MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steveklabnik | 2026-01-14 18:47:56+00:00
Both of those things are important, sure. I wanted this post to be talking about the higher level conceptual question, and then using interesting examples to tease out various aspects of that discussion, more than "here's what I think are the biggest differences between the two."

I think these two things are also things people would argue about a lot. It's hard to talk about them in a concrete sense of things, rather than just "I feel like code usually does X".
by utopiah | 2026-01-14 18:47:56+00:00
I think NLNet is pretty good (I helped on https://nlnet.nl/project/xrsh/ and now working on my own https://nlnet.nl/project/ImmersiveXP/ ) but otherwise I only know at the local level, e.g. subsidies in Brussels e.g. https://www.innoviris.brussels (I'm in touch with but didn't formally apply yet).

You might also want to try https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund which isn't limited to Germany AFAICT but does focus on infrastructure.
by dakiol | 2026-01-14 18:48:05+00:00
I’ve noticed that many people struggle to simply let things go. Take a hypothetical case where HN requires ID verification. I'd just stop using HN, even if that meant giving up checking tech news. Sometimes things end, and that's fine.

I used to watch good soccer matches on public TV. When services like DAZN appeared, only one major match was available each weekend on public TV. Later, none were free to watch unless you subscribed to a private channel. I didn't want to do that, so I stopped watching soccer. Now I only follow big tournaments like the World cup, which still air on public TV (once every 4 years).

Sometimes you just have to let things go
by film42 | 2026-01-14 18:48:16+00:00
I spend a lot of time out of reception and starlink has been fantastic. So much so that I leave it on anytime I'm driving where I have cellular reception because it's just consistently good. I get ~100Mbps whether it's a forest service road, ATV trail, or on the highway through curvy mountain passes.

I'm on the 50GB plan so doubling for free is very nice, but it looks like they yanked the ability to optionally purchase additional high speed data for $1/GB. Maybe it's still there?
by porkloin | 2026-01-14 18:48:17+00:00
I work remotely and use a starlink mini for work and general internet usage since I road trip in the summer a lot. For work I'm not using doing RDP/remote desktop stuff since I have a company-issued laptop, but I have some experience using it to stream graphics-intensive games from my home PC with a nice GPU to my phone with a mobile controller attached to it.

I saw around 50-100ms of latency in ideal conditions with a clear view of the sky. There are distinct large latency spikes every 30ish minutes, which I think is due to the dish switching between different satellites.

I think the latency would be fine for working, but it will hardly be transparent. When using it to play games, I've mostly stuck to stuff that doesn't require fast responses or parry mechanics, etc.

Even without RDP-ing into another workstation, the latency spikes on video calls can be noticeable. Moment-to-moment video conferencing latency is totally fine, given that most of the major players in the space have pretty good latency compensation baked in.

A few details/complications:

- I'm usually within ~500 miles of my home, which is relevant because starlink satellites communicate with ground stations, and being closer to home will still have a meaningful impact on latency

- host PC is on a wired fiber connection

- I live relatively far north (~65N) and starlink's network isn't biased toward polar orbiting satellites, so my coverage probaby isn't representative of behavior further south. You can see a map of satellites and note the relatively poor arctic and subarctic region coverage here: https://satellitemap.space/
by goku12 | 2026-01-14 18:48:35+00:00
This is exactly what I was referring to in the first comment. To the American fans, America is the hero who swoops in to save the day and can do no wrong. This is exactly how it is depicted in popular media too. But the reality is that the US is hardly the benevolent savior you imagine it to be. I will need an entire book to just list out the atrocities since WWII that the US is responsible for or complicit in. Even the inhumane suffering people had to suffer outside the US that you're referring to, often has a US hand in it. To you, communism is nothing more than a convenient bogeyman that you don't understand in reality, while the numerous warhawks of the US (like Kissinger) have caused unimaginable suffering on this planet. Honestly, you ought to see the world a lot more to even start to understand the depth of the problems that the US has left on this planet. Even the problems within the US right now is merely the birds coming home to roost.
by pcaharrier | 2026-01-14 18:49:04+00:00
As long as there's probable cause for some crime, the subjective motivations of the officer are almost never going to enter the legal analysis. Whren v. United States[1] was a case about a pretextual traffic stop, but the core reasoning (unanimously) was about what the Fourth Amendment requires/allow. For example, if police have a "hunch" you're selling drugs but not probable cause, they can just wait for you to run a stop sign or something and then pull you over and see if you left something in plain view, or if you act nervous, or try to get consent to search. At that point, the fact that the initial reason they started focusing on you was a mere hunch doesn't matter legally speaking. If this sounds like it can be used to make life hard for people that law enforcement doesn't like, you're not wrong. In my job we really didn't see how challenges to search warrants turned out, but as far as I'm aware the Supreme Court has never said "Whren only applies to traffic stops and not search warrant affidavits."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whren_v._United_States
by turtletontine | 2026-01-14 18:49:14+00:00
Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. Consumer spending can therefore easily look great while most people are struggling to get by. There really is no “overall economy”, there are many many different stories happening all at once, and focusing on simple metrics lets you easily fool yourself.
by glenstein | 2026-01-14 18:49:28+00:00
What are you talking about? Opera and Mozilla are both in the business of trying to deliver a good browser, which means good features. And Opera most definitely did rely on search licensing, and it was their biggest revenue source, despite attempts to diversify.

