MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cmos | 2026-01-04 15:34:29+00:00
Great.

But make climate control 3 knobs: Fan speed + off, temperature and output ports. Put the AC button inside the temperature knob, and the 'recirculate' button inside the output ports knob.

With the radio have a push on/off volume knob that starts up at the SAME volume as always (i.e. relative, not absolute) and NOT the previous volume. The volume knob should have some resistance to it. Opposite that have a tune knob for precise tuning, and pressing that gets you into setup and navigates you through it. This should have the same resistance, but the outside has some indents so you know it's not the volume knob.
Have 6 preset buttons and 3 'banks' with a single 'next bank' button. pressing and holding a preset will save it with a beep for confirmation.
On the steering wheel: up/dn for radio should be seek, not next/previous preset. There are 6 nice big buttons for presets but when traveling seek up/dn is the main way we change music.

On the door have the rear view mirror controls, and above that have a knob for dashboard light brightness.

2008 Honda Fit was close to a perfect car.
https://www.carsdirect.com/honda/fit/2008/pictures/interior
by webdevver | 2026-01-04 15:34:48+00:00
theres a fun "K-shaped" optionality with LLMs: on one hand, its possible to deal with otherwise large API surfaces.

but on the other hand, you can 'go oldschool' but with the hot new tools: install ubuntu, launch claude with yolo mode, and just tell it what you want as if it were a sysadmin from the early 2000s/late 90s.

both roads very reasonable, but that the old way of doing things is new again is interesting.
by dagmx | 2026-01-04 15:35:22+00:00
1. Nobody else is talking about managing windows as a user. They’re talking about the system that manages windows for drawing and interaction.

2. You’re provably wrong even if someone followed your description because you can kill the dock or explorer process and still be able to switch between windows and move them around. Killing explorer is a little more heavy handed than killing the dock but it doesn’t take down the window manager.
by nonoesp | 2026-01-04 15:35:22+00:00
I create a playlist for each month (e.g., 2026.01) inside of a folder of the corresponding year (e.g., 2026) and add new tracks there (instead of using Spotify likes).
This allows me to jump back to a specific year/month.
You can also hit play on the folder to play all songs from a specific year.

I used to have a single Inbox playlist to save music and keep the date when I saved each song.
by solenoid0937 | 2026-01-04 15:35:22+00:00
Having near-death experiences has made me much more scared of death. I realized I do not want eternal nothingness and nonexistence. I like existing, loving, etc.

I do not think death adds any value. It certainly does not motivate me in any way. I don't do things because I will die, I do things because I want to. Most of the time I am not thinking about death at all. When I do, it is only with a sense of sadness/dread.

> Living a short, happy life is much better than being miserable forever

IMO this is a false dichotomy. You could also live an immortal happy life in this scenario.
by tangotaylor | 2026-01-04 15:35:50+00:00
“What” comments can be quite nice to quickly parse through code.

But I don’t think they’re worth it. My issue with “what” comments is they’re brittle and can easily go out of sync with the code they’re describing. There’s no automation like type checking or unit tests that can enforce that comments stay accurate to the code they describe. Maybe LLMs can check this but in my experience they miss a lot of things.

When “what” comments go out of sync with the code, they spread misinformation and confusion. This is worse than no comments at all so I don’t think they’re worth it.

“Why” comments tend to be more stable and orthogonal to the implementation.
by throw0101c | 2026-01-04 15:36:18+00:00
> How are they supposed to fight back if their government stops because Microsoft shuts down their Azure accounts, Outlook, Teams, etc.?

Tell ASML that that they couldn't ship any new machines or parts to the US. Tell TSMC that if they want to receive ASML machines/parts they cannot send chips they make with ASML machines to the US.

There are US-made parts in ASML machines (AIUI). The two major chip design software companies are also American.

