MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palata | 2026-01-12 13:26:07+00:00
I personally choose not to depend on more wrappers. If I need to clone a git repo, I `git clone` it. Then I build and run the project using the build system of the project.

If the project properly uses a build system I am familiar with, then I don't really need to think. If the project does something exotic, then chances are that I will just give up on that project. But I don't think that your tool would help here: if it is exotic, then your tool probably won't know how to automate it.
by gf000 | 2026-01-12 13:26:23+00:00
For the "only few levels" claim, I think this one is sort of evident from the way they work. Solving a logical problem can have an arbitrary number of steps, and in a single pass there is only so many connection within a LLM to do some "work".

As mentioned, there are good ways to counter this problem (e.g. writing a plan and then iteratively going over those less-complex ones, or simply using the proper tool for the problem: use e.g. a SAT solver and just "translate" the problem to and from the appropriate format)

Nonetheless, I'm always open to new information/evidence and it will surely improve a lot in a year. As for reference, to date this is my favorite description of LLMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46561537
by jibal | 2026-01-12 13:26:30+00:00
You asked whether there anything humans should do about it other than adapting to it, and the answer is yes. And we may be past the point of returning to some baseline (it's interesting that you took one person's opinion that we are as if it were an established fact) but that doesn't mean that we can't possibly hold the line at some higher level.

> Energy and resource consumption is at vulgarity levels.

That sounds like a very good reason to be talking about it.

> Science is only a force to drive us towards these directions.

This is not at all true. And given your original very uninformed question about "natural cycles" vs. human causes (which is quite the false dichotomy), I don't think you're any sort of authority on science.
by m0llusk | 2026-01-12 13:26:41+00:00
In my experience this is not healthy. People who had problems with weight are very quickly losing excess weight and displaying a range of symptoms related to that including sunken and starved looking faces and significant loss of lean muscle mass. Changes made to the face with rapid weight loss may become permanent and especially for older people the loss of lean muscle mass can become a major health problem. Sudden extreme changes in body composition are often neither healthy nor stable.
by bvrmn | 2026-01-12 13:26:45+00:00
> 2.6 One vs. Many Check-outs per Repository

For practical cases `git worktree` allows to have multiple checkouts. Document marks this section as "partly disputed" with an external link. IMHO git worktrees has the same ergonomics as in fossil. This section kinda discredits the rest of the article.
by atwrk | 2026-01-12 13:26:46+00:00
The comments here seem to show a typical US-EU divide in perspectives, people talk past each other. Yes, mass-market low-margin consumer products (the US view) probably won't be produced much in the EU in the next few years.

But much of the electronics industry in the EU is B2B and centers around producing high-margin products where 10.000 units of a product would be huge.

The company I work for, for example, usually produces a few hundred units of a product before the next revision replaces it. Whether or not the PCB costs 20€ more or not really isn't that important if you only plan to sell 100 devices of it per year for 10k€ each. Aspects like quality and regulatory conformity are way more important here.
by dotancohen | 2026-01-12 13:27:02+00:00
Jaguar only started using a synchromesh gearbox in the E-Type in '65 or '66 (Series II) - that's forty years after the Austin. I have no idea why the British love to abuse themselves.

Last week I saw some old Rolls Royce that I absolutely could not guess even the decade of. The carriage looked 1930s but the interior looked 1950s - until I noticed what might have been spark advance levers on the steering wheel. It's a super luxury vehicle with super conservative styling, so I really don't know if it had a luxury interior for it's time or a classic exterior for it's time.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-12 13:27:06+00:00
>>> Very few people have the expertise to write efficient assembly code, yet everyone relies on compilers and assemblers to translate high-level code to byte-level machine code. I think same concept is true her

>> That's a poor analogy which gets repeated in every discussion: compilers are deterministic, LLMs are not.

> Why does it matter if LLMs are not deterministic? Who cares?

In the context of this analogy, it matters. If you're not using this analogy, then sure, only the result matters. But when the analogy being used is deterministic, then, yes, it matters.

You can't very well claim "We'll compare this non-deterministic process to this other deterministic process that we know works."
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-12 13:27:13+00:00
I can't but feel that there's a second, complementary point here.

Will you learn something about the place you visit? Probably. But, sure, not always. It's possible that reading the web might be as effective.

However, there's also the other side. To travel is to become educated about you. This experience cannot be replicated by reading the web. There's nothing quite as instructive as being blown away by the foreignness of another place, the language, the customs - the sheer strangeness of it to you. How you react to it, or manage it, or negotiate it are lessons worth learning. That's the education.
by tyjen | 2026-01-12 13:27:59+00:00
The overall food quality in Germany is significantly higher than in the US. Visit an Aldi or Lidl in Germany, then visit one in the US; night and day difference in food quality.

