MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abielefeld | 2026-01-12 11:53:38+00:00
I think the original commenter means companies that manufacture their own products but do not offer manufacturing services.

You can't beat JLC because the model from JLC is that they lose money on all order less than 100 boards, so that they win order of 10 to 100k+

If you work in germany in engineering, you know a lot of mittelstand (SMEs) actually have some production machinery, as said, usually they have between 50 and 200 employees, and they manufacture pretty niche products up to 10k units a year or so.

They do not advertise this, as their business model is not manufacturing, it's selling their own products.

I am actually the speaker of the talk, and for us, manufacturing is not a business model either, it's just the capability we want to develop. Our business model would be to sell products. We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.
by vintagedave | 2026-01-12 11:54:01+00:00
I love this: I think it may be really insightful in UI design. At the transition from user interface to user experience, the attitude gradually changed to a curated experience: perfect design, a specific way of doing things. We see this a lot with Apple, including how powerful features have disappeared.

I strongly suspect the root cause of their current UI situation on Mac could be tied to the theory in this post.
by b112 | 2026-01-12 11:54:11+00:00
There was a time when people were allowed to drive cars unlicensed.

These days, that seems insane.

As the traffic grew, as speeds increased, licensing became necessary.

I think, these days, we're almost into that category. I don't say this happily. But having unrestricted access seems like an era coming to an end.

I realise this seems unworkable. But so was the idea of a driver's license. Sometimes society and safety comes first.

I'm willing to bet that in under a decade, something akin to this will happen.
by lee_ars | 2026-01-12 11:55:10+00:00
After years of cargo-culting this advice—"run ssh on a nonstandard port"—I gave up and reverted to 22 because ssh being on nonstandard ports didn't change the volume of access attempts in the slightest. It was thousands per day on port 22, and thousands per day on port anything-else-i-changed-it-to.

It's worth an assessment of what you _think_ running ssh on a nonstandard port protects you against, and what it's actually doing. It won't stop anything other than the lightest and most casual script-based shotgun attacks, and it won't help you if someone is attempting to exploit an actual-for-real vuln in the ssh authentication or login process. And although I'm aware the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," it sure as hell didn't reduce the volume of login attempts.

Public key-only auth + strict allowlists will do a lot more for your security posture. If you feel like ssh is using enough CPU rejecting bad login attempts to actually make you notice, stick it behind wireguard or set up port-knocking.

And sure, put it on a nonstandard port, if it makes you feel better. But it doesn't really do much, and anyone hitting your host up with censys.io or any other assessment tool will see your nonstandard ssh port instantly.
by bArray | 2026-01-12 11:55:16+00:00
> For higher-end board that seems likely. For cheap hobby-grade boards just the job fee[1] is more than 10 boards delivered is from JLCPCB.

Just checked myself using a board I already had manufactured, and can confirm it's a lot higher than JLCPCB or PCBWay.

Maybe for rapid prototyping it is okay, but at scale, to make one board is more than the entire selling point of the whole device.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-12 11:55:23+00:00
The closest semi-Westernized country to Iran in the same region is Turkey:

* Highly educated population.

* Remnant of an ancient non-Arab Islamic empire.

* Almost precisely the same population count.

And people don't starve in Turkey. Why would they starve in a Western-aligned Iran? The main problem in the richer half of the world is already obesity.
by johnisgood | 2026-01-12 11:55:39+00:00
I did not say Plex is "just file sharing that can be replaced by torrents". Those were two separate points:

1. The "unlocked" framing implies capability, not time preference

2. General technical literacy has declined: non-SWEs used to torrent, use DC++ extensively, etc.

I was not comparing Plex to torrenting. I was observing that basic file-sharing knowledge used to be common and now is not (see Netflix et al).

> time and energy being the focus

Sure, that is fair. But that is a different claim than "Tailscale unlocked self-hosting for me" which is how it is often framed.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-12 11:55:45+00:00
People anthropomorphise LLMs, not understanding that they don't have "implied context" about things. They just go by the statistical average unless directed otherwise.

