MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-01-19 03:02:53+00:00
> Since you like pixel-perfect rendering even at very high resolutions, perhaps you have superhuman vision.

I'm just annoyingly particular about this. It's why I accept a framerate hit in video games and don't use upscalers like DLSS, and why I intend to swap my 3840 × 2160 600 × 340 mm monitor for a 5120 × 2880 one of the same physical size. Some really nice ones were demonstrated at CES a fortnight ago.

> if I dragged the window in the example photo upwards to sit entirely on the top display, it would stay huge, whereas if I dragged it downwards to sit entirely on the bottom display, it would stay small.

This is not the behaviour I see. The window upon occupying the larger percentage of a display, 'snaps' to the DIP of that display.
by neilv | 2026-01-19 03:03:25+00:00
Sunday evening musings regarding bot comments and HN...

I'm sure it's happening, but I don't know how much.

Surely some people are running bots on HN to establish sockpuppets for use later, and to manipulate sentiment now, just like on any other influential social media.

And some people are probably running bots on HN just for amusement, with no application in mind.

And some others, who were advised to have an HN presence, or who want to appear smarter, but are not great at words, are probably copy&pasting LLM output to HN comments, just like they'd cheat on their homework.

I've gotten a few replies that made me wonder whether it was an LLM.

Anyway, coincidentally, I currently have 31,205 HN karma, so I guess 31,337 Hacker News Points would be the perfect number at which to stop talking, before there's too many bots. I'll have to think of how to end on a high note.

(P.S., The more you upvote me, the sooner you get to stop hearing from me.)
by ikidd | 2026-01-19 03:03:41+00:00
Same here. Farmer now, former network engineer and software project lead, but I stopped programming almost 20 years ago.

Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of features.

And git was brand new when I left the industry, so I only started using it recently to any extent, and holy hell, is it ever awesome!

I'm finally able to build all the ideas I come up with when I'm sitting in a tractor and the GPS is steering.

Seriously exciting. I have a hard time getting enough sleep because I hammer away on new ideas I can't tear myself away from.
by gmuslera | 2026-01-19 03:04:26+00:00
Besides of the advantages and disadvantages of Linux and/or Windows on this, the problem I see on a Microsoft Linux distribution is not the Linux part, but the Microsoft one. The problem that is driving away users are the company policies, not what the OS can or not do, they were mostly OK with how things were in previous version. So putting the Microsoft policies in a Linux desktop will probably have the same results.
by skeltoac | 2026-01-19 03:04:53+00:00
Depends on what exactly gets banned. What is an ad? What isn’t? Must all information be paid for by the audience? I wish someone would tell me what this ban is supposed to cover.

I worry that innovators and small businesses won’t be able to get their message out efficiently. You won’t be able to display your message on anyone else’s property. You won’t be able to take any compensation for promoting anything.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-19 03:06:04+00:00
> the former type is all but obliterated now.

Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.

While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on.

Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.
by Ferret7446 | 2026-01-19 03:06:29+00:00
My understanding is that the "flood" is due to the state not assisting and arguably impeding ICE, vs states like Florida where the state is cooperating so they don't need as much ICE to do the work. It sounds like the fraud is being used as a red herring by detractors.

AFAIK, committing fraud does not protect illegal immigrants from deportation, which seems to be the implied conclusion here. If ICE deports illegal immigrants who are also committing fraud, I can't see how that is a minus rather than a plus.
by antonvs | 2026-01-19 03:08:20+00:00
Almost certainly not. You can go on AWS or GCP and spin up a VM with 2.2 TB RAM and 288 vCPUs. Worst case, if streaming the data sequentially isn't fast enough, you can use something like GNU Parallel to launch processes in parallel to use all those 288 cpus. (It's also extremely easy to set up - 'apt install parallel' is about all you need.) That starts to resemble Hadoop, if you squint, except that it's all running on the same machine. As a result, it's going to outperform Hadoop significantly.

The only reason not to do that is if for some reason the workload won't support that kind of out-of-the-box parallelism. But in that case, you'd be writing custom code for Hadoop or Spark anyway, so there's an argument for doing the same to run on a single VM. These days it's pretty easy to essentially vibe code a custom script to do what you need.

At the company I'm with, we use Spark and Apache Beam for many of our large workloads, but that's typically involving data at the petabyte scale. If you're just dealing with a few dozen terabytes, it's often faster and easier to spin up a single large VM. I just ran a process on Friday like that, on a 96-core VM with 350 GB RAM.
by lurk2 | 2026-01-19 03:09:32+00:00
You mean on the outside of the taxi, or the inside? If you meant outside, semitrucks often advertise for companies that don’t actually own them. If you meant inside, some airlines already do this with ads that play on the entertainment system before the flight, a lot like how old movie theaters used to.

