MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oenton | 2026-01-12 05:46:23+00:00
I was just talking to someone close to me about what to expect if (when?) Trump starts annexing Greenland. I truly believe a national strike is our best bet.
But the reality is many (most?) people are living paycheck to paycheck and can’t risk that. But knowledge workers and especially software engineers can probably fare much better in the event of immediate job loss.

Now that’s not to downplay or minimize that risk, especially if you have a family, dependents, or some unique circumstance. But I’d hope for the majority of workers in our profession, it’s the difference between “I can’t buy food next week” vs “I have about 4-8 months before I’ve drained my liquid / emergency savings”

The sad thing is I don’t know what to do. Would this make headlines? Would they cover it? Would it get condensed into a single sound bite “big tech goes on strike”?

I’m conflicted but I feel like the choice should be obvious and simple. Just do it.
by gpm | 2026-01-12 05:46:31+00:00
I'm not convinced that thinking tokens - which sort of have to serve a specific chain of thought purpose - are interchangeable with input tokens during which give the model compute without having it add new text.

For a very imperfect human analogy, it feels like saying "a student can spend as much time thinking about the text as they want, so the textbook can be extremely terse".

Definitely just gut feelings though - not well tested or anything. I could be wrong.
by DayGo | 2026-01-12 05:46:32+00:00
2022: cute, llms can autocomplete a line correctly sometimes

2023: ok it got the whole function right, still just pattern matching though

2024: cool it banged out that component in one prompt, but it's just boilerplate

2025: it one-shot an entire app, whatever, just glue code

2026: nah man that's nothing, it's just filling in competency gaps for one of the greatest programmers of all time
by cranberryturkey | 2026-01-12 05:47:08+00:00
I’m building a few
Projects that are ready for users

https://bittorrented.com a torrent-first
Streaming platform

http://marksyncr.com a free bookmarks synchronizer web extension for chrome safari and Firefox based browsers

http://defpromo.com a zero-cloud self promotion web extension for all browsers helps automate commenting on social media posts to promote your product api keys required

http://coinpayportal.com a non custodial crypto payment gateway Easy to integrate similar to stripe with web hooks and manage multiple businesses
by mattmaroon | 2026-01-12 05:48:02+00:00
I formulate, bottle, and sell beverages and I’ve used many of these ingredients. They are very potent, so yeah, the ingredients other than sugar are only a tiny fraction. They can be hard to source in small amounts sometimes though.

The non-nutritive sweeteners in their pure form are wild too. They are 2 + orders of magnitude sweeter than sugar and they come in very fine powders. You have to mask up when you work with them if you don’t want to taste vague sweetness for awhile.
by trueno | 2026-01-12 05:50:01+00:00
Like most LLM-made readme's and the six bajillion AI/agentic/llm tools now on Github I can barely get a grasp on what I'm looking at here, or how to use it practically.

> Smart code bundler that turns repositories into optimized code bundles meeting a token budget in milliseconds

Ok. So it's a tool, do I use it on my repo once? Then what? Do I use it as I go, does it sit somewhere accessible to something like Claude Code and the onus is on me to direct Claude to use this to search files instead of his out of box workflow ? I can see some CLI examples, what should I do with that where does that fit into what people are using with cursor / claude / gemini etc ?

This is the part I've been trying to hammer home about LLM created stuff. It leaves us with vague not well-understood outcomes that might do something. People are shipping/delivering things they don't even understand now and they often times can't speak to what their thing does with an acceptable level of authority. I'm not against creating tools with LLM's but I'm actually pretty against people creating the basic readme with LLM's. Wanna make a tool in an LLM? More power to you. But make sure you understand what was made, because we need humans in here telling other humans how to use it, because LLMs flat out lose the plot over the course of a large project and I think a big issue is LLM's can sometimes be more eloquent at writing than a lot of people can, so they opt for the LLM-generated readme.

But as someone who would maybe consider using something like this, I see that readme and it just looks like every claude code thing I've put together to date which is to say I've done some seemingly impossible things with Claude only to find that his ability to recap the entirety of it just ended up in a whole lot of seemingly meaningful words and phrases and sentences that actually paint a super disjointed picture of what exactly a repo is about.
by dangus | 2026-01-12 05:50:20+00:00
You…ever see a screenshot of Gnome?