As I said, Opera was probably the best ever at delivering features users want, but that wasn't enough to move the needle on market share, which is why Opera perfectly exposes the fallacy of assuming better features = better market share.

Also, this tab grouping argument is nonsense. Firefox had native tab grouping years before Chrome ever had it, had arguably the best tab grouping extension of any browser, Firefox has never not had tab grouping. What's new is that it's back as a baked-in default.
by mips_avatar | 2026-01-14 18:49:34+00:00
So I don't support queries with a radius larger than 50km (if an AI agent doesn't know where it's looking within 50km there usually is a context issue upstream), but i have a larger h3 index and a tighter h3 index. Then I have a router that tries to find the correct h3 indexes for each query. For some queries I'll need up to 3 searches, but most map to a single search. (sorry I probably won't be able to reply below here since the max hn comment depth is 4)
by cosinusalpha | 2026-01-14 18:50:01+00:00
Hi HN, I built webctl because I was frustrated by the gap between curl and full browser automation frameworks like Playwright.

I initially built this to solve a personal headache: I wanted an AI agent to handle project management tasks on my company’s intranet. I needed it to persist cookies across sessions (to handle SSO) and then scrape a Kanban board.

Existing AI browser tools (like current MCP implementations) often force unsolicited data into the context window—dumping the full accessibility tree, console logs, and network errors whether you asked for them or not.

webctl is an attempt to solve this with a Unix-style CLI:

- Filter before context: You pipe the output to standard tools. webctl snapshot --interactive-only | head -n 20 means the LLM only sees exactly what I want it to see.

- Daemon Architecture: It runs a persistent background process. The goal is to keep the browser state (cookies/session) alive while you run discrete, stateless CLI commands.

- Semantic targeting: It uses ARIA roles (e.g., role=button name~="Submit") rather than fragile CSS selectors.

Disclaimer: The daemon logic for state persistence is still a bit experimental, but the architecture feels like the right direction for building local, token-efficient agents.

It’s basically "Playwright for the terminal."
by leptons | 2026-01-14 18:50:02+00:00
Same here.

We stopped using toilet paper during covid, got a bidet, and bought a couple hundred shop towels to dry our butts. Now we only buy toilet paper for guests, which happens maybe once a year after throwing several parties.

Then we also bought shop towels for the kitchen to replace paper towels. I love the shop towels so much.

The butt-towels are white, and we wash them with bleach, there's been zero problems doing this over the last ~6 years. If there happens to be a bit of excess poop on a towel (typically there is none at all), we just throw it out, we have hundreds. The kitchen towels are blue, so we don't mix them up with the butt-towels.

We have laundry baskets specifically for each kind of shop towel. A small one in the bathrooms, a larger one in the kitchen for the kitchen towels. We have to wash the butt-towels maybe once a month, and about the same for the kitchen towels. It's a simple chore that takes practically none of our time, less than it would to go out and buy paper.

It's so much better than spending $100s of dollars a year on paper that literally gets flushed down the toilet or goes into the trash.

A few of our friends took notice and started doing this too.

Honestly, I don't know why we ever wiped our butts with toilet paper for so many years, it's just so... shitty. It's just not a good experience. When we travel we miss our bidet and shop towels so much, to the point that I've ordered a cheap bidet if I'm staying in an Airbnb for a week or more, and install it there, and leave it behind. $30 well spent.
by gregsadetsky | 2026-01-14 18:50:09+00:00
Yes, it's a step in the right direction.