Having worked with offshore consultant teams where there are language and cultural barriers - and needing clear specs myself. I somehow just naturally "got" how much context to give the Agent.

People who have been working solo or with like-minded people all their career might have a harder time.
by menaerus | 2026-01-12 11:56:00+00:00
Right, because the guy sitting next to me and is designing a PCB for next copy of rPI is so much more for an engineer than the other guy designing a distributed computing algorithm? It shows that you only dealt with the trivial things in SE. There are very complex areas in both disciplines and as much as I can find trivial things in SE I can do the same for EE. Let's just not pretend it's a science fiction when it's not.
by dspillett | 2026-01-12 11:56:16+00:00
> 1) I'm not good at prompting,

I assume this is part of the problem (though I've avoided using LLMs mostly so can't comment with any true confidence here) but to a large extent this is blaming you for a suboptimal interface when the interface is the problem.

That some people seem to get much better results than others, and that the distinction does not map well to differences in ability elsewhere, suggests to me that the issue is people thinking slightly differently and the training data for the models somehow being biased to those who operate in certain ways.

> 2) Other people are just less picky than I am

That is almost certainly a much larger part of the problem. “Fuck it, it'll do, someone else can tidy it later if they are bothered enough” attitudes were rampant long before people started outsourcing work to LLMs.
by tmtvl | 2026-01-12 11:56:25+00:00
LXQt is great, except for the fact it can only do 'regular, italic, bold, bold italic' for font weights even when a font supports medium (my preferred font weight, regular just seems so dainty now I've gotten used to medium).

I also like the fact that it allows use of any window manager and even supports Wayland now (so Wayfire is an option).
by lucb1e | 2026-01-12 11:56:35+00:00
What's the power consumption on those?

I'm not familiar with Dell product names specifically but 'tower' sounds like it'll sit there burning 200W idle. Old laptops (sliding out the battery) is what I've been opting for, which use barely anything more than the router it sits next to. Especially if you just want to serve static files as GP seems to be looking for, an old smartphone will be enough but there you can't remove the battery (since it won't run off of just the charger)
by adrian_b | 2026-01-12 11:57:01+00:00
KDE 3.5 has been the best desktop environment for me (mainly due to its extreme customization facilities), while the following KDE 4 was an unusable atrocious piece of garbage.

For a few years I had kept the last KDE 3.5, but eventually I grew tired of solving compatibility problems with newer programs and I switched to XFCE.

I am still using it because I have never seen any reason to use anything else. There are a few KDE or Gnome applications that I use, but I have not encountered yet any compatibility problem with them, so I have no need for one of the more bloated environment systems.

I have been using Linux on a variety of laptops and desktops, all with XFCE and without problems. XFCE does not do much, but I do not want it to do more and it has decent customization facilities, which is very important for me, as I have never encountered any desktop environment where I can be content with its default configuration.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-01-12 11:57:07+00:00
The premise is in progress. We are only at the beginning of the fourth year of this hype-phase, and we haven't even reached AGI yet. It's obviously not perfect, maybe never will, but we are not a the point yet were we can conclude which future is true. The singularity hasn't happend yet, so we are still moving with (llm-enhanced) human speed at the moment, meaning things need time.
by Anamon | 2026-01-12 11:58:19+00:00
Exactly. People are getting very good at detecting AI-generated designs -- because everyone can play around with it themselves and see in what ways they always tend to look alike.

To make an impression, it will become even more important to go with a real designer who can work in creative ways to regain people's attention.

But I have little doubt that a lot of the bread-and-butter, not-too-important, I-just-need-to-have-something jobs will no longer be contracted to actual designers.
by e-topy | 2026-01-12 11:58:37+00:00
> Git provides file versioning services only, whereas Fossil adds an integrated wiki, ticketing & bug tracking, embedded documentation, technical notes, a web forum, and a chat service [...]