You can tell Germany cares for its population via food regulation and from what's offered; whereas, it's a toxic trash heap in America solved with drugs or paying a higher premium for healthier items. The healthier items in America should be a baseline instead of pricing out people. Feels like Americans are paying for a premium upfront or downstream via pharmaceutical/healthcare solutions.
by illuminator83 | 2026-01-12 13:28:18+00:00
I think we are just used to it. Like we are used to so many suboptimal solutions in our professional and personal lives.

I mean, look something like C++ or the name "std::vector" specifically. There are probably 4 Trillion LoC containing this code out there - in production. I'm used to it, doesn't make it good.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-12 13:29:09+00:00
> People are (and have been) taking to the streets.

For those not in the know, non-stop protests around the US have been taking place, though they are being censored (ie, not covered by mainstream news). I wouldn't know about it if not for TikTok, of all places. One can find coverage of "music festivals" there. They've been ongoing since Summer 2025.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-12 13:29:24+00:00
> Chernobyl didn't fail because of a simple case of human greed and short sightedness.

I did not say that. You are overly reducing what I said. I said at its core, if we drill down to human behaviors, that’s what it really boils down to. But that “core” lead to a corrupt system that incentivized CYA, passing the buck, or just creating enough opacity that nobody looks too closely at a problem that needed to be solved. That was how success was often measured - don’t cause problems, keep the machine ostensibly moving - and it compounded until we had a horrific accident. I’m not going to keep explaining this because you keep glossing over my words.

> You really haven't read the details of how Chernobyl came about - its truly wild.

I have. Nothing I’ve said above discounts that and you know nothing about me. I’m not going to rattle off what I’ve read.

> Your underlying argument is that we shouldn't use high tech energy and enjoy its benefits because there's a chance somewhere that someone might abuse it

Never said anything remotely like that at any point. And I never would, because I am not against nuclear energy. It is vastly superior to fossil fuels from a humane standpoint and for the environment.

Have a good rest of your week man. This isn’t productive. Go grind your axe elsewhere.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-12 13:29:32+00:00
It's the second.

Like, yes, prompting is a skill and you need to learn it for AI to do something useful but usefulness quickly falls down a cliff once you go past "greenfield implementation" or "basically example code" or "the thing done a lot so AI have a lot of reference to put from" it quickly gets into kinda sorta but not really working state.

It can still be used effectively on smaller parts of the codebase (I used it a lot basically to generate some boilerplate to run the test even if I had to rewrite a bunch of actual tests) but as whole very, very overrated by the AI peddlers.

And it probably stems from the fact that for the clueless ones it looks like amazing productivity boost because they go from "not even knowing framework" to "somewhat working app"
by brianpbeau | 2026-01-12 13:29:34+00:00
It's not just processed foods, there is also a genetic struggle as well. Looking at my family living in the US and in the EU, being overweight is a thing for a large portion of us. Even in my grandparents generation of family had issues as well, and they were all blue collar manual workers that lived before processed foods.

This is not to say you are wrong. The food supply in the US is not healthy. The bad news is that the same greed that destroyed our food will find ways to get around the ways GLP-1s work.
by 0dayman | 2026-01-12 13:29:48+00:00
I'm building ADB Remote from the sole desire to be able to do Android development without having to commit to launching Android Studio.
ADB Remote wraps common ADB and Gradle operations into a single interface. Useful for quick tasks like checking LogCat, managing devices, running builds, or testing a specific Git branch.

What it does:

File Explorer: Browse your project files and open them directly in your terminal/editor

Git Operations: Checkout and run any branch/tag directly on a device

Gradle Tasks: Run assembleDebug, installDebug, or custom tasks with streaming output

Logcat Viewer: Live filtering by level, tag, or search text

Activity Tracker: Monitor the current foreground activity

ADB Tools: Clear data, uninstall, manage permissions, input text, take screenshots

Visual Testing: Screenshot comparison tool to catch UI regressions

Terminal Integration: Open files in iTerm2, Terminal, Warp, etc.

https://saltserv.gumroad.com/l/adbremote

Feedback welcome—especially if you find yourself avoiding Android Studio for quick device tasks.
by kace91 | 2026-01-12 13:29:50+00:00
>I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other...

As far as I know, what we know as established historical fact is that:

- there indeed was a bloke

- he splintered from being a follower of another more famous bloke at the time who was executed by the romans for becoming too popular with the masses

- he preached the world was about to end (as in, in their listener's lifetime)

- he also pissed off the romans enough to be executed.

Everything else is left to guess!
by knuckleheads | 2026-01-12 13:29:50+00:00
In a world full of people who read Wikipedia first and, generalizing some, actively look for other people's opinions via online reviews and reading up about the history of a place before visiting, I feel that the more unique experience overall be to show up and actively experience the place on your own outside the opinions of others.

