MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-02 14:23:48+00:00
Next gen models are always hard to build, they are by definition pushing the frontier. Every generation of CPU was hard to build but we still had Moores law.

> Simultaneously we see a distinct narrowing between players (openai, deepseek, mistral, google, anthropic) in their offerings.
Thats usually a signal that the rate of progress is slowing.

I agree with you on the fact in the first part but not the second part…why would convergence of performance indicate anything about the absolute performance improvements of frontier models?

> Remind me what was so great about gpt 5? How about gpt4 from from gpt 3?
Do you even remember the releases? Yeah. I dont. I had to look it up.

3 -> 4 -> 5 were extraordinary leaps…not sure how one would be able to say anything else

> Just another model with more or less the same capabilities.

5 is absolutely not a model with more or less the same capabilities as gpt 4, what could you mean by this?

> “Mixed reception”

A mixed reception is an indication of model performance against a backdrop of market expectations, not against gpt 4…

> That is not what exponential progress looks like, by any measure.

Sure it is…exponential is a constant % improvement per year. We’re absolutely in that regime by a lot of measures

> The progress this year has been in the tooling around the models, smaller faster

Effective tool use is not somehow some trivial add on it is a core capability for which we are on an exponential progress curve.

> models with similar capabilities. Multimodal add ons that no one asked for, because its easier to add image and audio processing than improve text handling.

This is definitely a personal feeling of yours, multimodal models are not something no one asked for…they are absolutely essential. Text data is essential and data curation is non trivial and continually improving, we are also hitting the ceiling of internet text data. But yet we use an incredible amount of synthetic data for RL and this continues to grow……you guessed it, exponentially. and multimodal data is incredibly information rich. Adding multi modality lifts all boats and provides core capabilities necessary for open world reasoning and even better text data (e.g. understanding charts and image context for text).
by olivierestsage | 2026-01-02 14:24:19+00:00
It brings a nostalgic tear to my eye to see the OS flame wars heating up like it's 2002 again. Time to re-download some of those 1024x768 3D render wallpapers of Tux smashing a Windows computer

Edit: Here we go: https://wallpaper-house.com/data/out/9/wallpaper2you_359831....
by karlshea | 2026-01-02 14:25:10+00:00
I tried getting Nix working a couple of months ago and ditched it because changing some Tower settings updates the global gitconfig (as it should in this circumstance) and Nix would wipe them out.

All of it seemed way too annoying compared to just having a dotfiles repo, and if it couldn’t handle the Tower/gitconfig issue I know for sure everything else I was going to run into wasn’t worth it.
by formerly_proven | 2026-01-02 14:25:16+00:00
No, 580 is the new legacy driver branch, it's still supported for a couple years. Just not optimized for new titles iirc.

I'm not sure what the state of the open-source drivers is for the really old nvidia GPUs, but for Pascal and such it's pretty decent. No video hwaccel though. However, for hardware encoding, NVENC has improved a lot over the generations. So the old chunkers are probably beat on every metric by e.g. a T400 card. Or Intel Arc (business model: "Quick sync for AMD").
by Biganon | 2026-01-02 14:25:39+00:00
I've been using Arch for 15 years, it's not like I'm suddenly discovering the concept of the distro.

But when something crashes with no error message whatsoever, it makes it a tiny bit harder to troubleshoot.

Especially when so many people answer, just like I had predicted, "works on my machine". Which would only be a gotcha if I had implied it worked on no machine whatsoever. Which I didn't.

I'll tinker some more and I'll be sure to post my findings if I get these games to work.
by michaelrpeskin | 2026-01-02 14:25:46+00:00
25 years ago when my wife and I were poor grad students we had to do this. I tracked everything religiously and she cut coupons for the grocery store. We were generally positive about $100/month at best. Tracking it allowed us to not go negative.

As soon as we got real jobs with a real income, we didn't waste time with that. Our philosophy now is to just make sure that we spend well under our means and not track. We don't penny-pinch, but we still keep some of the grad school "do I really need this?" mentality.