I like the idea of having all of those within the actual VCS, mostly because with Git you need centralized services like GitHub to provide that.

But I have to ask: Is it really a good idea? Seems like feature creep motivated by the wants of a single project (SQLite).

All of those could be (albeit awkwardly) backed with a git repo and a cron job.
Wiki? Just make a repo with a bunch of Markdown or this-week's-favorate-markup-language files.
Ticketing & bug tracking? Again, just a Markdown file for every ticket.
Embedded documentation & technical notes? Those are just special wiki pages with different attributes.
Forum and chat service? Do you want your VCS to do that? I get being able to hyperlink between files and conversations, but still.
by jbergstroem | 2026-01-12 11:59:13+00:00
I coincidentally worked on something similar but I kept closer to the SQL standard. It grew out of business cases where you don't have strongly typed data to act on.

I more or less adopted the syntax from dumbql (https://github.com/tomakado/dumbql) and started off with a peg parser using ohm.js. As I started benchmarking I realized how slow it was and started looking for "fast paths" using regex. I ultimately resorted to a recursive descent parser similar to Elo. At that stage I already had a lot of tests and api in place, so I was able to get a lot of help from Claude.

Website here: https://filtron.dev
by lelanthran | 2026-01-12 11:59:20+00:00
> Set up tooling like tests and linters and the like. Set rules. Mandate code reviews. I've been using LLMs to write tests and frequently catch it writing tests that don't actually have any valuable assertions. It only takes a minute to fix these.

You can do all that, but it still remains a case of "I'm only interested in the final result".

When I read LLM generated systems (not single functions), it looks very ... alien to me. Even juniors don't put together systems that have this uncanny valley feel to it.

I suppose the best way to describe it would be to say that everything lacks coherency, and if you are one of these logical-mind people who likes things that make sense, it's not fun wading through a field of Chesterton's Fences as your f/time job.
by dueyfinster | 2026-01-12 11:59:58+00:00
I never had a good experience with mercurial from memory. Docs and examples weren't as good (not that Git was hugely better, but network effects had more resources available). I remember the CLI commands being a small bit more intuitive but as someone new to DVCS at the time (as most people would have been) - it didn't really do anything special to help new users get a handle on the mental model for how it works. I remember Facebook publicly using / backing it, was surprised they didn't do more to promote it.
Show HN: A cross-platform toolkit to explore OS internals and capabilities
by DenisDolya | 2026-01-12 12:00:05+00:00
I built this toolkit with my colleague to dive deep into OS internals and automate the identification of privilege escalation vectors. Written in pure C without external dependencies, it explores everything from Linux capabilities and Docker escapes to Windows token manipulation and service permissions. We believe that the constant struggle between breaking and securing systems is the ultimate driver of software evolution. This tool is our contribution to that cycle, designed for researchers who want to understand how low-level misconfigurations can be discovered and audited across different environments.

Source: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/ferki-escalator
by mcv | 2026-01-12 12:00:36+00:00
My MacBook is corporate, and it's therefore loaded with a ton of corporate auto-update, VPN and apparently questionnaire software. Stuff pops up at the most annoying times. And sometimes, indeed it takes focus away from the thing I'm currently typing. Extremely annoying.

But apparently Apple is not the only offender. Just as I was typing this (on Harmonic on Android), a popup popped up, ate a few of the characters I typed and disappeared again. No idea what it said. Why do people do this? Don't hijack let applications I didn't ask for hijack my input.
by Mindwipe | 2026-01-12 12:01:03+00:00
> I'm hopeful that some day Linux will have enough users where the media companies can't ignore them.

The entirety of personal computer viewing doesn't have enough users where the media companies can't ignore them.

