MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blackbrokkoli | 2026-01-04 13:46:06+00:00
Variations of this are a common talking point in the self-help world, and while it's a powerful antidote against "I'm sure some day this giant thing will suddenly be easy and I'll just do it", it's not a silver bullet. Here are some counter-considerations:

- Doing anything usually involves prep work. Want to take a step? First put on your shoes (literally or figuratively, depending). If your attempted habit is 70% prep, your brain will somewhat rightfully conclude "this is stupid" fairly quickly.

- "Just do X every day for [long time period]" has an inherent falsification problem: You aren't "allowed" to argue against it until you tried it. Stopped after 2 years because you saw no change (and 5 was recommended)? You are still not allowed to argue against the strategy!

- You can actually make steps so small that they're useless. I once set out to have (at least) one github commit online per day (going for that green tile!). This led to my brain finding hacks like rephrasing one sentence of an old blog post. Doing that for 20 days is way less effective than one single coding session, at 20 times the emotional cost.

- Doing something daily for a long time is extremely hard to achieve, especially if it's not the main thing you're doing. It's rare in the wild. You will find piano virtuosos who play piano daily, but not piano virtuosos who also go to the gym daily.
by tpdly | 2026-01-04 13:46:20+00:00
Just because LLMs are a technological innovation for "going to the gym" does not make cable machines a good metaphor. Maybe cable machines with cables made of highly variable grade hemp are comparable to LLMs-- they'll break randomly, and cause unexpected friction here and there. A cable machine still involves a human doing a thing. A forklift at the gym does the work instead.

All this fluff about targeting specific muscles etc is simply not analogous to LLMS. Maybe old-school barbells are paper files and fax machines, and cable machines are Slack, Asana, and Excel?
by yanhangyhy | 2026-01-04 13:47:08+00:00
I think what you said makes a lot of sense, and my earlier comment wasn’t very rigorous. More accurately, the most interesting thing about the United States is that it has almost stripped away all other influencing factors—no deep history, no influence from classical literature. If we set aside the atrocities committed against the Native Americans, it’s as if the country started from an untouched, resource-rich continent and rapidly evolved into the most advanced capitalist society. This makes the contrast between material wealth and the spiritual world especially stark and easy to observe.
by whalesalad | 2026-01-04 13:47:21+00:00
I’ve been using Wayland on Debian 12 since 2023. On an Apple Studio Display (5K) over thunderbolt (the built-in camera, speakers, etc work fine)

I screen share and video call with Slack and Google Meet.

I use alacritty/zsh/tmux as my terminal. I use chromium as my browser, vscode and sublime text as code editors.

Slack, Spotify, my studio mic, my Scarlett 2i2, 10gbe networking, thunderbolt, Logitech unifying receiver…. Literally everything “just works” and has been a joy to use.

Only issues I’ve ever faced have been forcing an app to run native Wayland not xwayland (varies from app to app but usually a cli flag needed) and Bluetooth pairing with my Sony noise canceling which is unrelated to Wayland. Periodically I get into a dance where it won’t pair, but most of the time it pairs fine.
by andy99 | 2026-01-04 13:47:46+00:00
This similar thing was posted a few weeks ago, and also apparently two years ago, glaze also from uchicago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364338

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224219

We’ve seen this arms race before and know who wins. It’s all snake oil imo
Show HN: HireProof – An AI tool to align resumes with job descriptions
by jadibdev | 2026-01-04 13:48:09+00:00
Hi HN — I’m a solo builder experimenting with how far one person can go using AI tools.

HireProof is a resume alignment tool that helps job seekers match their resumes to specific job descriptions while staying readable to both ATS systems and humans.

I built this end-to-end myself (product, backend, frontend, deployment) using Next.js, Supabase, and AI models for analysis and generation.

This started as a personal experiment to test whether a single person could ship and operate a production SaaS without a traditional engineering team.

I’m especially interested in feedback on:
• whether the problem is real
• whether the approach makes sense
• what feels confusing or unnecessary

Happy to answer questions and share details about the build.
by shlant | 2026-01-04 13:48:22+00:00
I know "try this other tool" is probably an eye-roll-worthy response, but as someone who's not a programmer but is in IT and has to write some scripts every once in a while and has a lot of AI-heavy dev friends - all I've ever heard about Copilot is that it's one of the worst.