Our normal spending is somewhere under 1/2 of our take-home (including mortgage), so we just don't worry about it and keep saving. It helps that we don't have fancy tastes. It's a nice stress free way of saving and we don't have to get neurotic about tracking every penny either.
by phil-martin | 2026-01-02 14:26:12+00:00
Accounts (in the accounting sense) are unitless, and refer to whatever meaning we ascribe to them, so we can transfer value from $ to shares, or USD to GBP or whatever.

Lalit describes this I think really well in his article

https://lalitm.com/post/one-number-i-trust/#chapter-4-invest...
by gonzo41 | 2026-01-02 14:26:15+00:00
I was always stuck by how different all the cars in the BYD line are. There are some pretty bold styling and fitout choices between the models.

I have mostly driven BMW and Toyota sedan and fwd's. And as you progress in car price and size its a matter of getting more features, and a better version over the cheaper model.

The BYD's all seem really different,
by iljya | 2026-01-02 14:26:49+00:00
Double-entry accounting models the source and destination of funds. If you keep all of your money in one bank account and neither owe anyone or have anyone that owes you, then double-entry accounting is not necessary because you can record just the one side of every transaction – your bank account is the other side.

However, if you have more than one account or debts, or budgets, then it becomes useful to track both sides of a transaction. If you track both sides of a transaction then you can easily answer questions like:
1. how much money do I have in my investment account?
2. how much debt do I have?
3. how much did I spend on recreational social activities?

You can track debts and investments separately, but then you are still making two entries just in two places.

I think many people have few enough debts and investment account that they track these separately, and the third question, budgeting, can be simplified if each vendor is only ever considered for a single budget, for example, all your flights are part of your vacation budget, and you don't care to break out a flight to a career related conference.
by netsharc | 2026-01-02 14:26:53+00:00
I remember seeing an online shop that did the whole font substitution to prevent web-scraping of their prices.. I think they even changed the substitution between elements so one couldn't just do a single pass replacement and get the original data back..

I guess nowadays it's very cheap to run a headless browser, screenshot the output, and run it through OCR.. hah, to prevent that they'd have to design their webpage as 1 full screen Captcha..
by ben_w | 2026-01-02 14:28:10+00:00
Many daily expenses, yes. Before I left the UK, IIRC there was some campaign about tampons.

But "majority" just means half.

Between "The standard rate of VAT is 20 per cent, with around half of household expenditure subject to this rate." - https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...

And Figure 10.2 on page 6 of https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05...

I'd say it's very close to even odds that the other poster is correct to say "No vat on the majority of spending".

I'd also say that VAT should be reduced to encourage domestic spending and local growth, but I did leave the country for various reasons that can be simplified as "I do not expect the UK government to do the right thing".
by chaostheory | 2026-01-02 14:28:23+00:00
Maybe if Campbell was still alive in the 1990s, he would have been able to help Lucas with his scripts for the prequels?

We now know Lucas wasn’t really a good storyteller. He was just really great with visuals, but was surrounded by great storytellers. His first wife Marcia and people like Irvin Kershner and Campbell were the ones who were able to convince Lucas that the story mattered more than the visuals. They were noticeable absent in the prequel production.
by mrob | 2026-01-02 14:28:51+00:00
CDs have no distinct sound. CD quality (assuming correct dithering) is transparent to human hearing. You could play a vinyl record into a good ADC, dither it to 16 bits, then burn it to CD-R. It will sound 100% identical to the original vinyl in a blind test. The only way to tell the difference is that the vinyl continues to degrade with each playback, while the CD-R will last decades if stored correctly (pressed CDs last even longer).
by PeterHolzwarth | 2026-01-02 14:29:00+00:00
The two rode on each-other's coat tails during their ascent. Lucas was happy to give a "yeah, I was totally thinking that!" when people would point out some classic hero stuff in his simple little wonderful space opera (not damning with faint praise here - Star Wars is a ridiculously wonderful film!).

And Campbell knew a good thing when he saw it, happy to agree that Lucas' film represented a hero's journey.