So we're in a M.A.D. situation when it comes to tech.
by DecoySalamander | 2026-01-04 15:36:55+00:00
> maybe slightly further cementing that the US will not come to Taiwan's aid

Isn't that the opposite? The US just demonstrated that it can still conduct military operations, and the presence of Chinese envoys in the country does not deter it in any way. As of now, China has one fewer source of oil it can rely on in case of an invasion.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-04 15:36:55+00:00
> Which country was Venezuela at war with?

> Germany waged war on just about the whole world, the response to that was one of defense, not offense.

I find it useful to distinguish legality from morality of the move of capturing Maduro and his wife.

One way I approach it is to ask myself: if one could have Maduro returned to Venezuela today, would one? Perhaps the answer that most people would give is yes (i.e. everyone would be better off), but I'm not so sure.
by Xophmeister | 2026-01-04 15:37:06+00:00
A chilling vision of the future, where phone books and checkbooks still exist ;)

I have the impression that nanotechnology was very in vogue for science fiction around the late-80s and early-90s…and yet, these days, it’s seemingly disappeared; both as a sci-fi trope and, AFAIK, an area of industrial/medical R&D. Why is that? Did it just atrophy, perhaps combined with unmet expectations, or did we discover some limit that makes the technology infeasible?
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-04 15:37:09+00:00
Yes, of course, the organization with its bureaucratic center being in Belgium, and military headquarters also being in Brussels, IS obviously just the US and the US only.

I'm sorry to tell you, but the world is actually larger than the US, regardless of what your current media is trying to tell you. If the US actually dared to attack Denmark, an ally, I'm fairly certain France and The UK would stop being allies to the US, because suddenly "ally" doesn't mean anything anymore.
by state_less | 2026-01-04 15:37:12+00:00
We had an Asian store across from the middle school where I hung out and we played Street Fighter for hours after school. The second generation Hmong that came out of the Vietnam war would would hang out and play. We all loved it! I'd often play Ken and they'd play Ryu, haha, we love our avatars. Sometimes I gave them a run for their money, sometimes they taught me new techniques, like a new sequence of moves.

Some of the other kids on my street went to private schools and I think they missed out on some of the lessons/bonding I got from interacting with a variety of people in public school. It's good to get out into social setting and mix it up with folks.
by seanwilson | 2026-01-04 15:37:31+00:00
I've used https://lunrjs.com/guides/getting_started.html briefly and it has lots of options for things like different fields, complex queries, fuzzy searching and wildcards. Didn't notice anything specific about dates but you could always add date as a field then filter out a date range manually at the end. I'm sure there's better libraries now as well.
by delichon | 2026-01-04 15:37:51+00:00
> Ironically, users who are extremely put off by conversational expressions from LLMs are just as vibe-sensitive as anyone else, if not more so. These are preferences regarding style and affect, expressed using the loaded term ‘sycophancy’.

It's not just about style. These expressions are information-free noise that distract me from the signal, and I'm paying for them by the token.

So I added a system message to the effect that I don't want any compliments, throat clearing, social butter, etc., just the bare facts as straightforward as possible. So then the chatbot started leading every response with a statement to the effect that "here are the bare straightforward facts without the pleasantries", and ending them with something like "those are the straightforward facts without any pleasantries." If I add instructions to stop that, it just paraphrases those instructions at the top and bottom and. will. not. stop. Anyone have a better system prompt for that?
by noduerme | 2026-01-04 15:38:09+00:00
I was making a point elsewhere in this thread that the best way to learn is to teach; and that's why Stack Overflow was valuable for contributors, as a way of honing their skills. Not necessarily for points.

What you need to do, in your organization, is to identify the people who actually care about teaching and learning for their own sake, as opposed to the people who do things for money, and to find a way to promote the people with the inclination to learn and teach into higher positions. Because it shows they aren't greedy, they aren't cheating, and they probably will have your organization's best interests at heart (even if that is completely naïve and they would be better off taking a long vacation - even if they are explicitly the people who claim to dislike your organization the most). I am not talking about people who simply complain. I mean people who show up and do amazing work on a very low level, and teach other people to do it - because they are committed to their jobs. Even if they are completely uneducated.