I recently used Claude for a personal project and it was a fairly smooth process. Everyone I know who does a lot of programming with AI uses Claude mostly.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-04 13:48:30+00:00
Well, probably trillion dollar one by now; It's not just the null pointer bugs that waste time, it's the fact language is designed around them that's the problem

> null pointer dereferences are empirically the easiest class of invalid memory addresses to catch at runtime, and are the least common kind of invalid memory addresses that happen in memory unsafe languages.

and yet I still see them popping up in memory-safe languages

> In statically typed compiled manual-memory managed languages, it’s not as much of a problem empirically compared to the set of invalid memory address problems, of which most of them are solved with a different mindset.

that's moving goalpost away from original claim; it wasn't "billion dollar mistake" in context of ALGOL, it was one because oh so many other languages, static or dynamic, managed or unmanaged, copied that behavior
by jdiff | 2026-01-04 13:48:32+00:00
As I said, p2p benefits even you right now, today, on IPv4, despite your unwillingness to acknowledge it. I've never even owned an IPv6 address in my life, so this mental image you've painted of myself and of our interaction is quite inaccurate.

You've taken this conversation quite far off its rails. This started due to your objection about phone calls not benefiting from P2P connections, which as I said are one narrow use of the overall technology. P2P connections are still useful. Nobody's blocking China. China connects peers, too.

I'd also like you to clarify something for me, earlier you mentioned P2P doesn't work, specifically for calls, specifically for your country, because all calls need to be transported through the FSB. This isn't any sort of accusation, I fully believe you are in China, but I'm curious what the FSB has to do with you in that case?
by utopiah | 2026-01-04 13:48:40+00:00
> not touching anything remotely related to Microsoft, even if it's a properly licensed open source, is way better and even some GNU projects have no issue with it.

For sure those are important but what actually drivers a project are accepted COMMITS and GOVERNANCE. If Microsoft puts the right license sure anybody can fork it if somehow the project goes in the wrong direction... but if most contributors are Microsoft employees doing those commits, or refusing others, what will happen? The license or how "better" the project is won't help. If KDE does not trust Microsoft (one of the largest corporations who is selling proprietary software since its inception and still do this day) then even if the "better" solution is from Microsoft then strategically KDE is right to avoid it.
by msukhareva | 2026-01-04 13:48:48+00:00
I built an architecture that enables continuous learning for open-weight models.

The "curse" of LLMs is the knowledge cut-off. RAG is just a band-aid. Google's "Titans" memory solves this, but costs millions to train.

I built a "Grafted" version on a single desk-side GPU (€4.4k). I attached a trainable memory adapter to a frozen Qwen-2.5-0.5B model.

The Result: It beat the vanilla model even when the model had the full context on the challenging Babilong benchmark.

Vanilla Qwen (seeing context): 34.0% Accuracy

Grafted Titans (memory retrieval): 44.7% Accuracy

My memory module effectively acts as a denoising filter, outperforming the model's native attention mechanisms.

The Specs:

Hardware: Single Nvidia DGX Spark Blackwell.

Training Time: ~7 days.

Output: Plug-and-play adapter for open weights.

This proves we don't need industrial clusters to build AI that remembers.
AGI is marketed as Spearman's 'g', but architected like Guilford's model
by jatinkk | 2026-01-04 13:49:40+00:00
I am not a tech expert and not working in the tech industry, so this is an outsider's perspective.
The marketing around AGI promises Spearman’s g: a general, fluid intelligence that can adapt to new, unseen problems.
But the engineering—specifically "Mixture of Experts" and distinct modules—looks exactly like J.P. Guilford’s Structure of Intellect. Guilford viewed intelligence as a collection of ~150 specific, independent abilities.
The issue isn't just about how these parts are stitched together. The issue I see is: what happens when the model faces a problem that doesn't fit into one of its pre-defined parts? How will they ensure that the output doesn't look fragmented when the architecture relies on switching between specialized "experts" rather than using a unified reasoning core?
A collection of specific skills (Guilford) is not the same as the ability to adapt to anything (Spearman). By optimizing for specific components, we are building a system that is great at known tasks but may fundamentally lack the fluid reasoning needed for true general intelligence.
I am not anti-AI; I simply feel we might need to relook at our approach.We can't expect the right destination with the wrong highway.
by dijit | 2026-01-04 13:50:01+00:00
I made the jump to Hugo too (from a managed service: svbtle) a long time ago, but I'll be really honest...