This was a time when Campbell's writing was entering broad pop consciousness and his speaking engagement schedule was starting to grow: the massive popularity of Star Wars was a great ship to catch a ride on.

People wanted to see a depth in Star Wars that caught Lucas off guard (remember that he just wanted to replicate the exciting, cliff-hanger kids serials of his 1950s childhood). He decided to go with it, saying it was all part of a big plan, "I have ten movies with their stories all plotted out" etc. The reality is he cobbled things together ad-hoc and kind of quickly, with no real overarching intent - something he only decades later finally admitted.

I feel for him: in his mind, he was just a nuts-and-bolts technology guy who loved the "how would I make that?" questions and work far far more than the story he had to come up with to tell. He freely admitted he hated writing. If he had it his way, he would have merely been the head of ILM, excitedly figuring out ways to use new technology to solve film making problems, but Star Wars blew up on him, becoming an over-the-top ultra-success.

The real connection between Lucas and Campbell was nearly non-existent, but it was a useful thing for each of them to strategically latch on to as their popularity began to rapidly grow.
by rmunn | 2026-01-02 14:29:16+00:00
Not an accountant, so if I get it wrong someone please correct me. But index fund shares are an asset: something you own. So is your car, your house (if you own it), and your computer. When you buy an asset, you paid a certain price for it. When you sell it, you pay a different price. Until you sell it, though, you don't actually have the money, so it hardly matters what its value is until you sell it. If you buy $100 of an index fund and a year later it has grown by 10%, you don't actually have $110 yet until you sell it. So you just track that you have a certain number of shares of the fund. Let's say each share sells for exactly $20 when you bought them, so you have exactly 5 shares. Later the share price is $22, but you don't have $110 yet, you still have exactly 5 shares. When you sell them, then you'll have $110.

So you record two entries:

January 1st, 2025:

-$100 checking account
+5 shares VFINX at $20 ea

January 1st, 2026:

-5 shares VFINX at $22 ea
+$110 checking account

At this point you have "realized" ("made real") $10 of profit from this asset. You bought it for $100 and sold it for $110, so the IRS wants you to pay taxes on the $10 profit you made. (This is capital gains tax). Until you sold them, some people would consider you to have $10 profit in "unrealized capital gains", but you did not actually have that profit until you sold the shares. This is important to remember, because if you start counting on that $10 profit but then the share price drops because the economy took a hit, suddenly you don't have $110 worth of shares, you have $90 worth of shares, and you'll make a loss if you sell them now. (This is one of the reasons why only the economically illiterate would propose a tax on "unrealized capital gains": that means taxing people for income they have not actually received, but merely could theoretically receive. Which is both immoral and stupid.)

Hope this explanation helps a little. And as I said, if I got something wrong, please correct me and explain how I was wrong; I'm not an accountant. I understand the basic principles, but it's entirely possible I was off on some detail or other.
by ndriscoll | 2026-01-02 14:29:19+00:00
Those players can have their own solutions. They should recognize they are a tiny bubble and not insist the other 999,000 players need the same.

And they don't even need it all the time either. I did once participate in a CS:S tournament, so I guess I was "competitive", but half the time I was on gun game or ice world or surf maps. My friends and I played normal Warcraft 3 against each other, but otherwise I pretty much only played custom maps, which were apparently popular enough to spawn an entire new genre. I never ran into problems queueing for something like preschool wars or wintermaul. When we did queue for ladder sometimes it was like 10 minutes to find a match.

To your earlier point about e.g. Valorant: my mom invited me to play on weekends with her and my sister. I know my mom is 0% competitive. This was not some serious thing. I couldn't play with them because I'm not going to buy another computer just to run it. That's the absurdity here.
by loganc2342 | 2026-01-02 14:29:36+00:00
The last reported monthly active user count for Steam by Valve puts it at 132 million users per month. Since this was in 2021, it’s a conservative estimate now. But based on that conservative figure and if my numbers are correct, Steam added roughly 7 million Windows 11 users in December 2025.

