MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-11 19:10:38+00:00
Aside from the wrong constants, inverted operations, self-contradicting documentation, and plausible-looking but incorrect formulas, the egregious error and actual poison is all the useless noisy token wasting comments like:

# =============================================================================

From the MOOLLM Constitution Core:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/kernel/constit...

NO DECORATIVE LINE DIVIDERS

FORBIDDEN: Lines of repeated characters for visual separation.

# ═══════════════════════════════════════════ ← FORBIDDEN
# ─────────────────────────────────────────── ← FORBIDDEN
# =========================================== ← FORBIDDEN
# ------------------------------------------- ← FORBIDDEN

WHY: These waste tokens, add no semantic value, and bloat files. Comments should carry MEANING, not decoration.

INSTEAD: Use blank lines, section headers, or nothing:
by mystifyingpoi | 2026-01-11 19:10:59+00:00
So what? Most people don't care about battery, so let's just have a crap battery? That argument would work, if Apple released a super light laptop with a tiny battery, specially made for "most people who sit at their desk".

No, people do care about battery life. That's where Macs excel. (I'm saying this as a Thinkpad user, where getting 6-8hrs of battery is doable, if you don't do anything on the laptop).
by DrewADesign | 2026-01-11 19:11:17+00:00
The price isn’t the same, it’s more expensive, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. This particular project is slated to take a decade — the last nuclear reactor that the US built was also slated to take a decade. It just opened in 2024, and was approved for construction in 2009. This is a long-view solution to a right-now problem.

We should have been keeping up with this infrastructure stuff all along… but I’m really not convinced all of these companies are going to be using this shit in 5 years, anyway.
by ZenoArrow | 2026-01-11 19:11:49+00:00
What do you mean it works in some cases, not others? A literal string is a literal string in all cases.

As for it being a "masterpiece of design", it has it's quirks but compared to common Unix shells (aside from Nushell) it's far better. It doesn't need to have a perfect design in order to be a step above the competition.

I hope to continue to see the growth of Nushell, I can see that becoming the best shell one day.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-11 19:11:50+00:00
Discussions at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048820

Blog post in 2016 by Noah, Aaron's brother: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10881413
by dakiol | 2026-01-11 19:11:57+00:00
The moment my manager or some other non-technical stakeholders start to use AI to push software to production and it works fine, that's the moment I'll know for sure I'm out of business. I don't think that's really gonna happen soon, not because of the tech, but because non-technical stakeholders need at least one more generation to change their mindset. It doesn't really matter if we reach AGI, your manager (or their manager) is too busy to be hands-off with anything and will most likely delegate to some IC. That IC is me.
by theogravity | 2026-01-11 19:12:00+00:00
If I'm on 18.7.1, do I still need to upgrade?

https://www.cvedetails.com/version/2021355/Apple-Iphone-Os-1...

seems to be the same as 18.7.2

https://www.cvedetails.com/version/2037518/Apple-Iphone-Os-1...
by carshodev | 2026-01-11 19:12:16+00:00
Yes i love quickly creating tools in a single file, if the tool gets really complex I'll switch to a sveltekit Static site. I have a default css file I use for all of them to make it even quicker and not look so much like AI slop.

I think every dev should have a tools.TheirDomain.zzz where they put different tools they create. You can make so many static tools and I feel like everyone creates these from time to time when they are prototyping things. There's so many free options for static hosting and you can write bash deploy scripts so quickly with AI, so its literally just ./deploy.sh to deploy. (I also recommend writing some reusable logic for saving to local storage/indexedDB so its even nicer.)

Mine for example is https://tools.carsho.dev (100% offline/static tools, no monetization)
by Rastonbury | 2026-01-11 19:12:27+00:00
I think you mentioned it, when a large number of people outsource their thinking, relationship or personal issues and beliefs to chatgpt, it important that we are aware and don't because of how easy it is to get the LLMs to change their answers based on how leading your questions are due to their sycophancy. HN crowd mostly knows this but general public maybe not
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-11 19:12:50+00:00
Thanks!

> but in Sqlite doesn't WAL mode give you a kind of super simple, super basic temporal data system

Yes-ish.

For one, it is unitemporal. For another, it is for SQLites own transactions, not of the individual datums. Litestream is the way to replicate WAL into an object store / elsewhere. litestream-vfs is also looking good!

https://litestream.io/ , https://litestream.io/reference/vfs/ (announced here: https://fly.io/blog/litestream-vfs/ )

I'm trying to emulate the data assert/redact properties of append-only bitemporal-by-design data stores like XTDB. The giant blog post builds up the intuition from scratch. Or at least tries to.

So my system is going to be: bitemporal data, enforced by SQLite schema and application checks, along with WAL replication for point-in-time transaction backup/restore. Both are entirely distinct, and unaware of each other.
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-11 19:12:58+00:00
> This is such a weird issue for me, who is blind.

I'm not sure what your mental model is for someone's visual likeness.

I'd propose a blind-inclusive analogy of what is happening on Twitter is anyone can create a realistic sexdoll with the same face and body proportions as any user online.

Doesn't that feel gross, even if the sexdoll's genitalia wouldn't match the real person's?
by misnome | 2026-01-11 19:12:58+00:00
FS will literally sell you heavy-duty Armored (e.g. thicker/stronger sheath) cable and the packet it comes in will be labelled "military grade". That's literally your scenario.

