MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oblio | 2026-01-12 10:45:14+00:00
> but I could have gone with Nvidia and had much less issues (for double the cost, dual Blackwell's vs quad Radeon W7900s for 192GB of VRAM).

> If you spend twice what I did and go Nvidia you should have nearly no issues running any models.

I goodled what a Radeon W7900 costs and the result on Amazon was €2800 a piece. You say "quad" so that's €11200 (and that's just the GPUs).

You also say "spend twice what I did", which would put the total hardware costs at ~€25000 total.

Excuse me, but this is peak HN detachment from the experience of most people. You propose spending the cost of a car on hardware.

The average person will just pay Anthropic €20 or €100 per month and call it a day, for now.
by InfinityByTen | 2026-01-12 10:46:11+00:00
I am probably in the camp where I've found myself ovewhelmed with the amount of information about networks and I'm an alleged software engineer (without formal training in CS albeit).

The 10 loc is not a valid measure.

`sudo rm -rf /` is a 1 line of code. It's not the lines that are hard to wrap your brain around, it's the implication of the lines that really what we are talking about.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-12 10:47:32+00:00
Never heard of Bartender before, seems to be this:

> superpowered your menu bar, giving you total control over your menu bar items, what's displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them.

Which also, for some reason has permission to record your desktop and recently had a change of owner? I'd be reformatting my computer so quickly if I found this out about software on my computer...
by Altern4tiveAcc | 2026-01-12 10:48:08+00:00
> You know good and well that what is being discussed is the _use_ of LLMs

Not the person you're replying to, but I've found that some people do argue against LLMs themselves (as in, the tech, not just the usage). Specially in humanities/arts cycles which seem to have a stronger feeling of panic towards LLMs.

Clarifying which one you're talking about can save a lot of typing/talking some times.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-12 10:48:46+00:00
They are also completely unable to build any new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 13 years late on a 5 years project and 7x over budget.

Their proposed EPR2 fleet requires 11 cents/kWh and interest free loans. Sum freely. With the first reactor coming online in 2038, if everything goes according to plan.

New built nuclear power in 2026 just doesn't square with reality when the costs and timelines are factored in.
by Festro | 2026-01-12 10:49:05+00:00
This further exposes just how pointless and ill-thought out the Online Safety Act was in the UK. It does nothing to actually limit harm at the source, and empower the UK's public body's to take immediate action.

Ironic that the minister who spearheaded that awful bill (Peter Kyle) as Tech minister is now being the government spokesperson for this debacle as Business Minister. The UK needs someone who knows how tech and business works to tackle this, and that's not Peter Kyle.

A platform suspension in the UK should have been swift, with clear terms for how X can be reinstated. As much as it appears Musk is doubling down on letting Grok produce CSAM as some form of free speech, the UK government should treat it as a limited breach or bug that the vendor needs to resolve, whilst taking action to block the site causing harm until they've fixed it.

Letting X and Grok continue to do harm, and get free PR, is just the worst case scenario for all involved.
Show HN: Tokyo Land Price AI – RAG App to Explore Tokyo Land Prices
by spider-hand | 2026-01-12 10:49:10+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small RAG application that lets you ask questions about Tokyo land prices and explore them on an interactive map. I mainly built this because I wanted to try making something with an interactive map and real data, and I found Japan’s open land price data interesting to work with.

I’d really appreciate any feedback. I’m just an amateur in data science and machine learning and I feel there’s still a lot of room to improve the accuracy, so I’d especially love to hear any suggestions on how the RAG part could be improved.

Source code: https://github.com/spider-hand/tokyo-landprice-rag
by Applejinx | 2026-01-12 10:49:23+00:00
No no. The thing is, the Monty Hall guy is responding to YOUR choice. So if he has to open a door where you fail, it's a response to what he knows of your choice, so HE knows what YOU chose and is not only revealing the remaining losing choice but also the winning choice. Call it a coin flip except for he always has to call tails.