Meanwhile, the most recent estimates show the Steam Deck, the most popular handheld gaming PC by far, having sold around 4 million units, while every other handheld gaming PC (including the Asus ROG Ally, the predecessor to the ROG Xbox Ally) having sold around 2 million units combined. While the Xbox name carries some weight, I highly doubt the Xbox Ally has sold significantly in the two months since its launch.

TLDR: You’re likely correct that numbers from Windows handhelds did not contribute significantly to the added Windows 11 users in December.
by simonh | 2026-01-02 14:29:45+00:00
Zelensky was arguably a nobody internationally, until he lead his country to stalling out the entire military might of the Russian Federation in a war that's only a few months away from being longer than the Great Patriotic One, and keep on giving Russia bloodey noses like taking out a chunk of their strategic bomber fleet, the underwater drone strike on Novorossiysk, and tanking the Russian economy. Not bad for a literal comedian.
by pastor_williams | 2026-01-02 14:30:14+00:00
You're comparing apples and really big complicated apples. Books are protected by copyright and they only need a computer and 2 sqm of space, right? People make copyright protected videos with 2 sqm of space and a phone that get as many views as many large budget movies.

I think the differences between inventing a story or song and inventing a theory are not as great as you pretend.

The big difference really is status quo and tradition.
by BOS1980- | 2026-01-02 14:30:27+00:00
The Square Face Icon Generator is the beloved pixel avatar maker from the early 2010s, originally created by h071019 and preserved from Flash Museum—now updated to run smoothly on modern devices. It remains free and requires no signup, offering 200+ customization options across 12 categories and instant 256×256 PNG downloads with transparent backgrounds. Perfect for Discord, Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, and gaming profiles, it retains the nostalgic pixel-art aesthetic with real-time preview, unlimited color choices, and privacy-by-default (everything stays local in your browser). If you’re seeking a free Picrew alternative with true retro charm, this updated experience is instantly accessible on any device.
by eunoia | 2026-01-02 14:30:46+00:00
Eh not sure why OP chose Boulder, it is a great EV town. I commute into Boulder in an EV every day I need to be in the office. I almost exclusively charge my EV in Boulder at the office. The proportion of EVs I see driving in and out of Boulder is very high.

I also road trip around Colorado in my EV and it works great.
by EdNutting | 2026-01-02 14:30:49+00:00
Interesting read, it’s a shame the ranty format makes it 3x longer than necessary.

Not sure why it takes a dump on VLC - it’s been the most stable and friendly video player for Windows for a long time (it matters that ordinary users, like school teachers, can use it without special training. I don’t care how ideological you are about Linux or video players or whatever lol).
by condensedcrab | 2026-01-02 14:30:51+00:00
I’d try applying to in office roles too - I suspect that most places have a soft hiring freeze regardless of work status.

At least, that way you know it’s not the remote work portion that’s keeping you from a job.

I’m in the US and everyone I’ve talked to who wants to move have been discussing the challenges of getting a foot in the door anywhere.
by mjpa86 | 2026-01-02 14:31:00+00:00
The back button breaking seems to be if you're not logged in, as loading the dashboard redirects to the homepage. Might be better to show a modal or something prompting the user to log in or at least use window.location.replace so it doesn't kill the back button.

The demo page looks to be what I was missing, are these placed in a specific location (eg the bottom right corner of the window) or is that up to the site owner?
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2026?
by vekker | 2026-01-02 14:31:01+00:00
This question seems to be asked almost annually on here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=successful%20one-person%20online%20businesses&sort=byPopularity&type=story), and I'm curious what it looks like in 2026.

> How many people on Hacker News are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?

> Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.

I am also interested in how this looks today given the current tooling. With generative AI, fast code generation, and agentic workflows, it seems easier than ever for one person to build and operate things that previously required a team.

> For those running solo businesses today, how are you using LLMs or agent workflows in practice, if at all?
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-02 14:31:29+00:00
My memory of Next (and somewhat Laravel, although I'm definitely stale in php) is not so much that they got traction because of the hosting/deployment.