This statement of yours is also a bit silly considering Linux desktops have way more in common with macOS than with Windows. They share a whole bunch of concepts like POSIX compliance, use the same shells, and they even share a package manager (Homebrew, which seems to be gaining a bit of Linux popularity lately). Even CUPS comes to mind.
by fredwu | 2026-01-12 05:51:22+00:00
Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-12 05:51:41+00:00
As I always tell people, if you're right there's no point in arguing about it, so the only thing I would say is that you owe it to yourself to check your predictions. Set a reminder for January 25 to confirm whether Trump has ordered the military and security agencies to invade any state capitols. I did this a few times last year, and immigration policy is really the only topic where the "expect the worst" heuristic has worked for me.
by BatteryMountain | 2026-01-12 05:52:12+00:00
Basically whenever I use a machine that has an nvidia gpu, I always use xfce, as it just works, has least amount of issues & babysitting nvidia drivers & breakages. For everything else I use KDE.

I have some old chromebooks (flashed with chromebox firmware) that uses xfce too, which works great!

So kde & xfce is the only two desktops I use these days & have patience for.
by petesergeant | 2026-01-12 05:52:17+00:00
Codex is a sufficiently good reviewer I now let it review my hand-coded work too. It's a really, really good reviewer. I think I make this point often enough now that I suspect OpenAI should be paying me. Claude and Gemini will happily sign off work that just doesn't work, OpenAI is a beast at code-review.
by dpc_01234 | 2026-01-12 05:52:21+00:00
The US government entered a debt spiral a while ago (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA), and needs lower interest rates to service its tremendous debt while trying to inflate it away by printing money. That's all it comes down to. For decades fiscal conservatives were warning about it and were laughed at. Now that we're are the end game the inevitable shitshow will become apparent. You can hate Trump (rightly so), but as much as he did contribute to the problem directly, the problem is larger and systemic, and anyone else in office would have the exact same problem now.
by hoten | 2026-01-12 05:52:33+00:00
Implementing a debugger for the custom scripting language used by the Zelda game engine I contribute to.

The game engine I work on (link in bio) developed a custom language for engine customization, but it never had any runtime debugging capabilities. I've been adding that over the last couple weeks.

The language compiles to a bytecode, which is what the engine runs. But the bytecode has no source information.

The easy part was getting source locations for stack traces (associating each generated bytecode with an originating source line of code).

Harder was getting scopes information for displaying function names in those stack frames, and for associating runtime variables per-scope (stack variables, globals, class fields, etc.)

Now I just need to create an expression parser for evaluating expressions at runtime based on the current scope, add breakpoints and step over/into/etc. capability to the engine, then wrap it all together in a VSCode extension.

https://web.zquestclassic.com/zscript/ (this doesn't show what I'm working on, it's just a basic web text editor to quickly test the language. can't run it from here).
by nine_k | 2026-01-12 05:52:51+00:00
As a decades-long Xfce user, I greatly value Xfce's modularity, and don't care the slightest bit about improving the display server performance. Xfce is already snappy well beyond my level of sensitivity, and I won't trade the flexibility I have and use for a sliver of extra performance I don't even think I might need.
by dehugger | 2026-01-12 05:52:51+00:00
I found a path from Sunset to Bicycle with 185 generated topics!
Sunset → Sunset Boulevard (places)
Sunset Boulevard → Boulevard (broader)
Boulevard → Boulevard Saint-Germain (people)
Boulevard Saint-Germain → Saint-Germain Boulevard (deeper)
Saint-Germain Boulevard → Paris (places)
Paris → Saint-Denis Basilica (people)
Saint-Denis Basilica → Dagobert I (people)
Dagobert I → Frankish rulers (broader)
Frankish rulers → Charlemagne (people)
Charlemagne → Feudalism (opposite)
Feudalism → Feudalism in Europe (future)
Feudalism in Europe → Knight Protocols (future)
Knight Protocols → Garter Palace (places)
Garter Palace → Ruined Fortress (opposite)
Ruined Fortress → Ruins (similar)
Ruins → Machu Picchu Citadel (places)
Machu Picchu Citadel → Andean Civilization (broader)
Andean Civilization → Inca Emperor Pachacuti (people)
Inca Emperor Pachacuti → Machu Picchu (people)
Machu Picchu → Atlantis (opposite)
Atlantis → Hyperborea (opposite)
Hyperborea → Hyperborea (mythology) (places)
Hyperborea (mythology) → Arctic explorers (similar)
Arctic explorers → Franklin Expedition (similar)
Franklin Expedition → Exploration (broader)
Exploration → Voyage (deeper)
Voyage → Travel (broader)
Travel → Travel safety (good)
Travel safety → Safe driving (similar)
Safe driving → Road safety (similar)
Road safety → Pedestrian safety (deeper)
Pedestrian safety → Pedestrian Bridge (places)
Pedestrian Bridge → Footbridge (similar)
Footbridge → Transportation (broader)
Transportation → Motorcycle industry (deeper)
Motorcycle industry → Motorcycle racing (similar)
Motorcycle racing → Superbikes (similar)
Superbikes → Motorcycles (similar)
Motorcycles → Bicycles (opposite).
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-12 05:53:11+00:00
There are major differences in the design between Windows and Mac desktops, and generally speaking, Linux desktop environments function more like Windows than they do macOS.