Therefore your choice can either be cadillac or goat, he cannot choose cadillac and has to show a goat, so the remaining option you DIDN'T highlight is that much more likely to be cadillac because it could've been either, but he doesn't get to pick randomly, he had to show which one was NOT the winning one.

Hence the result. And since it started out as one pick of three, he responds to you and then you respond to the added information by switching and that's where the 66% odds come from: two moves each responding to each other.
by abielefeld | 2026-01-12 10:49:37+00:00
Hi, Augustin here, one of the presenters.

As other commenters pointed out, the electronics industry is quite big in Europe, on paper it generates a lot of money and sustains a lot of jobs. The issue is a bit more complex, and you point it out when you say people around you are old and old-fashioned.

Like I said in the talk: We used to laugh at the chinese products for how low quality they were 20 years ago, who's laughing now?

I don't believe europeans are unable to turn around this situation in as many years as a matter of fact, it's my core beliefs: That together with other young motivated people we'll build our own little electronics industry for ourselves, among ourselves and people who believe we can one day have theye crazy future factories in Europe.

Yes it's crazy hard, but like you I believe things will get sufficiently bad that more will see that the effort is worth it.

You should check out the 39c3 talk from Kliment, he understands this issue so well, and I'll paraphrase him here: Electronics is dominated by old dudes, the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more. But by making an effort to give people who are starting a good experience, we can turn this around.

Honestly there is no worker shortage, in my immediate contacts, I already know 2 or 3 people who are ready to work my production line: They have the smarts, skills, and time. They are unemployed because no one would respect them, and give them a meaningful mission like we would, and it's quite clear this is quite a widespread feeling among people.
by wiether | 2026-01-12 10:50:03+00:00
To me the "unlocked" is just another hyperbole used by some people, partly because they lack initial knowledge, partly because its click-bait.

The way I understand it is more like "without the ease of use provided by X, even though I could have done it, I wouldn't have done it because it would require time and energy that I'm not willing to put in".

Since we're talking about self-hosting, to me the main focus is not skill set but time and energy.

There's the same debate around NAS products like Synology that are sold with a high markup, meanwhile "every SWE should be able to make their own NAS using recycled hardware".

Sure.
And I did all of this:
- homemade NAS setup
- homemade network setup
- homemade mediaplayer setup

It was fun and I learned a lot.

But I moved to some more convenient tools so that I can just use them as reliable services, and focus on other experimentations/tinkering.

To be honest, the fact that you insist that Plex is just "file sharing" that can be replaced by torrents makes me think you either don't know what Plex actually is, or you are acting in bad faith.
by runarberg | 2026-01-12 10:50:30+00:00
> You’d need a very no-true-Scotsmanned definition of intelligence to be able exclude LLMs.

The thing is, that intelligence is an anthropocentric term. And has always been defined in a no-true-Scotsman way. When we describe the intelligence of other species we do so in extremely human terms (except for dogs). For example we consider dolphins smart when we see them play with each other, talk to each other, etc. We consider chimpanzees when we see them use a tool, row a boat, etc. We don’t consider an ant colony smart when they optimize a search for food sources, only because humans don’t normally do that. The only exception here are dogs, who we consider smart when they obey us more easily.

Personally, my take on this is that intelligence is not a useful term in philosophy nor science. Describing a behavior as intelligent is kind of like calling a small creature a bug. It is useful in our day to day speech, but fails when we want to build any theory around it.
by auggierose | 2026-01-12 10:51:01+00:00
That would indeed be annoying, but I doubt it is the case. If you only consider this scenario, it cannot be distinguished by conditional probability from the case that the host knows, and so the math should stay the same.

As usual, the problem is not an incredibly difficult problem, but just a failure to state the problem clearly and correctly.