They were decent free frameworks that started getting popular, and the hosting/deployment tooling came later as a way for the companies to make money.

I don't see Rails skipping the tooling there as a bad thing, although I also don't see adding that tooling as a bad thing either.

---

That said - I really don't like modern Rails all that much. And I think that does directly play into the issue, because I think you're entirely right that Ruby and Rails are tightly coupled in a bad way for Ruby.

Basically - Modern Rails reminds me of legacy ASP tooling from the microsoft world... It does it all, magically (wizard me up a new controller, magic man!), and god fucking help you if it breaks. It's not that it's impossible to untangle, but good luck hunting down your exact spot where the magic broke and then finding decent documentation for your specific version of Rails, buried under all the blog-trash weight of the old versions.

Combined with relatively poor documentation (seriously, why is this so bad?), and it's not a fun framework to use as a newcomer.

The cherry on top is that lots of companies that are Rails shops are now fairly mature, and have relatively large codebases and teams, and Ruby is genuinely bad for large teams.

My first run in with Ruby was for CLI tooling way back around it's initial 1.0 release, and I like Ruby quite a bit in that space, but I won't install it just for that. Too much momentum for Node/Python which are almost always there in some form or another by default.

Rails needs a "Dotnet Core" variant with less magic, less stuff in general, and solid conceptual documentation as a breathe of fresh air. Because I'd actually pick Dotnet Core over Rails right now (or ideally, neither).
by qsera | 2026-01-02 14:31:44+00:00
What is the point. If I share something, someone is going to come along and say. That is not how you are "supposed" to do it in rust.

And that is exactly my point. You need to learn a zillion rust specific patterns for doing every little thing to work around the borrow-checker and would be kind of unable to come up with your own designs with trade-offs that you choose.

And that becomes very mechanical and hence boring. I get that it would be safe.

So yes, if I am doing brain surgery, I would use tools that prevent me from making quick arbitrary movements. But for everything else a glove would do.
by michaelrpeskin | 2026-01-02 14:31:51+00:00
Yeah, I only read the abstract and looked at the plots, but this is what I hate about public health papers:

They say the prevalence of virus is down. They don't say that the cancer rate is down (granted too early to tell), nor do they talk about any adverse events or all cause mortality differences (again, probably too early to tell)

The only thing they can conclude is that the treatment given to stop the virus, stops the virus. But they don't mention any tradeoffs.

Not trying to be an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, but good science needs to talk about the whole picture.
by floodle | 2026-01-02 14:31:56+00:00
It's about the value to you versus the effort you put in. For me the granularity you are talking about is too much effort. All my supermarket shops go in one big category "groceries and household".

Start easy and see what you want to get out of the data. If you can store the original source (e.g receipts) so that you can later go back and increase the granularity if you find yourself wanting it, that would be ideal.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-02 14:32:05+00:00
You could probably have gotten away with it a decade ago but that is a very poor plan today.

Statistically nobody even knows a guy who knows a guy who's dick fell off. Serious HPV problems for men are not even common enough to be viable urban legend. The nanosecond someone who took your bait shows up to be interviewed by some Youtube talking head about side effects the already severely damaged (compared to, IDK a decade ago) credibility of the medical establishment will go up in flames.

You need to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and let people make their own decisions. People don't "trust the experts" anymore at the scale you need for stuff like vaccination campaigns so you have to operate based on that reality.
by evanjrowley | 2026-01-02 14:32:15+00:00
As someone wearing the post-sales support hat for a non-OSS product, I appreciate use of "ready" tags in Jira. Unlike OSS, our engineers prioritize KPIs to be compensated for their work, and so we must find a way to track the triage discussions within Jira. In a significant way, Jira is solid proof that work happened, even if no actual code was pushed into the repo. If the support team has an unconfirmed bug that requires a technical deep dive, then the "non-ready" Jiras seem like a good fit. I'm open to a better way of doing this and would like to learn more about alternatives, but for now, this is how the teams engage.