MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamalek | 2026-01-04 19:15:21+00:00
At the end of the day these developers are almost entirely volunteers. Codebases that are a mess, ie X11, are not enjoyable to work on and therefore convincing people to use their discretionary time on it is more difficult. If there wasn't Wayland the current set of developers on Wayland might not have been doing DE work at all.

Attracting new contributors is an existential problem in OSS.
by duggan | 2026-01-04 19:15:34+00:00
Search “centre a div” in Google

Wade through ads

Skim a treatise on the history of centering content

Skim over the “this question is off topic / duplicate” noise if Stack Overflow

Find some code on the page

Try to map how that code will work in the context of your other layout

Realize it’s plain CSS and you’re looking for Tailwind

Keep searching

Try some stuff until it works

Or…

Ask LLM. Wait 20-30 seconds. Move on to the next thing.
by setopt | 2026-01-04 19:15:42+00:00
I get regular "crashes" on the newest Fedora KDE on a new Thinkpad X1 (from this year). I say "crashes" because it’s not the window manager or Wayland session crashing but some non-essential component of the Plasma desktop (don’t remember which one right now), so it doesn’t affect my work at all. From my point of view it basically just causes a crash report popup every 1-2 hours and says whatever service crashed has been restarted.
by pbiggar | 2026-01-04 19:17:01+00:00
I think more systematic testing. It seems the AI is pretty good at generating tests and validating them, so really filling out the places where testing is weak. I think we could do a lot more tests for each compiler pass. For example, I think getting the AI to generate tons of programs and validate that the types the compiler infers on each variable are what we expect them to be.
by kmoser | 2026-01-04 19:18:40+00:00
I recently used AI to help build the majority of a small project (database-driven website with search and admin capabilities) and I'd confidently say I was able to build it 3 to 5 times faster with AI. For context, I'm an experienced developer and know how to tweak the AI code when it's wonky and the AI can't be coerced into fixing its mistakes.
by danaris | 2026-01-04 19:19:12+00:00
As someone with ADHD, but who hasn't kept super abreast of official developments in its diagnosis:

My understanding is that while this may have been the case at one time, it is not now.

I believe that there are something like nine symptom clusters for ADHD, and a standard diagnostic measure is whether you have at least X of them at a moderate level, or Y of them at a severe level. Something along those lines, anyway. And the clusters include things like "time blindness", "task initiation", "task perseverance", etc.

(Again, this isn't based on any recent and specific knowledge, but amalgamated recollections of some things I've read on the subject over the past several years.)
by ajross | 2026-01-04 19:19:29+00:00
> Linux has no concept of a base system, it's a stand-alone kernel with a hodgepodge of crap around it

Good grief. How does this end up as the top comment on HN of all places? I'll bet anything that this author also thinks that systemd is way too opinionated and unified and that the system needs a less coupled set of init code.

Edit to be at least a tiny bit more productive: the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is about to pop the cork on its thirty second birthday. It's likely older than most of the people upvoting the post I responded to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard

To wit: that's outrageous nonsense, and anyone who know anything about how a Linux distro is put together (which I thought would have included most of the readers here, but alas) would know that.
by _moof | 2026-01-04 19:19:43+00:00
George W. got reelected - by a razor-thin margin - for three reasons: lucky timing, an unpopular opposition candidate, and a deliberate campaign to smear Kerry's record in the service.

GW's popularity steadily declined from the summer of '03 until the end of his presidency. If the election had been any later, he would've been below 50% and wouldn't have been able to pull it off. Meanwhile Democrats chose the least energizing presidential candidate I've seen in my entire adult life. (I've been voting since Bush v. Gore.) And when Kerry was nominated and the Swift Boat smear campaign started - a group whose claims have been since been discredited - Democrats did very little to fight back.

Even if we did "want this" back then, support for the invasion of Iraq plummeted during Bush's second term and has never recovered. Two-thirds of Americans, and almost that many veterans who actually fought in the war, said it wasn't worth fighting and still say so today.

So no, the majority of us don't want this.
by marcellus23 | 2026-01-04 19:19:51+00:00
> I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive

I agree 10x is a very large number and it's almost certainly smaller—maybe 1.5x would be reasonable. But really? You would be shocked if it was above 1.0x? This kind of comment always strikes me as so infantilizing and rude, to suggest that all these developers are actually slower with AI, but apparently completely oblivious to it and only you know better.
by apparent | 2026-01-04 19:19:59+00:00
> That's the problem, though. It shows how gullible and easy manipulated the US population was. Trans people are already such a tiny part of society, and an even tinier part of the prison population.

But Kamala's position was not that it wouldn't cost very much. She backed the ideology, and the vast majority of Americans disagree with that ideology.