However it is opt-in aka "Launch a page in minutes and showcase Sponsors buttons on your GitHub profile and repositories". That's effort & friction and only simplifies the "begging" aspect that I am (strongly) reacting to.

https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund will also "list all dependencies that are looking for funding in a tree structure"

I want the step (or 5 steps) after that. Charge first, then distribute.
by seiferteric | 2026-01-14 18:50:15+00:00
I think the real issue is that for the powers that be, inflation is seen as either neutral or a good thing. The only people it hurts is the working class and the blame is nebulous. So it is used as a tool to increase taxes without changing laws, lower the cost of debt, and cut labor wages since they don't get pay raises commensurate with inflation. So I think it is a trick played upon the working class to screw them over in the long term while the wealthy are protected because all their assets simply go up in value with inflation. I think the target inflation rate should be 0%, not 2%. I simply don't believe the justification for the 2% target.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-14 18:50:24+00:00
They are the worst of both worlds: not enough battery range to satisfy on long trips plus the weight and maintenance headaches of a gas tank and engine, especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range.

As a 2012 Volt owner I think EREV was a great idea in the 2010s given battery tech and networks at the time. In the 2020s, they seem a weak compromise that I wouldn't recommend to people.
by steveklabnik | 2026-01-14 18:50:38+00:00
Yes. Your point about noalias (the keyword is 'restrict' in C, noalias is the LLVM IR annotation) is right.

What I will say is that the fact that Rust uses this so much, and had to turn it off because of all the bugs it shook out, at least implies that it's not used very much in real-world C code. I don't know how to more scientifically analyze that, though.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-14 18:50:54+00:00
If you think that just because VSCode is free there's no money on the line, you're not thinking about things the way others do. As I said, reputation alone definitely has a cost and Microsoft has partnerships where VSCode is strategic. They probably just made a calculation that there's not enough users and/or the users using that private API were strategically misaligned with their direction.
by acdha | 2026-01-14 18:51:04+00:00
10x came from the 80s, so already fairly different in key ways (internet documentation, CI, platform and tool maturity, etc.), and the methodology is challenging because you don’t have easy comparisons between complex real projects without tons of confounds and trying to measure artificial challenges runs into different but also significant challenges selecting the candidates and ensuring that the work is representative.

There are definitely people who are more or less productive but I think we’re very prone to focus on the individual while ignoring the environment they’re working in, as well as the question about broadly applicable that result is.
by bitbasher | 2026-01-14 18:51:11+00:00
When IDEs entered the market, they were the talk of the town. Improve your programming speed. Blazingly fast refactoring. A graphical debugger and logging information. Intellisense, inline documentation and the whole nine yards.

Many developers never bothered with IDEs. We were happy using Vim, Emacs and many of us continue to do so today.

It's not surprising the first "innovation" was agentic programming with a modified IDE.

I'm sure many people will enjoy their new IDEs. I don't enjoy it. I enjoy doing things a different way.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-14 18:51:18+00:00
A "parenthetical dash" (the semantic meaning) can be typeset either as an em dash (a typographic meaning) without spaces, or as an en dash (a typographic meaning) surrounded by spaces. And the latter is often referred to as an em dash (as a semantic meaning), since basically everyone uses that to mean "parenthetical dash" which is the correct term but a term that virtually nobody uses.
by binarylogic | 2026-01-14 18:51:30+00:00
What you're describing is very real and it works to a degree. I've seen this same manual maintenance play out over and over for 10 years: cleaning dashboards, chasing engineers to align on schemas, running cost exercises. It never gets better, only worse.

It's nuts to me that after a decade of "innovation," observability still feels like a tax on engineers. Still a huge distraction. Still requires all this tedious maintenance. And I genuinely think it's rooted in vendor misalignment. The whole industry is incentivized to create more, not give you signal with less.

The post focuses on waste, but the other side of the coin is quality. Removing waste is part of that, but so is aligning on schemas, adhering to standards, catching mistakes before they ship. When data quality is high and stays high automatically, everything you're describing goes away.

That's the real goal.
by rmah | 2026-01-14 18:51:38+00:00
It saddens me that your rather innocuous comment has been down-voted so aggressively. Immigration enforcement is required. Illegal immigration should be discouraged. ICE's current tactics seem overly aggressive to me and, yes, seem to be used politically. But immigration laws should still be enforced. I imagine you'd agree that if ICE agents/supervisors act beyond the scope of their duties or with excessive force, they should be disciplined/prosecuted. I also have a hard time understanding people who don't agree with what I just wrote. I can only imagine those that want to disagree think I'm writing with some sort of underlying agenda and in code to push some broader political narrative (I'm not).
by alibarber | 2026-01-14 18:51:38+00:00
It's a good question - unfortunately I don't really have a good answer...

Almost all of my embedded activities are for a my own hobby purposes, and I just like the ability to go 'as low as I can' with projects on MCUs. It's nice to be able to use the device's peripherals as much as possible (hardware DSP etc) and I'm not confident in how I'd do that on a Linux based system. I'm in to building my own ham radio Software Defined receivers and it's nice to keep it completely real time.