For me, the only people I trust are people who exhibit this behavior: They do something above and beyond which they manifestly did not need to do, without credit, in favor of the project I'm spending my time on.

>> But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.

Humans aren't even good at this, most of the time, but one has to consider AI output to be almost meaningless babble.

May I say that the process of elimination is actually not the most important aspect of that type of meeting. It is the surfacing of things you wouldn't have considered - even if they are eliminated later in debate - which makes the process valuable.
by mananaysiempre | 2026-01-04 15:39:04+00:00
> The thing I dislike about NixOS the most is ... nix. But I guess that is hard to change now. Every good idea to be ruined via horrible jokes of an underperforming programming language ...

I don’t get the hate for Nix, honestly. (I don’t get the complaints that it’s difficult, either, but I’m guessing you’re not making one here. I do get the complaint that the standard library is a joke, but you’re not making that one either that I can see.) The derivation and flake stuff excepted, Nix is essentially the minimal way to add lazy functions to JSON, plus a couple of syntax tweaks. The only performance-related thing you could vary here is the laziness, and it’s essential to the design of Nixpkgs and especially NixOS (the only config generator I know that doesn’t suck).

I’ll grant that the application of Nix to Nixpkgs is not in any reasonable sense fast, but it looks like a large part of that is fairly inherent to the problem: you’ve got a humongous blob of code that you’re going to (lazily and in part) evaluate once. That’s not really something typical dynamic-language optimization techniques excels at, whatever the language.

There’s still probably at least an order of magnitude to be had compared to mainline Nix the implementation, like in every codebase that hasn’t undergone a concerted effort to not lose performance for stupid reasons, but there isn’t much I can find to blame Nix the language for.
by xtiansimon | 2026-01-04 15:39:15+00:00
No, but you'll come down in about eight hours... LOL.

I like this project--

The layout is well designed--image area, editable code window, and compact navigation--pleasantly proportioned with an excellent demonstration of thematic font choice. And, surprise, some are interactive.

I imagine it's an excellent way to organize and store your collection of animation algos. The 'about' is detailed (https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/abc.html#play:about) and interesting to read.

Thanks to OP for sharing.
by networked | 2026-01-04 15:39:38+00:00
I'm also happy with the freedom and stability of a single-purpose SSG. My previous static site generator, Tclssg, was public and reusable from the start. This had big upsides: I learned to work with users and was compelled to implement features I wouldn't have. I actually wrote documentation. Seeing others use it was one of my favorite parts of the work. However, it also put constraints on what I could do. I couldn't easily throw away or radically change features, like how templates are rendered. With an SSG that's only for my site, I can.

If I were maintaining multiple large sites or working with many collaborators, I'd rely on something standard or extract and publish my SSG. For a personal site, I believe custom is often better.

The current generator is around 900 SLOC of Python and 700 of Pandoc Lua. The biggest threats to stability have been my own rewrites and experimentation, like porting from Clojure to Python. I have documented its history on my site: https://dbohdan.com/about#technical-history.
by HighChaparral | 2026-01-04 15:39:40+00:00
Not a single mention of the word fashion. Here in the UK, Adidas Sambas (and similar models like Gazelles and Spezials) have been everywhere for the last couple of years, particularly amongst women and girls, who often have two or more pairs, making the most of the huge number of colours - sorry, “colourways” - available. This is purely for daily wear, btw, rather than athletic/gym use.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-04 15:39:52+00:00
A bit of both and more

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115826842237835815

I have usually resisted KPIs but I have them now like "Got mistaken for an animal (ex. hunters and dogs)", "Heart rate (low) for adjusted gaits", "People laughed", etc. I pass out more business cards now in a week than I used to do in three months and from a KPI perspective I'm doing about 50% of what I could.
Ask HN: What do you want in a guitar tablature/chord markup language?
by j6m8 | 2026-01-04 15:39:55+00:00
I have been looking for a spec language to write guitar tablature and chord diagrams, mainly with a focus on being able to quickly type out diagrams or chords during a lesson (i.e., I am personally more focused on speed than expressiveness, though I'm interested in other options!).