Try to write a computer program that approximates the probability, and you'll see what I mean.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-12 10:51:09+00:00
YaCy does a pretty good job, and is free, and you can run yourself, so the quality/experience is pretty much up to you. Paired together with a local GPT-OSS-120b with reasoning_effort set to high, I'm getting pretty good results. Validated with questions I do know the answer to, and seems alright although could be better of course, still getting better results out of GPT5.2 Pro which I guess is to be expected.
by abielefeld | 2026-01-12 10:51:43+00:00
What is really interesting is that worker pay in tier 1 cities in China (e.g. Shenzen) actually is higher than in EU countries such as Slovenia, Bulgaria or Czech republic. Incidentally these countries have a large number of EMS, and we know of quite a few startups that quickly grew production capability to be able to provide electronics assembly.
by morshu9001 | 2026-01-12 10:52:32+00:00
I swear Apple broke the iPhone keyboard permanently in like 2015. I don't know what it is, but I can't type reliably, to the point where I call instead of texting. And the rare times I go back to use that iPhone 5 in my car for music, it's so easy to type, so I'm not just remembering wrongly.
by bloak | 2026-01-12 10:52:32+00:00
> the world's most popular OS

Wikipedia claims that Android "has the largest installed base of any operating system in the world", if you're going to measure popularity that way.

(Of course it's hard to know how to define an OS. Is Android a kind of Linux? Are the various things called "Windows" or "MacOS" to be regarded as different versions of the same OS just because marketing people decided to use the same name? If not, how much similarity in code or design is required?)
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-12 10:52:36+00:00
Yeah but I would think that is still survivable, unless it comes like that one dumb movie in which the ice age is a super quick one and everything happens in the space of 24 hours approximately.

Of course I'm thinking survivable with the magic of "technology" and maybe I'm adding wishful thinking into this science fiction scenario here, but I'm not sure if the result of the new Ice Age will be the same as the last one.
by fbouvier | 2026-01-12 10:52:47+00:00
Hi, I am Francis, founder of Lightpanda. We wrote a full article explaining why we choose Zig over Rust or C++, if you are interested: https://lightpanda.io/blog/posts/why-we-built-lightpanda-in-...

Our goal is to build a headless browser, rather than a general purpose browser like Servo or Chrome. It's already available if you would like to try it: https://lightpanda.io/docs/open-source/installation
by aprilfoo | 2026-01-12 10:53:48+00:00
That's really interesting, but i'm wondering if this is as rational as it looks.

> we are going to be kinda of obsolete in what defined us, as a profession: the ability to write code

Is it a fact, really? I don't think "writing code" is a defining factor, maybe it's a prerequisite, as being able to write words hardly defines "a novelist".

Anyway, prompt writing skills might become obsolete quite soon. So the main question might be to know which trend of technological evolution to pick and when, in order not to be considered obsolete. A crystal ball might still be more relevant than LLMs for that.
by DjangoReinhardt | 2026-01-12 10:53:48+00:00
I wish to gently but firmly disagree.

The thousands of $$ on audio software are spent because they actually provide the exact output needed. Think of them as a precision-tooled machine part critical to the production flow in a factory. Sure, you can replace it with a cheaper alternative but the cheaper part will likely have rough edges and the errors caused by those rough edges will cascade into your final production output...
by Ragnarork | 2026-01-12 10:54:14+00:00
This reasoning is flawed in my opinion, because at the end of the day, the software still has to be paid for (for the people that want/need to make a living out of it), and customers wallet are finite.

Our attention is also a finite resource (24h a day max). We already see how this has been the cause for the enshittificaton of large swathes of software like social media where grabbing the attention for a few seconds more drives the main innovation...
by Traubenfuchs | 2026-01-12 10:54:24+00:00
You can't talk about terrain modification without mentioning "From Dust", which did it at a grand scale... 15 (!) years ago.

It allowed you to shape terrain with sand, water and lava. So terrain modification PLUS fluid simulation!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYUU3dv7WC4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Dust
by arethuza | 2026-01-12 10:54:27+00:00
I remember reading a von Däniken book when I was quite young, 9 or so, I think and being absolutely fascinated. Then after a while I realised it was pretty much all made up and what has stayed with me ever since was my blazing righteous anger that someone could make up a pile of stuff and put it in a book and claim it was true. That feeling has stayed with me far long than anything from the book itself.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-12 10:54:39+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Bithynia ?