Fundamentally higher resolution playback happens on platforms like Windows and MacOS because they have closed, signed driver stacks, same as anti-cheat in games. Not because of the browser. So it will only ever happen if someone forks Linux to a more restricted, closed browser stack and offers that as a product (which is basically how a cable set-top box works in practice).
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-12 12:01:25+00:00
I am rebooting a theme inspired by Deus Ex Human Revolution for various apps and tools.

A bit like DraculaTheme.com

https://tomaytotomato.github.io/jensen/

https://github.com/tomaytotomato/jensen

The plan is to get a Chrome and VSCode theme shipped this week.

"I never asked for this...."
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-12 12:01:33+00:00
"Oh, here comes my promotion to a centurion!"

Jokes aside, the Roman legions were so insanely good at fighting and military logistics that the defeats they suffered are still remembered today - precisely because they were so few.

After the Punic wars, the only peer competitor left was the Parthians/Persians. Everyone else got a few lucky hits at best, if they could exploit some major mistake (full respect to Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest, that is how it is done, but not every commander was as heedless as Varus).
by keybored | 2026-01-12 12:02:14+00:00
I wish influencer programmers[1] cared a quarter as much about social revolution as they cared about tech revolutions. Will it disrupt all people in tech? Will the benefits go to the top? Then what about an appropriate social response? No. In response to that we have “I hope” and “I wrote a novel .... about Basic Income”[2].

Programmers are simply accepting whatever the owner class does to them [3] and calling it Technological Determinism, even if just indirectly.

> But, I would not respect myself and my intelligence if my idea of software and society would impair my vision: facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever.

Token gestures:

> What is the social soltion, then? Innovation can't be taken back after all. I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless.

Innovation can't be taken back (see: technological determinism; tech people are powerless to affect anything) so we should... vote for good governments. That are willing to support those who remain jobless.[0]

Keyword “willing”. Take away people's political leverage to strike. Now they may have no wealth. What are they to do? What is their political influence? The non-answer is to hope that the government will be WILLING to support their existence.

> And, the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection.

The more people get fired the less people with political leverage. The realpolitic trend would be the opposite of what is written here.

> But I also look forward to the good AI could bring: new progress in science, that could help lower the suffering of the human condition,

Every progress made in science can be artificially restricted. See foodstuff. We could apparently distribute enough to feed the world but that doesn't make as much money as throwing a lot of it away.

Progress for any given individual can be non existent unless it is evenly distributed.

> which is not always happy.

At least the article looks completely organic in terms off writing

Genre: I Have Anecdotes About AI And If You Don't See What I'm Seeing You Are Misguided.[4 ]

[1] Not a vocation. Simply the obvervation that the famous and respected programmers will have more weight outside their niche simply because of who they are.

[2] Basic Income hails from the right libertarian tradition. Leave the rich alone, give the commoner enough crumbs to survive. Later it was romanticized as a way for former programmers to go to their evergreen pastures of endless sideprjects.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46526137

[4] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

[0] Let's vote and hope that Italy doesn't get a fascist prime minister next time.
by vixen99 | 2026-01-12 12:02:25+00:00
Perhaps most of us can assess something like this and decide for ourselves on the available evidence as to its truth and relevance. What the author claims seems, to me at least, a minor issue. I get it that you do not agree. More generally aside from outright lies and pure stories, there are always analogical levels of interpretation. Presumably, if an unbeliever, you're irate at many of the world religions.
by theturtletalks | 2026-01-12 12:02:27+00:00
Coke is actually very different from country to country and less so from state to state. This is because Coke uses local bottle companies and they might be using different water. The coke you buy at your local store is probably bottled somewhere close to keep shipping costs down.

If you're a fan of Dr.Pepper, you'll notice they have 2 different bottles based on where you buy. That's because in some regions, Dr.Pepper uses Pepsi for bottling and in others it uses Coke bottlers.
by water-drummer | 2026-01-12 12:02:34+00:00
> Using this stuff well is a deep topic. These things can be applied in so many different ways, and to so many different projects. The best asset you can develop is an intuition for what works and what doesn't, and getting that intuition requires months if not years of personal experimentation.