I've found vextab [1] though it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore, and of course there are plenty of ASCII-art formats (GuitarPro et al) though these are really renderers, not markup (in other words, I want to _generate_ renders, not have to type them).

LilyPond [2] is neat, but of course much too verbose to jot down in semi-realtime.

I've started writing a language spec [3] and renderer [4], but surely someone else has had this idea before??

```catl
# chords:
X554X5
```

```catl
# tabs: # ↓chord
0A 0D 5e 7B 3e+0D
```

---

[1] https://vexflow.com/vextab/tutorial.html
[2] https://lilypond.org/ly-examples/tab-example.ly
[3] https://github.com/j6k4m8/catl
[4] https://github.com/j6k4m8/catl-render
by kstrauser | 2026-01-04 15:40:02+00:00
A lot of people seem to be missing that Nike has fashion lines and sport lines. Their fashion lines are junky, IMO, and apparently in lots of people’s eyes. Their sport lines are still excellent.

I only run in Brooks because they fit me better, but my wife only runs in Nike.

Are Nikes junk? Yes. Are they top notch? Also yes. Imagine Toyota and Nissan had the same owners and it’d be a lot like that.
by surajrmal | 2026-01-04 15:40:24+00:00
It's all about where the stable ABI exists. You can do anything in practice, but if you stray off the happy path it will result in pain. On PC OS, everything used C (or in Linux, syscall) ABI. On android the ABI is java based, and on iOS it's objc/swift based. These are deliberate choices and while they make some use cases more difficult, they are optimized for the use cases the companies care about. I'm personally preferential to a language agnostic IPC boundary being the abi, but that has its own cons as well.
by MKRhere | 2026-01-04 15:40:58+00:00
Location: India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: TypeScript, React, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Supabase, Telegraf, Python, Zig, Figma

Résumé/CV: https://mkr.pw/resume

Email: hn@mkr.pw

I'm a performance and design-oriented full-stack developer. I can both build a product from scratch or take on an existing codebase and quickly help resolve scaling or performance bottlenecks. As an architect, I'm fluent with design. I can work closely with a designer or adapt to an incomplete spec and design and build with ease.

I love a good challenge, and I'm personally fond of decentralisation-related ideas and open source. I also enjoy writing parsers and protocol-related work. I've worked with many languages and can quickly adapt on demand. I don't believe language is ever an obstruction.

Timezone is also rarely a problem; I can work with significant overlap in working hours for most countries (plenty of experience working with US, Europe).
by chrisjj | 2026-01-04 15:41:12+00:00
> Photoshop is fine, running a business where you produce CSAM for people with photoshop is not.

The law disagrees - at least in UK. CSAM is illegal regardless of tool used.

> I did not see the details of what happened, but if someone did in fact take a photo of a real child they had no connection to and caused the images to be created

The article makes no report that happened. And it does report that is prohibited by the tool in question. But it does then quote a child safety advocate saying tools should not be allowed to "generate this material", so is misleading in the extreme.
by 1dom | 2026-01-04 15:41:31+00:00
> Until you have enough visitors or evil AI bots scraping your site so that it crashes, or if you're using an auto-scaling provider, costs you real money.

There's been multiple blog posts on HN from people who've received a hug of death and handled it fine with basically free or <$10 /month VMs

A couple of gigs of RAM and 2 cores can take viral posts and the associated bots. 99% of personal websites never go viral either.

> The problem isn't in markdown→HTML conversion (which is pretty fast), it's that it's a first step in adding more bells and whistles, and before you know it, you're running a nextjs blog which requires server-side nodejs daemon so that your light/dark theme switch works as copy-pasted from stackoverflow.