> To throw away a vote on this single issue can only be due to ignorance, hate or both.

Many Americans saw this issue as yet another one (like the Biden competence one) where Dems were telling them to ignore what appear to be plainly obvious facts, like "men cannot become women". Some voters decided that they could not support a candidate who appeared to live in a different reality, on the thinking that "if she's willing to lie to me about such basic facts, what won't she lie to me about?"
by gyan | 2026-01-04 19:20:01+00:00
The dupe is what I linked.
The orig is https://superuser.com/questions/601972

The orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio.

The dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants.

One can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-04 19:20:26+00:00
The existence of grey zones doesn't negate the existence of clear cut cases.

You can argue for or against anything by quoting edge cases. That doesn't mean that every case is an edge case. Very few cases are edge cases.

> There's lawyers looking at the videos of Venezuelan boats being destroyed saying "the US murdered those people". Is one of the sides here, pro or con it doesn't matter which, a victim of "severe brain washing"?

What's the argument being made? That's war, which is of course murder. A soldier's job is to murder the enemy.

As for your examples, they are probably not as certain as you think. Good luck secretly taking somebody's favourite hunting spear from him and then tell him that personal property doesn't exist.

Congratulations on knowing that people have different perspectives on most things, and that these can vary through time and through places. You are not the only person who knows this. What is interesting are the common values which sprung up in different cultures, different times and different places.

If somebody murders your child or your sibling, you are going to be outraged if you are a human. Only severe brainwashing and total dehumanization could make a person react in a different way.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2026-01-04 19:20:39+00:00
where in Ai use did you find low wage contractors?

both Photography and Ai are literally "click a (shutter) button" - so photo analogy is perfect

And Michelangelo is bad example because it's "ye old paintings" (you could've at least tried with Picasso or smth) - while my argument would be "painters got replaced by photographers"
by RevEng | 2026-01-04 19:20:52+00:00
While the Twitter recommendation is strange, the assertion that we will suddenly have leisure time is demonstrably false. For decades each new technological advance was supposed to make it so we could work half as long because we could get twice as much done. That never happens. The cost of a person was never in how much they could produce but in how much they would demand to do so. If you can do twice as much, then your work product becomes half as valuable. Many of the throw away things we buy everyday are cheap only because their production is so heavily automated. If we still had to cook food in a conventional kitchen instead of warming up precooked food, or use a hammer and hand plane to build furniture, we would be paying far more than we do today. If anything, the people working those jobs are paid comparatively less now than before automation because it used to take skill to work those jobs but now anyone can do it. This is why the main advice of the article - do something that can't be automated and learn how to build the automation - is good advice.
by drillsteps5 | 2026-01-04 19:22:39+00:00
What a wonderful way to start my Sunday, to distract from the antics of the rich and powerful, and to pay attention to things that matter.

I found it curious that a novel published in 1989 refers to the future immortal being going through crude pre-singularity historical records and comparing them to cobweb ("An analogy to cobwebs made her smile for a moment."). I thought Berners-Lee wouldn't launch his first "World Wide Web server" for another 2 years, no?
by danaris | 2026-01-04 19:23:26+00:00
While I feel that this is a little unfair on people with ADHD, it's definitely very true that it's a disorder heavily characterized by an inability to practice mindfulness. As such, it can be nearly impossible, especially from the inside, and most especially in the moment, to determine when Something I Did Wrong was because of ADHD, or because I've been too cavalier about things like planning and note-taking.
by yason | 2026-01-04 19:23:59+00:00
I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make yourself stop.)
by MisterMower | 2026-01-04 19:24:05+00:00
How does the US invading one country imply they won’t defend another country?

I get that military resources devoted to one theatre can’t be used in another and for that reason the US might be less able to defend Taiwan, but that may not make them less willing.

A more reasonable read is that the aircraft carriers and other naval assets in the Gulf of Mexico are more effective there than they could be in the Pacific. Venezuela doesn’t have hypersonic anti-ship missiles. China does.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-04 19:24:19+00:00
Well, the 101 idiom comes from US education, it's a reference to the introductory course. Part of the problem with anti-abuse work is that there's no course you can take and precious little inter-firm job hopping. Anti-abuse is a cost of business so you don't see companies competing over employees with experience like you do in some other areas like AI research. So it's all learning-by-doing and when people leave, the experience usually leaves with them.