I've traveled a fair amount now, and I think there's value to showing up someplace and letting it show you what you should know and experience, rather than letting the internet intercede between you and the world around you. I would add a fourth category, the person who shows up and finds something cool enough by walking around that they feel compelled to then read Wikipedia about it. For me, it would beat out the other three you posit, but that's a matter of taste I think.
by snowwrestler | 2026-01-12 13:30:06+00:00
The ice grinding primarily happens at the base of glaciers, in valleys.

Above the bergschrund (the head of the glacier), erosion in high mountains is accelerated by freeze-thaw cycles. Temps above freezing obviously contribute to this. But even well below freezing ambient temps, exposed dark rock in sunlight can absorb enough energy to cause local thawing, which results in rockfall.
Show HN: Marginal IA – An open source Readwise for physical books
by Poc | 2026-01-12 13:30:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I came up with a simple web app to take digital notes from physical books. The goal is to remove the friction between reading on paper and a well-formatted Markdown file.

It uses Whisper to record voice notes that are then parsed by an LLM. The notes are saved in a database and can be exported from computer or phone into Markdown (for Obsidian) or CSV (for Notion).

It is very early days (v0.1.0). Right now, it purely captures the notes; there is no search or fancy organisation yet. I just wanted to solve the capture problem first.

It is built with Python, Streamlit, and Supabase.

You can try it here: https://marginal-ia.com/ (might reach rate limits!)

Cheers.
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 13:30:53+00:00
> Operating LLMs is completly non-deterministic.

Claiming "completely" is mapping a boolean to a float.

If you tell an LLM (with tools) to do a web search, it usually does a web search. The biggest issue right now is more at the scale of: if you tell it to create turn-by-turn directions to navigate across a city, it might create a python script that does this perfectly with OpenStreetMap data, or it may attempt to use its own intuition and get lost in a cul-de-sac.
by rcarmo | 2026-01-12 13:30:53+00:00
It still looks _exactly_ the same way as a decade ago (well, there were some CSS tweaks). I used to use it for my own projects until friction overcame my tastes, but I remember one of the things I really didn't like about it was that the web interface was _so_ dated. I love Gitea because it feels a lot like GitHub (and hence I don't have to remember where things are).

Edit: Wow, it supports markdown now? and a forum? OK...
by RobinL | 2026-01-12 13:31:08+00:00
I was curious for a UK comparison so I looked it up.

At the start of 2025, about 3% of adults in UK had used GLP-1 drugs in past year in the UK. And "most GLP-1 for weight loss in the UK is from private, rather than NHS provision" [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12781702/
by throw0101d | 2026-01-12 13:31:23+00:00
> Not sure being out in the street really does much. Gives the jack booted thugs an excuse for a little recreational violence.

"Let" them do the violence. And let the violence be filmed. And let the (currently) indifferent / apathetic folks see the violence being done.

This is one way to enact change: most folks have no interest in violence and abhor it. By showing that one side is 'pro-violence' in their policies and actions you give more power to the side(s) that are not violence.
by rufo | 2026-01-12 13:31:34+00:00
Yep, I’m aware of the (incredibly-poorly-handled) change of ownership. I’ve been using it through a SetApp[1] subscription, and they stayed on the pre-acquisition version for quite a while; long enough that enough details came out about the new owner and I felt _relatively_ okay with continuing to use it after it got updates, especially going through another party. The Tahoe issues are making me rethink that heavily now - but the alternatives I briefly looked at when I upgraded to Tahoe all seemed incredibly lacking in one way or another, and I haven’t wanted to blow up my menu bar yet again :/

[1]: https://setapp.com/
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-12 13:31:50+00:00
Yeah I think Anthropic has the "right" to do this. That's fine.

But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why people might want to do this (use their Max membership with OpenCode etc instead).

People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens or something. That isn't possible.

They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality, has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it works.

I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction related bugs that took them 3 months to fix...

Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do it.

If you want to own the market and have complete control at the tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at their disposal ... they absolutely could. But they're not.
by mpyne | 2026-01-12 13:32:42+00:00
As a specific example of this, the U.S. 18F team had helped the Forest Service a decade ago with implementing a requirement to help people get a permit to cut down a Christmas tree.