This is my exact argument against SSGs, and Jeffs post proves it: it's easy to use SSG to generate web pages, but the moment you want comments, or any other bells and whistles, you do what Jeff's going to have to do and say you'll do it later because there's no obvious easy solution that doesn't work against and SSG.

> Why? Your interactive/feedback parts can be a 10-line script as well, running on the same site where you'd run Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Django, or whatever.

EXACTLY! This is my point! Why not just SSR the markdown on the server you're already running?!

This is the opposite of what Jeff and 99% of other SSG users do, they switch to SSGs to get rid of dealing with servers, only to realise they need servers or third parties, but then they're sunk-cost-fallacied into their SSG by the time they realise.
by Dagger2 | 2026-01-04 15:41:51+00:00
You don't need NPTv6 to use ULA. Just use both ULA and the dynamic prefix from your ISP. The latter is handled automatically by DHCPv6-PD, and if you're only using it for outbound connections then it changing isn't going to break anything.

I'd say this is actually elegant, compared to NPTv6 which is a kludge and will break things (and isn't well-supported anyway).
by cletus | 2026-01-04 15:41:57+00:00
The mistake was not having nullability be expressed in the type system.

At Facebook I used their PHP fork Hack a lot and Hack has a really expressive type system where PHP does not. You can express nullability of a type and it defaults to a type being non-nullable, which is the correct default. The type checker was aware of changes too, so:

function foo(?A $a): void {
$a->bar(); // compile error, $a could be null
if ($a is null) {
return;
}
$a->bar(); // not a compiler error because $a is now A not ?A
if ($a is ChildOfA) {
$a->childBar(); // not an error, in this scope $a is ChildOfA
}
}

Now Hack like Java used type erasure so you could force a null into something non-nullable if you really wanted to but, in practice, this almost never happened. A far bigger problem was dealing with legacy code that was converted with a tool and returned or used the type "mixed", which could be literally anything.

The real problem with Java in particular is you'd end up chaining calls then get the dreaded NullPointerException and have no idea from the error or the logs what was broken from:

a.b.c.d();

I'm fine with things like Option/Maybe types but to me they solve different problems. They're a way of expressing that you don't want to specify a value or that a value is missing and that's different to something being null (IMHO).
by rwmj | 2026-01-04 15:42:58+00:00
While the "modern" (actually, 1970s, from ML) approach with option types is vastly superior, modern C compilers do let you declare that function parameters should not be NULL. In GCC or Clang, add __attribute__((nonnull)). There are still issues[1] with this, but it's sufficient for most code.

[1] One big issue is that GCC takes this hint and uses it in the optimizer, so you cannot have both a compile time and a run time check for a non-NULL parameter.
by stevekemp | 2026-01-04 15:43:14+00:00
Not the poster, but what I did was to have a CGI script which would receive incoming comments and write them to "/srv/data/blog/comments/XXX/TIMESTAMP.txt" or similar.

The next time I rebuilt the blogs the page "XXX" would render a loop of all the comments, ordered by timestamp, if anything were present.

The CGI would send a "thanks for your comment" reply to the submitter and an email to myself. If the comment were spam I'd just delete the static file.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-04 15:43:22+00:00
I don't think they got caught in a trap, they followed their customer's preferences and decreased purchasing power.

It costs a lot of money to make quality garments, and a smaller proportion of people can afford them. On top of that, online sales have lower cost of goods sold than sales at physical stores, so it takes some time for all those real estate leases and staffing models to adjust to the new market.
by johnecheck | 2026-01-04 15:43:49+00:00
It's X, not twitter. That system is directly controlled by a single man for his own benefit; we should use the name that reminds us of that.

He openly promotes himself and those that pay him. If you think Musk doesn't have an admin dashboard where he can demote accounts he dislikes and promote his friends, I have some... unkind words for you.

It's about control. Control over your information intake is partial control over you.

We can do so much better than ceding that power to the highest bidder.