I regret it.

I decided to use an off-the-shelf theme, but it didn't quite meet the needs and I forked it; as it so happens Hugo breaks userland relatively often and a complex theme like the one I have requires a lot of maintenance. Like.. a lot.

Now I can't really justify the time investment of fixing it so I just don't post anymore, the site won't even compile. In theory I could use an old version of Hugo, but I have no idea when it broke, so how far do I go back?

So, advice: submit the binary you used to generate the site to source control. I know git isn't the best at binary files, but I promise you'll thank me at some point.
by mettamage | 2026-01-04 13:50:16+00:00
Location: Amsterdam
Remote: Hybrid or remote
Willing to relocate: Yes
Areas of expertise: (automated) growth marketing, creating MVPs, teaching technical topics to lay people
Technologies: I've used nearly all of them
Technology examples: x86-64 reverse engineering, ReactJS/NodeJS web dev, Unity3D/C# game dev
Résumé/CV: on request
Email: in my profile

I can also be a "normal" full-stack engineer but I bring much more value when my work is interdisciplinary. So far, I've noticed that this happens when I'm a data analyst/software engineer hybrid in a marketing team, while collaborating with marketing professionals.

My academic background is a mix between psychology and computer science. I love the intersection of it.

I have EU work authorization but can also work remote for US companies on a freelance basis through the US/EU agency that hires me for freelance assignments.
by KomoD | 2026-01-04 13:50:46+00:00
> because I was tired of timer apps that require accounts, downloads, or complex setup

Does your phone and PC not have a clock app preinstalled?

And fun fact: this works with Google too

https://www.google.com/search?q=25min timer

https://www.google.com/search?q=countdown to 17:00

https://www.google.com/search?q=countdown to 2026-01-05

(or since most have Google as their default search engine, just write "25min timer", "countdown to 17:00", etc in the url bar)
by jdiff | 2026-01-04 13:51:11+00:00
If there was drug trafficking, why has the administration failed to provide any evidence of it on the many boats they've destroyed and the many lives they've taken for it? Instead, the limited evidence we have points at the boats being entirely unrelated to drug trafficking.

If the administration had evidence, it would be in its best interest to have shared it already. Instead they keep on pushing points they can barely articulate and that conflict with known information.
by 24hrmvp | 2026-01-04 13:51:13+00:00
My competition is not a paper map because people who are blind cannot see a paper map.

Are those fire escape plans printed in multiple languages for the amount of people who show up to a hospital and do not speak english?

Why is it that the healthcare industry is losing so much money in staff hours to manual wayfinding assistance and it's a known problem?

Did you know that indoor navigation assistance qualifies now as patient experience improvements - meaning hospitals actually MAKE money by improving wayfinding within the facility?

Rather naive take you have...
by pzep | 2026-01-04 13:51:35+00:00
I built this 4 days before my wedding.
We'd spent the week moving Post-its around the kitchen table, arguing about who should sit where. Excel wasn't cutting it either - we couldn’t see it. Everything online had fixed table sizes, rigid templates, and $200 price tags. Nothing matched our actual venue and most importantly a bad experience wasn’t going to stop the arguing. PRO tip, its not the who should sit where that makes the fuss, its the “why haven’t you moved this person yet - are you ignoring me” that makes the fuss - especially after hours of planning.

So I started building. To my now wife's dismay.