If I were to be doing this stuff professionally (and I am very close to people who do at work) then yeah I'd probably be using Zephyr or something.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-14 18:51:46+00:00
> If you compare this to what is happening in Iran, US citizens are docile.

This is still moot. Even if they appear such (even if they are such) it does not diminish the validity nor righteousness of their message.

> A "peaceful protest" is an oxymoron.

This is false by a plain understanding of the words. A "protest" is expression against something. "Peaceful" means nonviolent. Obviously expressions can be nonviolent.
by lassejansen | 2026-01-14 18:51:59+00:00
DOM bloat can certainly become a problem when adding lots of code in e.g. table rows. I added functions mainly to be able to move common code into a central place to minimize that problem.

You certainly must get used to the stack based approach. I tried to make it more approachable by making stack lookups type based (automatic search for value with matching type) and by using type-prefixed commands, e.g.

<request-send url="..."> // returns response
<response-get-text> // looks up response on the stack and returns string
<selection-set-text> // looks up string on the stack and writes it as text content to the current DOM element.
by slg | 2026-01-14 18:51:59+00:00
>Yes, anybody who puts a sticker on their car apologizing for owning it is somebody who bought it to make a statement.

Or the opposite, buying the car wasn't a statement at the time and they don't like that driving it feels like a statement now so they got a bumper sticker to acknowledge that their continued ownership is not a statement of support for Musk and his ideology.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-14 18:52:10+00:00
I don't even know what argument you are even trying to make anymore. Occupy had demands, they were not clear. I explained one reason why.

>Always interesting how both the left and right forget democracy and checks and balanced and just assume the executive branch is a dictator when it's their wannabe dictator in power. :)

Where did I assume that? Mamdani was elected with an amazing margin bringing out people who had given up on voting and many who had never felt to vote before. Essentially he began his term with a strong mandate. This is while everyone clearly knew he was a Democratic Socialist. He didn't become a dictator, the actual overton window of what is considered mainstream has shifted in just 15 years. Thats whats extraordinary.
by marssaxman | 2026-01-14 18:52:11+00:00
All signs except for polls showing a large majority of Americans opposing the idea[1], opposition from within Trump's own party[2], and resistance from the military[3], for example... This Greenland nonsense is Trump's private obsession. The only Americans supporting it are Trump loyalists who would just as readily support a plan to blow up the moon if Trump started yammering on about that instead.

1) https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/06/politics/trump-western-he...

2) https://time.com/7344316/republicans-break-ranks-with-trump-...

3) https://www.ibtimes.com/trumps-greenland-invasion-plot-spark...
by firefoxd | 2026-01-14 18:52:28+00:00
My main concern is that there isn't a reliable way to know your information is securely stored[0].

> A few years ago, I received a letter in the mail addressed to my then-toddler. It was from a company I had never heard of. Apparently, there had been a breach and some customer information had been stolen. They offered a year of credit monitoring and other services. I had to read through every single word in that barrage of text to find out that this was a subcontractor with the hospital where my kids were born. So my kid's information was stolen before he could talk. Interestingly, they didn't send any letter about his twin brother. I'm pretty sure his name was right there next to his brother's in the database.

> Here was a company that I had no interaction with, that I had never done business with, that somehow managed to lose our private information to criminals. That's the problem with online identity. If I upload my ID online for verification, it has to go through the wires. Once it reaches someone else's server, I can never get it back, and I have no control over what they do with it.

All those parties are copying and transferring your information, and it's only a matter of time before it leaks.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/your-id-online-and-offline
by NickC25 | 2026-01-14 18:52:28+00:00
>It's disappointing, but not surprising, that people thought the president would make any really impact on inflation

Except that a president, in normal times, COULD make an impact on inflation, both directly and indirectly.

What is surprising, is that after a completely failed presidency that saw a marked decrease in middle class prosperity, people thought that Donald Trump, of all people, could bring inflation down.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-14 18:52:42+00:00
Range is the misconception, because people view range through the "sit and fill up then drive till empty" paradigm.

That is not how EVs work or how they should be used. They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else, and on road trips should be charged to align with other stops even if those stops are 10 minutes. It's rare that I have ever done the "sit in the car for 40 minutes waiting for charge", and extremely common to do the "Put car on charger for 13 minutes while going into [insert any of the gazillion places with chargers in the parking lot] to use the bathroom, stretch legs, and get a snack, or see a landmark"

Also you usually structure it so you arrive at your destination with very low charge, because you fill up while there. I've yet to be at a hotel with a gas pump in the lot.

Again, EVs function differently than gas, and that change of paradigm really gets people ruffled up and confused.