Although there was a software component for the backend, the thing that the actual user ended up with was a printed-out form rather than a mobile app or QR code. This was a deliberate design decision (https://greacen.com/media/guides/2019/02/12/open-forest-laun...), not due to a limitation of software.
by yostrovs | 2026-01-12 13:32:51+00:00
It seems like these days most places in Earth have become simply different versions of each other. How people dress, what they eat, what they know, their interests, and other such things are very similar almost wherever you go.
Maybe traveling to central Africa or North Korea, or other very remote areas, would be radically different, but most travelers go to places where cell phones work and a portion of the public speaks English. Now traveling to another country is how traveling to another city was 60 years ago.
by calpaterson | 2026-01-12 13:32:55+00:00
> fruit is significantly more expensive than snacks

This is a commonly repeated claim but it's usually not true. Fruit is, in fact, pretty cheap:

In the US, bananas average $1.68/kilo: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

A kilo is usually ~6 bananas. So a banana costs maybe 28c on average. Find a cost-competitive ultra-processed snack for the calories and satiety that a banana provides. Healthy eating might not is cheap but junk food, specifically, is not usually a cost optimisation.
by utopiah | 2026-01-12 13:33:03+00:00
Eh... well yes CS is not cheap but also... CS is Mouser. They got acquired 7 years ago https://www.crowdsupply.com/announcements/crowd-supply-has-b... .

You can buy the exact same products if they have enough in stock on either platform so price should be about the same e.g. https://www.crowdsupply.com/mouser-electronics and the opposite https://eu.mouser.com/manufacturer/crowd-supply/

They might have big margins on generic products but nothing obvious to me. FWIW bought uSDR with antennas just last month.
by efortis | 2026-01-12 13:33:11+00:00
I'm experimenting with recreating the whole DOM tree like this:

function render() {
restoreFocus(() =>
document.body.replaceChildren(App()))
}

function App() {
return (
createElement('div', { className: 'App' },
createElement('h1', null, 'Hello, World')))
}

function createElement(tag, props, ...children) {
const elem = document.createElement(tag)
for (const [k, v] of Object.entries(props || {}))
if (k === 'ref') v.elem = elem
else if (k === 'style') Object.assign(elem.style, v)
else if (k.startsWith('on')) elem.addEventListener(k.slice(2).toLowerCase(), ...[v].flat())
else if (k in elem) elem[k] = v
else elem.setAttribute(k, v)
elem.append(...children.flat().filter(Boolean))
return elem
}

`restoreFocus` is here:

https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton/blob/main/src/client/...

Results so far:

Rendering the whole DOM tree (instead of VDOMs) is a fast process. The slow part is attaching (committing) elements to the doc. For example, I have a test of 20,000 elements which takes <30ms to render, while attaching them takes 120ms.

Since the performance is mainly bound to the commit phase, with a DOM merging library, or hopefully, if we get a native API such as `document.replaceChildren(...App(), { merge: true })`, this approach could be better.

Caveats:

Although it restores focus, that's not the only thing we need to preserve, we also need to preserve scroll position and cursor position.

So to work around that, I still have to step out fully declarative, by just replacing the part that changed. For example, here I had to do manually mutate the DOM:

https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton/blob/main/src/client/...
by devilbunny | 2026-01-12 13:33:25+00:00
I've known several users of GLP1's. None ever paid more than $600/mo for them once the "patient assistance" programs started, and even in the very earliest days the prices I heard were never more than about $1100 if paid in cash.

So, while they are very expensive, your understanding is not reflective of the situation on the ground.
by u_sama | 2026-01-12 13:33:59+00:00
I think there is argument to be made that the path of least resistance is very different in the US, Europe and Asia. I think maybe by living abroad you have adapted by default to a path (shaped by the environment) to eat more healthy.

In the US I heard there is now parity in terms of quality products, but maybe culture takes some time to adapt to such environments.
by danparsonson | 2026-01-12 13:35:03+00:00
Agreed - as I see it, it's akin to the transitions from machine code -> assembly language -> C -> Javascript. As time went by, knowing the deep internals of the machine became less and less necessary, even though having that knowledge still gives an engineer a useful insight into their work and often makes them better at their job. The goal remains the same - make the computer do the thing; only the mechanism changes as the tools evolve.

"-> AI" is just the next step along that journey. Maybe it will end at "-> AGI" and then humans will engage in programming mostly for the craft and the pleasure of it, like other crafts that were automated away over the ages.
by mpyne | 2026-01-12 13:35:09+00:00
> That's a poor analogy which gets repeated in every discussion: compilers are deterministic, LLMs are not.

Compilers are not used directly, they are used by human software developers who are also not deterministic.

From the perspective of an organization with a business or service-based mission, they already know how to supervise non-deterministic LLMs because they already know how to supervise non-deterministic human developers.
by jasoneckert | 2026-01-12 13:35:11+00:00
The smooth, tile-based interface of Metro/Modern UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone are underrated in my opinion. It was simple, fast, and focused on touch. While I didn't have a touch-based Windows 8 laptop or tablet at the time, I had a Windows Phone, and I enjoyed using it more than any other device I've had since.