The technical bits:
1. Collaboration faster than Google Docs
Most collaborative editors wait for server round-trips. We don't.
Drag events broadcast client-to-client via Ably at ~30fps (33ms throttle). You see tables move during the drag. Server broadcasts confirm final position but never block the UI.
The trick is a hybrid optimistic model with version-based reconciliation:
- Each element has _version, _versionNonce, _updated
- Higher version wins
- Same version? Lower nonce wins (deterministic tie-breaker)
- Currently-dragged element always wins locally
This means two people can drag the same table simultaneously and the system resolves it without conflicts or last-write-wins chaos. The reconciliation code is ~100 lines.
We also skip broadcasts entirely when you're the only one in the session (solo optimisation) and compress large scenes with gzip via pako to stay under Ably's 65KB limit. 200-guest weddings generate ~50KB of scene data.
2. Custom touch and drag system from scratch
Started with react-beautiful-dnd. Ripped it out. The problem: it's designed for lists, not infinite canvas with zoom.
Built our own on native pointer events + requestAnimationFrame:
* Direct DOM updates during drag: We bypass React reconciliation entirely—write to element.style.transform directly via RAF. React only sees the final position on drop.
* Touch hierarchy: Canvas captures two-finger gestures (pan), tables capture single-finger (drag). No conflicts.
* Zoom-adjusted coordinates: Divide delta by zoom level. Sounds obvious, took embarrassingly long to get right.
* Haptic feedback: navigator.vibrate(50) on drag start. Small thing, feels native.
Result: 60fps on iPad (our biggest use case). The gesture detection alone is ~250 lines across useTouchGestures, useTableDragPWA, and useCanvasPan.

3. Version fields that don't pollute the database
In-memory versioning with underscore-prefixed fields (_version, _versionNonce, _updated). stripVersionFields() removes them before persistence. No schema changes, no migrations, no cleanup jobs.
Stack: Next.js 15 (App Router), React 19, Ably, Prisma + Postgres, Stripe, AWS Amplify.
Pricing: Free to try (no signup), £8 one-time to save, £25/month for event managers.
Traction: 500+ paying customers in first few weeks, organic only/
Honest limitations: Mobile web is functional but not great.

Happy to go deeper on the WebSocket architecture, touch gesture hierarchy, or the finer points of wedding seating diplomacy.
by maximinus_thrax | 2026-01-04 13:51:50+00:00
Russian troll operations mirror the narcissist prayer short of 'they deserve it' + whataboutism

- There are no such monuments in all of Russia

- If there are, they raised by some guy in some insignificant villages

- If there aren't in insignificant villages, they're in next to communist landmarks which makes it ok

- bUt wHaT AbOuT UkRaiNe reNaMinG CeNtRal aVeNuE In CapItal!??!??!?!??!??!??
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-01-04 13:51:51+00:00
> My hunch is that the NATO would be dissolved, and everyone would have to team up against the aggressor.

And do what exactly against the US? You can’t invade it, geographically they can easily defend Greenland from any invasion force. And speaking of an invasion force, how many countries do you know that can deploy an expeditionary force strong enough to take on the US?
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-04 13:51:55+00:00
> ...runtime casting...

...what else is a select on a tagged union than 'runtime casting' though. You have a single 'sum type' which you don't know what concrete type it actually is at runtime until you look at the tag and 'cast' to the concrete type associated with the tag. The fact that some languages have syntax sugar for the selection doesn't make the runtime overhead magically disappear.
by utopiah | 2026-01-04 13:52:12+00:00
> serious app will need C++

What does this even mean? This is not 1980 or whatever, even a device the price of a coffee (RPi Zero ~$10) can handle a LOT, like an entire OS. I'm not saying resources don't matter but for most people doing normal computing (so not weather simulation, 4K video editing of 4hrs long content, 3D modelling of high res models...) pretty much anything in any language is equivalent.
by stanac | 2026-01-04 13:52:53+00:00
I was thinking the same thing. Apple and Google can start (as tech companies) to add signatures to images. As long as private key doesn't leak we are good. And each manufacturer can have different cert issued by higher authority e.g. Google, so it can be revoked when it leaks. They could include digital camera manufacturers (sony, nicon, canon, ...) and define a standard. Signature can be a meta tag based on hash of the image.