Augmented reality adblockers can’t get here soon enough.
by dev1ycan | 2026-01-19 03:10:47+00:00
This is never going to happen for obvious reasons, it would mean Adobe and others would release on linux would instantly kill Windows.

Anyways, I cannot stress enough how good Linux is today, hell, using Hyprland is so light years ahead of Windows, it's really like going back to Windows 98 when I try to split my screen across my programs or swap desktops compared to Hyprland (personally use Omarchy although I know people dislike all the stuff it comes bundled with).

KDE Plasma is also beautiful and incredibly customizable, etc. Linux is just a marvel of an operating system nowadays, the missing software (that can be run with stuff like winboat and other program) is really not a deal breaker compared to having to deal with a beyond terrible OS on a daily basis.
by dkdcio | 2026-01-19 03:11:26+00:00
information flows fine without paid ads, and with much better incentives

> people can pay to have their messages displayed where they will be seen

…why? distribution of information is free across the world, which was not the case a century ago. let the message speak for itself

I ask again, what’s your actual argument against? you’ve seen things through ads you’ve liked? you think people should be allowed to pay to put their thumbs on the scale of the distribution of information? to what end?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-19 03:11:30+00:00
I am 30 years in professionally in June and 10 years as a hobbyist before that. I first started programming in 86 in assembly language

I’ve kept up with every wave in technology from 1996 when I was still programming ok mainframes, through web, a brief stint on mobile. “Full Stack development” (even though I suck at the web side), and since 2018 app dev + cloud including four years working at AWS.

I had three offers within 3 weeks after being Amazoned when I was 49 in 2023 and 1 offer in two weeks in 2024.
by contrarian1234 | 2026-01-19 03:11:30+00:00
Are you trying to say there is a parallel in that the right voices read the tea leaves correctly and knew that Russia was going to be a crazy rogue state? And that similarly, there are signs China is going to get super belligerent in the future?

I would first say that what happened with Russia, at least to me, did not seem inevitable even with hindsight. I don't think Romney had some keen foresight - more like a lucky guess.

I also don't really see the same happening with China, though it's of course possible. A sudden economic downturn could trigger a need for an external enemy and a conflict.

But a military conflict between the US and China just seems like an absurd fantasy. It'd how you end up with a nuclear war and the death of millions. I don't think the Chinese secretly want this in the long run. They want peace and more business and more wealth
by AlienRobot | 2026-01-19 03:11:51+00:00
My prediction is that in 5 years I'll try to drag an image from Chrome into Nemo, my file manager, and it still won't work.

I also predict that Mint still won't ship with a font manager.

That the workspaces tasklet still won't support dragging and dropping tasks into it to move them between workspaces.

That there still won't be a multi-step wizard for creating launchers on the desktop.

That there still won't be a proper shortcut format on Linux and people will be forced to still use symlinks, which are a terrible experience for folder shortcuts. And that file managers still won't support creating hard links.

That some applications still will have 1 pixel of padding at the top that prevents me from clicking the close button by moving my mouse to the top-right corner.

That Nemo still won't tell you that you need to make an appimage executable to run it.

That DE's still won't tell you that you need to install and configure flatseal to make some flatpaks actually work.

That you'll still be able to change your account password without changing the keyring password and then forgetting your old password and losing your keyring.

And that the Linux community will still be telling themselves that the real reason nobody uses Linux is because some lootbox game needs a kernel level anti-cheat, or because the latest gamer keyboard with rainbow-colored LEDs doesn't have a Linux driver, or that the average person just absolutely needs features that only photoshop/microsoft office have.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-19 03:12:48+00:00
It was a fun moment to finally work on a data problem that did not fit on any (practical) machine. I needed about 50TiB of memory to process a multi-PiB set of logs.

It's worth remembering however that even though it's less efficient per-CPU or whatever to split a large task into many smaller tasks, it may be more efficient overall alongside other workloads as you can bin-pack tasks more efficiently on a cluster, not to mention if tasks fail you are retrying less of the overall work.

All this is to say, the article makes a very good point, but doing it all on one machine also has problems. Just don't cargo cult engineering decisions.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-19 03:13:03+00:00
That also seems to be a risk with most centralized social networks these days as well.

Our LinkedIn profiles have been scanned by scrapers, Instagram photos used for facial recognition training, Twitter / FB posts replicated in a bunch of downstream places, archives, and search indexes. Not to mention data being sold to third parties.