The biggest difference is probably that under Windows-style environments, applications/processes and windows are mostly synonymous — each window represents an independent process in the task manager. In a Mac-style environment, applications can host multiple windows each, so for example even if you've got 7 Firefox windows open, there's only one host Firefox process. This is reflected in the UI, with macOS grouping windows by application in several difference places (as opposed to Windows, where that only happens in the taskbar if the user has it enabled).

"Windows style" also comes a number of other patterns, such as a taskbar instead and menubars attached to windows (as opposed to a dock and a single global, system-owned menubar under macOS).

"Mac style" comes with several subtleties that separate it from e.g. GNOME. Progressive disclosure is a big one. Where macOS will keep power user features slightly off to the side where they're accessible but unlikely to confuse non-technical users, GNOME just omits the functionality altogether. It also generally implies a greater level of system-level integration and cross-functionality from apps (including third party), lending to a more cohesive feel.
by changbai | 2026-01-12 05:53:58+00:00
Inference cost for leading models and more complex tasks is high. However, inference cost for a stationary model and task has dropped drastically.

https://a16z.com/llmflation-llm-inference-cost/ for example shows this to be true.

The report from OpenRouter https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai also makes the same observation.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-01-12 05:54:30+00:00
There’s for sure legitimacy to the concern over the quality of output of LLMs and the maintainability of that code, not to mention the long term impact on next generation of devs coming in and losing their grasp on the fundamentals.

At the same time, the direction of software by and large seems to me to be going in the direction of fast fashion. Fast, cheap, replaceable, questionable quality.

Not all software can tolerate this, as I mentioned in another comment, flight control software, the software controlling your nuclear power plant, but the majority of the software in the world is far more trivial and its consumers (and producers) more tolerant of flaws.

I don’t think of seniors as purely irrationally fixated on the artisanal aspect, I also think they are rationally, subconsciously or not, fearful of the implications for their career as the bottom falls out of this industry.

I could be wrong though! Maybe high quality software will continue to be what the industry strives for and high paying jobs to fix the flawed vibe coded slop will proliferate, but I’m more pessimistic than to think that.
by hilbert42 | 2026-01-12 05:54:30+00:00
But the difference is Pepsi would also have had dedicated laboratories and food scientists, scientifically controlled exhaustive testing and unlimited access to any ingredient they wanted. Thus one would expect Pepsi's testing to have had much finer granularity than in this YouTube video).

With millions of dollars tied up in just a few percent of sales you can bet Pepsi knows just about as much as Coke does about Coke's ingredients (and vice versa of course).

The research for both companies is more about the fine minutiae—keeping an optimal differentiation between the two products more than treading on each other's territory. Trampling over each other for market share is done through advertising, not by making their products the same.
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-12 05:54:52+00:00
Hmm, I'd say that on a 2018-era machine, you won't measure this in raw CPU throughput. In all probablity, your cores are fast enough to mask the context switching. The performance deficit here is strictly in the domain of motion-to-photon latency or frame pacing. I guess my point is that in xfce's split architecture, the compositor acts as just another X11 client.

This enforces a path where window contents often round-trip through the X server before composition. Quantitatively, this typically adds at least one frame of input lag compared to the zero-copy direct scanout path available to monolithic wayland compositors. You likely won't notice this while editing text. However, the architecture doesn't perform well when you attach an external monitor. Since X11 shares a single virtual coordinate space, it cannot synchronize VBLANK across two outputs with different refresh rates or clock domains.

ps: and please don't call your 2018 machine vintage, it makes my secondary thinkpads feel prehistoric :D
by smt88 | 2026-01-12 05:55:04+00:00
> In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity.

Everything you wrote here is directly contradicted by casual observation of reality.

Developers aren't a bottleneck. If they were, we wouldn't be in a historic period of layoffs. And before you say that AI is causing the layoffs -- it's not. They started before AI was widely used for production, and they're also being done at companies that aren't heavily using AI anyway. They're a result of massive over-hiring during periods of low interest rates.

Beyond that, who is demanding software developers? The things that make our lives better (like digital forms at the doctor's office) aren't complex software.