This would limit authenticity to images taken by official software.
by intended | 2026-01-04 13:53:49+00:00
Wouldn’t it end up being some form of nuisance proof? Introducing friction to create verification check points or examine and establish the chain of evidence?

But that will only matter for highly legal things or important things. Everything else will be too much of a bother to follow information hygiene.

It’s like we’ve introduced an information weed, whose only goal is to create content that matches our dopamine receptors. Maybe our instincts will shift to assuming any shiny or eye catching content is fruit of the weed? Designed to attract us?
by noduerme | 2026-01-04 13:53:50+00:00
>>what happens now?

I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the response.

The overall intellectual capacity sinks to the point where everything collaboratively built falls apart.

The machines don't need AGI to take over, they just need to wait for us to disintegrate out of sheer laziness, sloth and self-righteous.... /okay.

there was always a needy component to Stack Overflow. "I have to pass an exam, what is the best way to write this algorithm?" and shit like that. A lazy component. But to be honest, it was the giving of information which forced you to think, and research, and answer correctly, which made systems like S.O. worthwhile, even if the questioners were lazy idiots sometimes. And now, the apocalypse. Babel. The total confusion of all language. No answer which can be trusted, no human in the loop, not even a smart AI, just a babbling set of LLMs repeating Stack Overflow answers from 10 years ago. That's the fucking future.
by immibis | 2026-01-04 13:54:48+00:00
Wayland has a philosophy of "every frame is perfect", which means fixing every race condition. However, X11 doesn't have this philosophy. If the window manager is slow and doesn't respond to a notification that a window has been resized, drawing the new window content over the old borders is the correct thing to do. What sense does it make to freeze the whole display just for a window border?

Similarly, tearing gets pixels to the screen faster.
by mariusor | 2026-01-04 13:54:49+00:00
> For obvious reasons this was never going to happen.

Well, I guess this is the crux of the problem, and for open-source enthusiasts like me this is not obvious at all. What we can surmise is that Nvidia refused to collaborate, therefore they were the party to blame for the status of their video cards not being supported as well as others' vendors on linux.
by jaccola | 2026-01-04 13:55:15+00:00
For learning 3dgs (and its derivatives) I would recommend grabbing the original 3d Gaussian Splatting paper + repository and going through it and using an LLM to ask many questions.

LLMs aren't that great at explaining concepts a lot of the time so when you get stuck there, google around and learn that subtopic. E.g. you will come across "Jacobian" that you may or may not have seen before, but you can search Youtube and find a great Khan Academy/3b1b collab explaining it.

Get the code running also, play around with parameters, try to implement the whole thing from scratch, making sure you intuitively understand each part with the above method.

Obviously time scales vary for everyone, that having been said: I'd guess if you have a decent technical background, are OK feeling uncomfortable with the maths for a while (it is all understandable after a bit of pain), and are willing to keep plugging for a few hours a day you will have a very decent understanding in 6mo, and probably be "cutting edge" in a year or so (obviously the learning never ends, it is an active area of research after all!)
by atombender | 2026-01-04 13:55:34+00:00
I would argue that Go is the closest spiritual descendant of Wirth's languages. If you changed braces into BEGIN/END and so on, it would look a ton like Oberon or Modula 2/3.

It adds features (goroutines, channels, slices), changes some (modules become packages), the generics are a little different,
and it eschews some of Wirth's pragmatic type safety ideas (like range types). It even has ":=" for assignment.

The general spirt is the same, I think: Small language, simple compiler (compared to many other languages), "dumb" type system, GC, engineering-focused rather than-type theory-focused.
by stocksinsmocks | 2026-01-04 13:55:39+00:00
Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.

Hey, can you show me the log files?

Sure here you go. Please help!

Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!
by didgeoridoo | 2026-01-04 13:56:01+00:00
Part of the problem seems to be that he’s trying to derive a large portion of philosophy from first principles and low-n observations.

This stuff has been well-trodden by Dennett, Frankfurt, Davidson, and even Hume. I don’t see any engagement with the centuries (maybe millennia) of thought on this subject, so it’s difficult to determine whether he thinks he’s the first to notice these challenges or what new angle he’s bringing to the table.