At this point, I assume if I post it publicly online, it is no longer in my control where it ends up downstream and I assume it will be online somewhere forever.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-19 03:14:25+00:00
> Can't even put the inflected pronoun first even though it would be unambiguous:

> Him Colonel Mustard killed.

You can do that. It's called fronting, and it's not rare in English.

It's not a case of the argument order being flexible, but what you said is just plain false.

> The only variation in your English examples is with the prepositions.

So?

> English is a language where you just do not get that kind of flexibility.

You mean the kind of flexibility I just illustrated? Or something else? You have a verb with 5 arguments. Two of them go in fixed locations. The other three don't go in fixed locations.

It's not a coincidence that the arguments that are free to wander around the sentence are the ones that bear explicit markings of the nature of their relationship to the verb.

> The dog the policeman bites.

> Stilted and prone to get misunderstood isn't it?

Not really. It's not a sentence, though; "the dog the policeman bites" is just a noun phrase referring to a dog. There's no verb. (Bites is a verb, but it's inside a relative clause.)
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-19 03:15:29+00:00
> One of the key arguments is that Congress can't take that power away from him. For example, Congress can't tell him that he can't fire executive-branch staff, because the executive power rests with him, not with Congress.

Just want to comment what an incredibly piss poor argument that is, because if you take it to its conclusion, it means all of the power rests with the Executive and none with the Legislature. That is, by definition, the Executive branch has all the people that actually "do stuff". If the executive has full, 100% control over the structure and rules of the branch, why bother even having a legislature in the first place if all the laws can be conveniently ignored or "reinterpreted".

You could argue Congress still has the power of impeach if they believe laws aren't being faithfully excited, but I'd argue that is much too much of a blunt instrument to say that laws should be able to constrain what a President can do within the executive branch.
by wdsmaduranga321 | 2026-01-19 03:15:57+00:00
"Hello HN,

I'm the developer behind Smart Invoice Tool. I built this because I was frustrated with existing "free" invoice generators that forced me to sign up or pay to remove watermarks just to download a simple PDF.

The Tech Stack:

Frontend: Next.js 15 (App Router)
PDF Generation: html2canvas + jsPDF (client-side generation)
Styling: Tailwind CSS
Database: PostgreSQL + Prisma (for user accounts, but the core generator works without login)
Key Features:

No sign-up required for basic use.
Privacy-focused: Invoices are generated in your browser (for non-logged-in users).
Supports multiple currencies and customizable templates.
It's a simple tool, but it solves a specific itch I had. I'd love to hear your feedback on the UX or the code.

Link: https://smartinvoicetool.com"
by wewewedxfgdf | 2026-01-19 03:17:44+00:00
The real answer should have been a new language that has memory safety without all the extra conceptual changes and orthogonal subsystems that Rust brings. The core value of safety did not need the reinvention of everything else with the accompanying complexity and cognitive load. For example Zig which instead of introducing a new metaprogramkming language, it uses...... Zig - imagine using the same language instead of inventing a new additional language with all the accompanying complexity and cognitive load and problems. Rust is for those who revel in complexity. And traits - traits and extra complexity not needed for safety. And result and option and move by dedfault - none of these things were needed but they all add up to more complexity and unfamiliarity and cognitive load. And when you add it all together and intertwine it you end up with something so unfamiliar that it no longer looks like "ordinary programming" it looks like something from the Cambrian period.
by keyle | 2026-01-19 03:18:09+00:00
I'd help build Gas City and Gas State, and Gas Country if that would mean we actually would solve the things AI promised to solve. All sickness, famine, wealth ...

The problem is, we're just fidgeting yolo-fizzbuzz ad nauseam.

The return on investment at the moment is probably one of the worst in the history of human investments.

AI does improve over time, still today, but we're going to run out of planet before we get there...
by tombert | 2026-01-19 03:18:56+00:00
Yeah, I was about to say. The NT kernel isn’t bad at all; it’s arguably better than Linux. It’s just that an OS is more than a kernel, and pretty much all the other crap in Windows is terrible.

Honestly, what I would like them to do is make/support a modern Copy on Write filesystem so that System Restore actually works, and so that it’s easy to roll back when Windows Update borks your PC.

You don’t need Linux for either of these things. You need software engineers to build a modern filesystem or make Windows natively support ZFS or something.
by coolThingsFirst | 2026-01-19 03:19:22+00:00
Let's take that thought for a second: " big companies can copy your product in no time"

How will big companies know your revenue and the number of paying customers you have?

Before you even get there, you'll have made generational wealth pretty much. They made tons of clones of Agario but none of them were as good.

