the black screen, sometimes it hangs during the spinning dial and freezes, and very occasionally blue screens with a DPC watchdog violation. Oddly, it can happen during Safe Mode boots as well.

I would think hardware, but RAM has been replaced and all is well once it boots up. I can redline the CPU and GPU at the same time with no issues.
by CWuestefeld | 2026-01-07 15:26:44+00:00
Gaming is a smaller thing for me than the Adobe creative apps, especially Lightroom.

Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.
by piker | 2026-01-07 15:28:09+00:00
Read the article.

What happened is exactly what it suggests. OneDrive migration doesn't just copy your files to a server. While the migration is occurring, the operating system is optimistically re-mapping them all to a cloud URL and/or deleting them entirely.

Halting the migration and disabling "backup" returned the mapping back to the local disk, and I was able to open the file as normal.

I know, it's as crazy as it sounds and your bet was my bet at first as well.
Show HN: Career Control System – Roadmap in a repo for experienced developers
by we_can | 2026-01-07 15:28:14+00:00
I am a Developer turned Solution Architect. One pattern I saw in my career path is that a lot of experienced developers (including myself) find our career plateau out even though we are technically quite strong.

We are good at learning and delivery but career decisions are mostly reacting to opportunities. Lot of advice out there but what I needed was a hands-on system to help make routine decisions to pro-actively control my career path.

I built a lightweight "control system". Really a few markdown files in a GitHub repo. The idea is to work through to come up with a self guidance system that is unique for ourselves and is very tactical.

Core Idea:
- 5 worksheets (baseline, leverage, direction, positioning, execution)
- Everything feeds into one roadmap.md file
- Read it weekly, update monthly, review quarterly

The system forces you to answer:
1. What am I optimizing for right now?
2. What are the things that actually get results?
3. What do I not want to do?
4. What is my current direction and bet?
5. What signals should I watch for to indicate a need for change?

I've templated it here: https://github.com/balaji-techascend/career-roadmap

Would genuinely appreciate feedback from other senior folks - what am
I missing? What would make this more useful?
by close04 | 2026-01-07 15:28:38+00:00
> I asserted that if a tool is that dangerous, it shouldn't be used on a daily basis

Agree to disagree. I will repeat, we are surrounded by dangerous tools that we use on a daily basis. Clearly the "danger" part is not the criteria that defines if or how often you should use the tool.

> OneDrive meets those criteria.

Correct. But those are my criteria, and I believe they are the ones that carry my argument. Your criteria was "is dangerous" which is not enough to carry the weight of your conclusion.
by EthanHeilman | 2026-01-07 15:28:39+00:00
Even if you are going green field, you need to build it the way it is likely to be used based a having a deep familiarity with what that customer's problems are and how their current workflow is done. As much as we imagine everything is on the internet, a bunch of this stuff is not documented anywhere. An LLM could ask the customer requirement questions but that familiarity is often needed to know the right questions to ask. It is hard to bootstrap.

Even if it could build the perfect greenfield app, as it updates the app it is needs to consider backwards compatibility and breaking changes. LLMs seem very far as growing apps. I think this is because LLMs are trained on the final outcome of the engineering process, but not on the incremental sub-commit work of first getting a faked out outline of the code running and then slowly building up that code until you have something that works.

This isn't to say that LLMs or other AI approaches couldn't replace software engineering some day, but they clear aren't good enough yet and the training sets they have currently have access to are unlikely to provide the needed examples.
by weitendorf | 2026-01-07 15:28:45+00:00
Generally if something is fast enough/efficient enough that a paying customer can use it without having to worry or actively think about performance and un-bloatedness, that's enough for them. The only people who might complain still are developers who are bothered by the inefficiency and are technically literate enough to notice it, and maybe the users with less powerful/capable devices than the ones the big paying customers use. Generally these groups of people are not the actual customers of these products.

The people who actually pay for slack and discord (eg enterprises that need workplace chat app and decided to go with the "gold standard", consumers with discord servers and such) need the features/tradeoffs choosing featuers over efficiency causing that bloat. They just don't all need the exact same set of those features as the other customers. So because customers are willing to pay for all these features the product tries to ship all of them and becomes bloated.

> Every person I talked to that uses Excel hate how slow it is

But do they make the purchasing decisions behind using Excel?

To be clear I am not really arguing that bloat/overly enterprisey products are good. What I mean that you don't see the world exploding with more elegant products now with agents for the same reason you didn't see the world exploding with them before agents either: the people who pay for those products and build them for a living are not incentivized or necessarily even rewarded for choosing to make them more efficient or elegant when there are other things that customers are asking for with more $$$ behind them.
by banannaise | 2026-01-07 15:28:59+00:00
The turn-based version sounds interesting, but I think it falls on its face in practice. The game then becomes:

1. lure the horse to an optimal point on the map.

2. trap it in a small circle of fences.

3. build part of your final wall with the remaining fences.

4. one by one, move the fences trapping the horse in place into position.
by josu | 2026-01-07 15:29:04+00:00
I know what's like running a business, and building complex systems. That's not the point.

I used highload as an example because it seems like an objective rebuttal to the claim that "but it can't tackle those complex problems by itself."

And regarding this:

"Claude is very useful but it's not yet anywhere near as good as a human software developer. Like an excitable puppy it needs to be kept on a short leash"

Again, a combination of LLM/agents with some guidance (from someone with no prior experience in this type of high performing architecture) was able to beat all human software developers that have taken these challenges.
by palmotea | 2026-01-07 15:29:37+00:00
> Yes. Believe it or not, most people are not all star human beings in all facets of their lives.

The above is not just normal faults of the magnitude we all have, instead they're pretty strong indications that jobs was a terrible person. He was probably a narcissist.

> We can certainly still learn from them, instead of casually dismissing them when we find an instance that they don't live up to our pedestal.

There are different kinds of "learning from people," I'd recommend not "learning from" Jobs like he's a guru to be admired, but that's what a lot of people do.

We should admire and learn from good people, and the lesson to learn from Jobs is terrible people can be successful, and not to confuse success for goodness.