After leaving Google the anti-abuse teams at a few other tech companies did reach out. There was absolutely no consistency at all. Companies varied hugely in how much effort and skill they applied to the problem, even within the same markets. For payment fraud there is a lot of money at stake so I'd expect eBay would have had a good team, but most products at Google didn't lose money directly if there was abuse. It just led to a general worsening of the UX in ways that were hard to summarize in metrics.
by andrewaylett | 2026-01-04 19:25:02+00:00
In part a follow-on from the Stack Overflow thread, when I was younger I found various "how to ask questions" articles to be really useful (I particularly recommend Jon Skeet's https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2010/08/29/writing-the-perfect-...). But he's focused on asking questions of "the Internet", where there should be no expectation that a random netizen will put effort into answering.

That's not necessarily the case at work with colleagues, so I wrote this article to fill a perceived gap.
by quantumfissure | 2026-01-04 19:25:11+00:00
For me, the issue is not being alone, or quiet. I don't even own a cell phone.

It's everyone else with the incessant noise; non-stop music; speaker/video calls; and now AI talking back to you via phone. Speakerphones are the worst, I cannot believe we normalized having a two way conversation via speakerphone while holding it up to your ear.

I used to enjoy nature and just sitting and staring, with portable bluetooth speakers and phones blasting music, I can't do that anymore. I used to enjoy the library and just sitting, reading whatever random facts I could find. Last couple times I went, I was yelled at to mind my own business by people when I asked them to take their phone conversations to the lobby. So I went to another library, librarians were loud and several meetings via Teams were going on by different people.

Local rail trails are similar, I can't just take a walk in peace and quiet anymore. Honestly, removing the 3.5mm port is when I started noticing when it all got worse.
by cromka | 2026-01-04 19:26:01+00:00
You're not wrong, but even then forking a well established, well designed and not anti-pattern-ridden project with a massive library of build recipes for your own purposes is still better than maintaining some bespoke code used by two projects that forces developers to go mad, give up and quit.

My point was maybe not articulated well: it wouldn't have to be vcpkg. Could be Conan or something else, as long as it's not making you waste your free time and actually help producing reproducible builds and distributables on each platform supported (Linux, BSD, Mac, Windows).
by brunooliv | 2026-01-04 19:26:21+00:00
Over the holiday period, I have vibecoded a simple running/fitness app that I wish I had, but never found!

The app is geared towards running, offering comprehensive plans for different distances and durations, with the ability to log runs/save plans, export to PDF and focused on simplicity.

It uses a progressive distance building approach to allow runners to safely reach their goals.

As an extra, it offers some dedicated strength training for running as well as healthy/hearty meals focused on lean protein, veggies and all the cliches :)

I know there's nothing new or unique about an app like this, but, I like that I have one single place where I can generate a running plan, have some nice meal ideas for when I lack inspiration, as well as some strength training added in the mix!

If this resonates and it's helpful, there's an option to buy me a coffee which will help cover all the vibecoding/hosting costs :)

I hope it's as useful for someone as it has been for me (currently following a plan generated with it for a trail run in a few months' time!).

Feedback welcome!
by foresto | 2026-01-04 19:26:28+00:00
Does anyone know why, when Lennart and friends wrote their XDG Base Directory Specification, they decided that each user should replicate /usr/local/ subdirectories under $HOME/.local/?

Doesn't being under $HOME make .local redundant? I guess one could argue for binaries going in an architecture-specific subdirectory if $HOME was on a shared filesystem, but that's not what's being done here.

To me, $HOME/.local/share and its siblings feel like a needless level of indirection, forcing me to jump through an extra hoop every time I want to access what's in there.

(I know it's possible to override it with an environment variable, but the predictably spotty support for those overrides means I would then have to look for things in two places. I think sensible defaults would be nicer.)
by blacksmith_tb | 2026-01-04 19:26:34+00:00
I was nodding along until your last paragraph - SSGs encourage letting other people own parts of your personal site, really? Sure, people bolt on Disqus or something, but otherwise I am not sure I follow the argument. Isn't part of the appeal of SSGs that all you have is a bunch of html/css/js that you can drop on any server anywhere (even a solar-powered RPi can serve a lot of requests[1])?

1: https://www.vice.com/en/article/this-solar-powered-low-tech-...
by apparent | 2026-01-04 19:27:02+00:00
> Majority doesn't mean more than 50% of the vote in everyday language

I guess it depends on whom you hang out with and talk to. I completely agree that some people can't understand the difference and speak accordingly. But I don't think we should redefine words based on the lowest common denominator of understanding/usage.

And in this case, it's especially important not to redefine "majority" because if we do then there's no word left to refer to an actual majority. That's not the same thing as JFK conspiracy theories.
by matwood | 2026-01-04 19:27:11+00:00
Sun Tsu said you have to either give your opponent an out or completely destroy them. I’ve always said that you can only skin a sheep once but can shear them over and over. Or to be more blunt, it’s better to be effective than right.