„Die Partei ist kein Internat für höhere Töchter, sondern eine Kampforganisation.“

Q. What do woke parents and maga parents have in common when their kid Silas wants to be called "she/her"?

A. "Oh my god ... we no longer have a son!"
by habinero | 2026-01-12 10:54:48+00:00
Just say the model uses the files to seed token state. Anthropomorphizing the thing is silly.

And no, you don't skip the documentation because you "think you can just remember everything". It's a tradeoff.

Documentation is not free to maintain (no, not even the AI version) and bad or inaccurate documentation is worse than none, because it wastes everyone's time.

You build a mental map of how the code is structured and where to find what you need, and you build a mental model of how the system works. Understanding, not memorization.

When prod goes down you really don't wanna be faffing about going "hey Alexa, what's a database index".
by kace91 | 2026-01-12 10:55:18+00:00
the demand for software has increased. The demand for software engineers has increased proportionally, because we were the only source of software. This correlation might no longer hold.

Depending on how the future shapes up, we may have gone from artisans to middlemen, at which point we're only in the business of added value and a lot of coding is over.

Not the Google kind of coding, but the "I need a website for my restaur1ant" kind, or the "I need to agregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind. Anything where you'd accept cheap and disposable. Perhaps even the traditional startup, if POCs are vibecoded and engineers are only introducer later.

Those are huge businesses, even if they are not present in the HN bubble.
by tgv | 2026-01-12 10:56:15+00:00
C#, or rather .NET, is pretty decent. I rate it lower than the macOS frameworks for UI development, but it brings a lot of functionality, which has been refined since the days of Visual Basic. Linux simply doesn't have that development effort. Completely understandable, but it holds Linux back, in particular on the desktop.

If you're not convinced: look at the difference between desktop Linux and Android. Although Android Studio seems to be a bit of a disaster nowadays, there's a lot of development support for Android, and it shows in the 1.6 million apps that have been built for it. Android has got what people crave: easy, slick, user-friendly apps, no technical hassle. It's an uphill battle, and at the same time, the focus is shifting away from desktop. So I think the year of Linux for the desktop will likely never come.
by abielefeld | 2026-01-12 10:57:36+00:00
Hey, original talk speaker here. I agree with this sentiment, we are very geared for high-quality, high-spec industrial designs in Europe.

CE for simple consumer products is actually not so pricy, and things are moving very quickly there in the right direction. We work with Smander.com for compliance, but there are others who offer it for cheap. The more expensive measurements are EMI, but in Germany universities will let you use their chamber at low cost or even for free if you are a small business or single person.

Honestly the problem with CE is misinformation most of all. It does not need to be complicated: Cheap standards can be bought from evs.ee for 30€, a couple of hours of a CE consultant cost is only a couple hundred, getting close to a university costs only time...

The goals of the EU is also to simplify these regulations, and things are also moving very fast there.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-12 10:57:48+00:00
> They may give you a different result when you run the same spec through the LLM a second time.

Yes kind of, but only different results (maybe) for the things you didn't specify. If you ask for A, B and C, and the LLM automatically made the choice to implement C in "the wrong way" (according to you), you can retry but specify exactly how you want C to be implemented, and it should follow that.

Once you've nailed your "spec" enough so there isn't any ambiguity, the LLM won't have to make any choices for you, and then you'll get exactly what you expected.

Learning this process, and learning how much and what exactly you have to instruct it to do, is you building up your experience learning how to work with an LLM, and that's meaningful, and something you get better with as you practice it.
Show HN: I stopped doomscrolling (built an app for it)
by Strawhatoofy | 2026-01-12 10:58:43+00:00
I had this bad habit of picking up my phone without thinking. Mornings, breaks, late at night. Open Insta or Twitter “for a min” and boom, 30–40 mins gone. Not even fun scrolling. Just autopilot.