The majority of the demand is from enshittification companies making our lives worse with ads and surveillance. No one is demanding developers, but certainly individual humans aren't demanding them.
by daxfohl | 2026-01-12 05:55:13+00:00
The central equation is still marginal ROI. Will adding an engineer provide positive higher marginal ROI than some other investment? If so, hire; if not, fire. With the scale and size of the software industry about to explode even higher, one measly engineer can still drive some feature that's worth millions of dollars. AI will just allow us to also release features that are worth only thousands of dollars.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-12 05:56:42+00:00
It seems like you're mostly focused on the tooling for actually directing the LLM but there's a whole host of other technology which becomes relevant re: building guardrails and handcuffs for your agent. For instance I've been doing a lot of contract testing lately. It's not new tech, not changing at a blistering pace, but now that generating mountains of code is cheap, techniques for dealing with those mountains are suddenly more necessary.
by Kephael | 2026-01-12 05:56:53+00:00
I don't understand the cost either, apparently it only costs around a billion dollars to build a skyscraper? The Burj Khalifa only cost one and a half billion dollars when completed in 2010. I don't know that there's criminal activity here, but the cost of this is rather surprising to me. I knew the Federal Reserve was being renovated, but I thought it was something closer to a hundred million dollars.
by eru | 2026-01-12 05:57:26+00:00
An exhaustive formal spec doesn't exist. But you can conservatively proof some properties. Eg program termination is far from sufficient for your program to do what you want, but it's probably necessary.

(Termination in the wider sense: for example an event loop has to be able to finish each run through the loop in finite time.)

You can see eg Rust's or Haskell's type system as another light-weight formal model that lets you make and proof some simple statements, without having a full formal spec of the whole desired behaviour of the system.
by khafra | 2026-01-12 05:58:10+00:00
> Non-trivial coding tasks

A coding agent just beat every human in the AtCoder Heuristic optimization contest. It also beat the solution that the production team for the contest put together.
https://sakana.ai/ahc058/

It's not enterprise-grade software, but it's not a CRUD app with thousands of examples in github, either.
by nine_k | 2026-01-12 05:58:59+00:00
Xfce is pretty customizable. Out of the box it may look like OSX, or like Windows. But you can make it fit your needs, not adjust yourself to the machine and somebody's design decisions, or (often) lack thereof.

Unlike Gnome, Xfce is pretty un-opinionated; I can do away with everything that annoys me in Gnome, macOS, and Windows, while keeping the good bits, and having many more good bits none of these offer.
by krasin | 2026-01-12 06:00:42+00:00
I found the specs for the fuel source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/SNAP-19C_Moun...

The high-power unit had 300 grams of Pu-238 in 1965. Given its 87.7 years half-life, only 187g of Pu-238 remaining. It's very hard to do much damage with this amount of radioactive material.
by 9dev | 2026-01-12 06:00:44+00:00
An open source, self-hostable ebook library for yourself, and/or family and friends. Will include professional and automatically gathered bibliographical metadata, direct reader connectivity, calibre sync, OPDS, an (optional) public bragging shelf, and high quality packages to go with.

If you love reading, want to have an easy way to access your collection, and share it with a few people, this is for you.

https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri

I’m looking for contributors who would like to help shape Colibri into a counter-approach to big tech; it’s specifically meant to never get monetised, and explore what such software can become.
by tolciho | 2026-01-12 06:00:46+00:00
> This is also a good reason to log everything all the time in a human readable way. You can get services up and then triage at your own pace after.

Unless, hypothetically, the logging velocity tickles kernel bugs and crashes the system, but only when the daemon is started from cron and not elsewhere. Hypothetically, of course.

Or when the system stops working two weeks after launch because "logging everything" has filled up the disk, and took two weeks to so do. This also means important log messages (perhaps that the other end is down) might be buried in 200 lines of log noise and backtrace spam per transaction, which in turn might delay debugging and fixing or at isolating at which end of the tube the problem resides.
by habinero | 2026-01-12 06:01:02+00:00
I've heard this analogy regurgitated multiple times now, and I wish people would not.

It's true that many master artists had workshops with apprenticeships. Because they were a trade.

By the time you were helping to paint portraits, you'd spent maybe a decade learning techniques and skill and doing the unimportant parts and working your way up from there.

It wasn't a half-assed, slop some paint around and let the master come fix it later. The people doing things like portrait work or copies of works were highly skilled and experienced.

Typing "an army of Garfields storming the beach at Normandy" into a website is not the same.
by pico303 | 2026-01-12 06:02:29+00:00
I was thinking something similar, but not so much an ad as a citation. A good starting point might be a law stating that when an LLM produces an answer, it cite its sources, with a link back to the content. Ideally, though, the producer of that content should receive some amount of financial compensation as well, similar to how an author or an actor receives royalties. If the LLM is making money off of this, so should the person who provide the LLM the value.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-12 06:02:51+00:00
> there is always a better closed service you have to pay for

Always? I think that only holds for a certain amount of time (different for each sector) after which the open stuff is better.

I thought it was only true for dev tools, but I had to rethink it when I met a guy (not especially technical) who runs open source firmware on his insulin pump because the closed source stuff doesn't gives him as much control.