It’s about keeping the bigger/long term goals in mind. That means relationships and being an asshole.
by taklimakan | 2026-01-04 19:27:35+00:00
Yes nice but also very naive. Most developers do not have that level of ownership, nor know how their users interact with the software. Their job is precisely to complete tickets from the product manager. The product manager is the one who should be in charge of UX research and “build a software that solves users problems.” Sure, in abstract that is the mission of the developers too, but in any structured (and hopefully functional) team, product strategy is not what the software engineer should be concerned with.
by PaulRobinson | 2026-01-04 19:28:04+00:00
It is a chain of very cheap pubs, often known by the abbreviated name "spoons".

It's the sort of place you can go at 9am and see people having a full English breakfast with a large glass of wine. It's people who want to drink a lot of alcohol for not a lot of money, but not quite at the point where they're buying very cheap cider (which is always alcoholic in the UK), and sitting in the park with it. There's a veneer of high-functioning about it.

They do vary a bit (the "posh pub" in central Hull is the 'spoons, one of the roughest pubs I've been to in West London is also a 'spoons), but the clientele are typically white, working class, pro-Brexit (the founder is very anti-EU and publishes an in-house propaganda mag to that effect), pretty right wing, heavy drinkers.

It's not my preferred crowd, I'd rather spend a bit more and go to a pub where there's a chance somebody is reading something other than the Daily Mail or The Sun, but each to their own.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-04 19:28:17+00:00
> There are two sorts of projects (or in general, people): artisans, and entrepreneurs. The latter see code as a means to an end, possibly monetized, and the former see code as the end in itself.

Me from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391392#46398917
by avidiax | 2026-01-04 19:28:21+00:00
Every previous job I've had has a similar pattern. The engineer is not supposed to engage directly with the customer.

I think there are multiple reasons for this, but they are mostly overlapping with preserving internal power structures.

PM's don't want anecdotal user evidence that their vision of the product is incomplete.

Engineering managers don't want user feedback to undermine perception of quality and derail "impactful" work that's already planned.

Customer relations (or the support team, user study, whatever team actually should listen to the user directly) doesn't want you doing their job better than they can (with your intimate engineering and product knowledge). And they don't want you to undermine the "themes" or "sentiment" that they present to leadership.

Legal doesn't want you admitting publicly that there could be any flaw in the product.
by gosub100 | 2026-01-04 19:28:25+00:00
It's frustrating to read this advice, which to me can be summarized as "don't think too hard, dumb it down, keep it simple, be a people-person" and then look at their hiring process full of advanced data structures and algorithms. Why hire top tech talent if you just need to keep a simple vibe and not over-think clever solutions?
by Dorker | 2026-01-04 19:28:25+00:00
Hello everyone.

I'm sharing a tool here that I found quite useful for streamlining the reconnaissance and OSINT phase. It’s a website that automates the creation of complex Google Dorks.

Basically, it allows you to enter a domain and instantly generate searches to find PDF files, login panels, exposed directories (index of), or configuration files.

It is Open Source and static (you can check the code on GitHub).

It automatically cleans URLs before sending them to Google.
by bheadmaster | 2026-01-04 19:28:54+00:00
Many Rust programmers despise Go's "if err != nil" pattern, but that pattern actually forces you to think about errors and "design" them to give meaningful messages, either by wrapping them (if the underlying error is expected to provide userful information), or by creating a one from scratch.

It may be easier to just add the "?" operator everywhere (and we are lazy and will mostly do what is easier), but it often leads to problem explained in the article.
by freedomben | 2026-01-04 19:29:01+00:00
It's just fun in a different way now. I've long had dozens of ideas for things I wanted to build, and never enough time to really even build one of them. Over the last few months, I've been able to crank out several of these projects to satisfactory results. The code is not a beautiful work of art like I would prefer it to be, and the fun part is no longer the actual code and working in the code base like it used to be. The fun part now is being able to have an app or tool that gets the job I needed done. These are rarely important jobs, just things that I want as a personal user. Some of them have been good enough that I shipped them for other users, but the vast majority are just things I use personally.

Just yesterday for example, I used AI to build a GTK app that has a bunch of sports team related sound effects built into them. I could have coded this by hand in 45 minutes, but it only took 10 minutes with AI. That's not the best part though. The best part is that I was able to use AI to get it building into an app image in a container so I can distribute it to myself as a single static file that I can execute on any system I want. Dicking with builds and distribution was always the painful part and something that I never enjoyed, but without it, usage is a pain. I've even gone back to projects I built a decade ago or more and got them building against modern libraries and distributed as RPMs or app images that I can trivially install on all of my systems.

The joy is now in the results rather than the process, but it is joy nonetheless.