The problem is finding a solid idea and marketing it to people. That's the harder part. Programming is still hard despite vibe coders churning out slop but not as hard.
by foxglacier | 2026-01-19 03:20:02+00:00
I don't know what it would take to be self-sufficient but neither do you. Eventually humans will have to have a sustainable presence off Earth if we don't want our species to go extinct. Why can't somebody give it a try? Maybe we don't quite have the technology for it yet but it doesn't hurt to have a good go at it. Extinction would be a real tragedy because we might be the only hope of intelligent life in the whole universe ever. It's incredible how not a single other species we know of even comes close despite millions of years of evolution.
by Taniwha | 2026-01-19 03:20:25+00:00
Yes but Cathedral and the Bazaar was telling us that the world had changed, gcc was free, linux was a thing etc, mainframes (where compilers cost $10k and you (mostly) couldn't bring your own OS) were being replaced by workstations etc.

Commercial access to Unix source was still many thousands of dollars, the whole SCO debacle was an attempt to stop free OSs from being a thing

Many of us who had grown up from the mainframe era wanted to write compilers, work on OS's etc etc it was a hard thing to do (esp. outside the US) before the late 80s, cheap commodity hardware let a thousand flowers bloom
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-19 03:21:09+00:00
Thoughtful writing matters so much in an AI world.

The writing and editing is thinking. Trying to figure out whether we communicate our ideas well matters. Giving that over to the AI means giving up on critical thinking.

If we don’t think through the implications of our words, we delegate work without thought of for consequences. That’s especially problematic if AI actually does something for us like code.
by bfrog | 2026-01-19 03:21:10+00:00
Claude is ok. Gas town seems like a Claude multiplier. I’m not sure more Claude is what I’d even want!

Not sure I love what it does all the time, it tends to fit whatever box you setup and will easily break out if you aren’t veeeery specific. Is it better than writing a few thousand lines of code myself that I deeply understand that can debug and explain? I don’t know yet. I think it’d be good for writing functions one at a time with massive supervision.

It’s great for writing scripts and things where precision and correctness outside the success path isn’t really needed. If a script fails and it wasn’t deleting a hard drive who cares. If my embedded code fails out in a product in the wild this is a much bigger nuisance and potentially fatal for the device (not the humans) which is wasteful.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-19 03:21:31+00:00
I think people should realize that, in a democracy, it is virtually impossible to put these safeguards in place if people at large don't want them.

The reason Trump is able to get away with so much right now is because Congress is letting him. They could easily constrain his tariff powers, or his warmongering powers (they actually were close to doing that WRT Venezuela before some Republican Senators caved like a bunch of wet blankets), but they don't, because this is what people voted for. Trump is so much more powerful in his second term because at this point everyone knew he was a convicted felon, they knew he fomented the attack on the Capitol, and still a majority of voters voted for him.

Safeguards only work of someone is willing to enforce them.
by fsckboy | 2026-01-19 03:22:01+00:00
no, it's not hilarious, look at the comments here on HN, it's Europeans constantly lamenting, jabbing, complaining. Americans do not spend any time thinking that Canada and Europe are anything but friends; but other side of the border/pond, it's an obsession, born of insecurity and jealousy I would surmise but I'd be happy to be wrong.
by PyWoody | 2026-01-19 03:25:39+00:00
The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
by layoric | 2026-01-19 03:28:31+00:00
Exactly, these markets exist in the real world, so as their size and use increases, the more likely the odds will influence real world events. Look at sports betting for a much smaller example. Match fixing is known. Electricity markets are gamed for individual profits at the detriment to everyone and the stability of the system, even with regulators trying to keep things stable. Enough "Market for all the things" already..
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-19 03:30:34+00:00
I think one flaw with agentic coding: agents want to please the coder. They don’t push back on our opinions.

Hearing we’re geniuses all the time can create slop loops.

If we fail to be circumspect about a problem, to think through the implications of our decisions, we’ll produce thoughtless slop.

We have to avoid the dopamine high of “velocity” and take our time and ensure we remember all the real constraints for our problem.
by moomoo11 | 2026-01-19 03:31:35+00:00
I didn’t read the full site but it seems they’re not really going for those users?

Anyone who has dozens of custom workflows and apps in their Slack is probably spending 10s of thousands of dollars on Slack. It is probably vital to their business.

This seems like it’s for small teams (like 3-5 people even, collaborating daily) who get rekt really fast before they’re forced to spend $60 a month.
by bfrog | 2026-01-19 03:31:54+00:00
More like windows market share will continue to erode from hostility towards the customer. Who wants SpywareOS 11 with AI-fail on the side while it locks up and freezes the ui on my 16 core machine because it was downloading a file off the internet. It’s abysmal quality control, likely derived from AI centered development and KPIs about user activity monitoring rather than stability, usability, and performance.