You feel that way because it took you years or months to reach that point. But after reaching that point, do you really think that it's equally—if not more—difficult to put what you learned into words compared to, let's say, programming or engineering?

See, the thing about these tools is that they're designed to be operated via natural language, which is something most people (with a certain level of education) are quite comparable to each other at; consequently, the skill ceiling is considerably lower compared to something like programming. I am not saying there's no variance in people's ability to articulate, but that the variance is considerably less than what we get when comparing people's ability to write code or solve engineering problems.

So, whatever you learned by trial and error was just different ways or methods to get around the imperfections of the existing LLMs—not ways to use them skillfully according to their design goals. Their design goal is to achieve whatever task is given to them, as long as the intent is clear. These workarounds and tricks that you learned aren't something you build an intuition for. What you build an intuition for is finding new workarounds, but once you've found them, they're quite concrete and easy to describe to someone else who can simply use them to achieve the same results as you.

Tools that are designed to be operable via natural language aren't designed to be more thorough—it's actually the opposite. If you want more control, you have programming languages and search engines; thoroughness is where you get that high skill ceiling. The skill ceiling for using these tools is going to get narrower and narrower. The workarounds that you figure out may take skill to discover, but they don't take much skill to replicate.

If you share your "tips and tricks" with someone, then yeah, it will take them a week to start getting the same results as you because the skill ceiling is low and the workarounds are concrete/require less thinking.
by nickjj | 2026-01-12 12:03:03+00:00
I recently switched to native Linux. I have a dotfiles repo that installs and configures a number of CLI tools, complete with theme switching for a bunch of years that works on Arch / Debian / Ubuntu and macOS, with WSL 2 support too.

Now I've been piecing together a complete desktop environment using niri and many other tools. If you're using Arch, you can opt-in to turn this feature on. There's an install script which can be run on a new system or existing system, documentation on each package and more at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles. I'm using it on 2 systems at the moment.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-12 12:03:05+00:00
I misread this as AI initially ...

The only art-centric monkey I knew was Koko, the female gorilla.

Here she draws some things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iixL0CMOAM

Smartest monkey I ever saw was Kanzi though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENKinbfgrkU

I think it is only a question and matter of time before
the prison systems for monkeys may have to be reconsidered
completely. Of course even smarter monkeys than Kanzi
won't reach human brain functions, but they are also very
convincingly extremely clever and can adapt. Numerous videos
where monkeys handle (!) smartphones show this already and
this is just the beginning. Like, in the movie Planet of the
Apes. Just long-term in smaller steps.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2026-01-12 12:03:22+00:00
The job fee seems to include shipping, which makes it more reasonable. But Aisler's "estimated dispatch" for the budget service is Jan 26. That's 10 business days + shipping, making it not very competitive with JLCPCB's 10-15 business days including the slowest/cheapest shipping.

Express service adds ~20 EUR, roughly the same cost as picking DHL express delivery on JLCPCB.
by fmichel42 | 2026-01-12 12:03:44+00:00
Agreed. Having an open-source alternative to (the otherwise excellent) Typora would be fantastic; as far as I can tell the main feature Ferrite is currently lacking to be used for most (all?) applications where I use Typora is a way to easily write and render maths formula. (As far as I am concerned, support for TeX math would be ideal due to wide support from the existing ecosystem; but Typst would work too.)
by graemep | 2026-01-12 12:03:55+00:00
Gt was not successful because of network effects, but more monkey see monkey do imitation that people are prone to. Whatever is used for big projects must be the best, right?

I have recently returned to Fossil for personal stuff. IMO its better than git for one person projects and small teams. It was designed for a small team. What everyone else uses does not really matter for personal stuff. Nor does it matter if you are working with people willing to try something new. Nor does it matter to someone who can take a decision for a team.

It is also very easy to self host.