Tried app blockers. Tried turning off notifications. Didnt last. Blocking just made me annoyed, and I’d end up disabling it.

So I built Mindsnack.

Instead of blocking apps, it lets you binge small concepts around life skills. If something actually interests you, you can go deeper and take short lessons. The idea is to replace empty scrolling with something that at least feels intentional.

Tech stack is pretty simple:

React Native

Node backend

Postgres

A backend agent that generates short courses

Didnt build this to be more productive. Built it because I was tired of losing time without choosing it.

I still scroll sometimes. I’m planning to make it more interactive and engaging over time.

Curious to hear from others:

have you used any app to stop doomscrolling?
what worked or didnt?
would replacing the habit work better than blocking?

Happy to hear honest thoughts, even if this sounds dumb
by bamboozled | 2026-01-12 11:00:23+00:00
Meteorologists, however, also add that there have been heavy snowfalls during some winters in recent years, but these have been isolated, extreme events rather than the evenly distributed precipitation of past winters.

Anecdotal but this is not dissimilar to how Japan has been lately with snowfall in the northern regions. It was once 30cm a night, almost every night during winter, fairly stable and predictable weather, we're still getting a lot of snow most winters, but it seems to happen in these major storm events now. Not consistent manageable snowfall, but more like a snow bomb goes off once a week, it gets warm, quite a lot of melt occurs and then boom, hit again. It's actually. taking some getting used too and requires adaption. It's a small thing but it makes it quite hard to plan for, and it makes life generally quite stressful.
by kristf | 2026-01-12 11:00:27+00:00
2D CAD app in Rust with WGPU.

Why? Because why not? I love CAD.

It's still very much in the early stages because it's just a side project for me, but, it is possible to draw lines and circles, copy or move them, delete, snap, create text, and a couple of other basic stuff.

https://github.com/kristof1345/easycad
by Goz3rr | 2026-01-12 11:00:51+00:00
My issue is that a large share of what he tests are Amazon products with alphabet soup brand names, where QA is likely nonexistent and the conclusions are often based on a sample size of N=1. Even if you wanted to buy the "winner", the exact same product may be sold under a different name a week later.

I also find his testing methodology inconsistent. In some cases he takes manufacturer specs at face value without actually verifying them, in others he goes out of his way to comprehensively measure things that don’t matter much (to me anyways), while skipping things that seem genuinely important (self-discharge of jump starter packs for example).

That said, he's doing this with his own time and money, and makes it available for free to anyone. A lot of this also comes down to personal preference in what you value in a test.
by morshu9001 | 2026-01-12 11:01:05+00:00
Also Gnome disappeared after 2, got replaced with Unity in Ubuntu which was a whole new ugly thing, then that got replaced with Gnome3 which is very different from Gnome2, also Xorg got deprecated...

The rare times I use my Linux desktop at work instead of just SSHing in, I'm like, why did the entire GUI change
by lelanthran | 2026-01-12 11:02:27+00:00
> Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?

Roughly 80% of the planet has an inability to change their mind regarding their religious beliefs.

In reality, there is more evidence of ancient aliens that there is of almost every other religion, and yet the people who follow religion aren't being vilified the way the ancient alien believers are.

I mean, look at your own question - do you routinely ask people (IRL and online) why they can't change their religion based on evidence?
by misja111 | 2026-01-12 11:03:48+00:00
> And the most successful people I know basically did exactly that.

Well that depends heavily on how you define successful.
Successful in life? I would tend to disagree, unless you believe that career is the only thing that counts.
But even when career is concerned: the most successful people I know went on from being developer to some high end management role. The skills that brought them there definitely did not come from hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things.
by iamrocklobster | 2026-01-12 11:04:33+00:00
Location: Portugal

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Android, Java/Kotlin, RxJava/Coroutines, XML/Compose

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelaboliveira/

Email: migueloliveira1794@gmail.com

I am a Portuguese Android developer with 9years of experience, in different work contexts (startup to large companies), looking for a new challenge. I'm open to different mobile technologies.