Is one supposed to send it back for a refund and order the much thinner, less-durable cable? Or is perhaps the landscape not as black-and-white as your "this is automatically snake-oil"?
by anotherpaulg | 2026-01-11 19:13:08+00:00
I’m building a quantum photonics experiment that is a variation of the quantum eraser.

One aspect that HN may find interesting is my use of Bayesian optimization to control and perfect key experimental settings. About a dozen of the wave plates and other optical components are motorized and under computer control.

Given a goal metric like "maximally entangle the photon pairs" the optimizer will run the experiment 50-100 times, tweaking the angles of various optics and collecting data. Ultimately it will learn to maximize the given cost function.

This sort of thing is commonly done with tools like Optuna during NN/LLM training to optimize hyper-parameters, but seems less common in physics especially quantum photonics. I'm using a great tool called M-loop to drive the optimization, which was originally developed for creating Bose-Einstein condensates.

https://github.com/michaelhush/M-LOOP
by luiscosio | 2026-01-11 19:13:24+00:00
I’m working on Security Level 5 (SL5), which is basically “nation state grade security” for frontier AI systems. The core idea is that if a model’s weights or training artifacts could enable catastrophic harm, you should treat them like top-tier secrets and secure them accordingly.

One piece I helped with is SenL, a “sensitivity level” framework for AI labs. It’s like a practical clearance system for AI assets. Not everything in a lab is equally dangerous, so you label assets by sensitivity (weights, training data, eval sets, agent tooling, deployment configs, etc.), then tie that label to concrete controls like who can access it, where it can run, what logging is required, and what monitoring / two-person rules apply.

If anyone’s curious, SL5 is here: http://sl5.org/
and the SenL framework is part of the published artifacts.
by Cyph0n | 2026-01-11 19:13:30+00:00
An eBPF-based Wireguard mesh VPN in Rust using Aya.

The idea is to rely on kernel Wireguard, and process packets in kernel space (via eBPF) for maximum performance and minimal CPU overhead. I plan to use egress and ingress TC to “apply” the policy at both sides. XDP is faster, but only works on ingress, which is not sufficient for a mesh VPN imo.

Netbird already exists in this space, so this is mostly a learning exercise, and maybe a reference implementation for those learning eBPF in Rust.

Goals and constraints:

1. Single digit CPU overhead for multi Gbps bandwidth (probably a bit too ambitious, but we’ll see)

2. Linux only

3. No hole punching or complex NAT handling

4. Basic policy language for L3 and L4 traffic (L7 requires punting packets to a userspace proxy)
by mrstackdump | 2026-01-11 19:13:35+00:00
> There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.

Very few people of any age understood how local computing (or any computing) works. There's probably more now since most of the world is connected.

Profit scale has reached a point where commercial OS creators have to do stuff like shove ads into the UI. There's probably more legitimate need from non-developers to use Linux now than ever before, just to get a better base-line user experience.
by jihadjihad | 2026-01-11 19:13:59+00:00
I didn’t have any rigorous training or anything, but my understanding since learning HTML way back in high school was, like the author mentions in TFA, tags like <br> and <p> can simply be used “as-is” as markup and don’t need the concept of being closed.

I write virtually zero HTML anymore, but the one time this sort of thing comes up is in writing PR descriptions in GitHub using Markdown. Sometimes I want to add a <br> or two for space. I guess I’ve never stopped to notice that I never close those tags after adding them, or wondered why in my head it makes sense not to!
by epistasis | 2026-01-11 19:14:00+00:00
Well in a way they are building their own generation by paying elevated prices for nuclear to keep it running, as most nuclear will be shutting off pretty soon due to cheaper alternatives.

Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive. Nuclear plants get more expensive the more of them we build, but for already paid-off nuclear reactors there's a sweet spot of cheap operations and no capital costs before maintenance climbs on the very old reactors.

Meta paying for all that very expensive maintenance is not a bad deal for others, unless market structure is such that the price for entire market is set by this high marginal generation from uneconomic aged plants.
by freeopinion | 2026-01-11 19:14:42+00:00
I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering. In the past, freedom meant a lot to tinkerers. My sense is that this is not so true today. Perhaps I am wrong. It may be that few people respect licensing enough to care. As long as somebody (not necessarily the producer) has made a youtube video of how to hack something, that's good enough.

This was probably always true. Replace youtube with Byte magazine and it was probably the same 45 years ago. I wonder if the percentage of true FOSS adherents has changed much. It would be a bit of a paradox if the percent of FOSS software has exploded and the percent of FOSS adherents has declined.

Note: I mean "adherent" to mean something different than "user".
by jesse__ | 2026-01-11 19:14:53+00:00
I've been working on a voxel engine in my spare time for 10 years, this year. I wrote everything from scratch, from the memory allocators, font rasterizer and a programing language all the way to collision detection, renderer and gameplay code. It's been a journey!

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof
by kakacik | 2026-01-11 19:14:59+00:00
Dude, caffeine ain't no heroin. I drink 2-3 coffees a day and skipping this (ie traveling on vacation, easily for a week or two) does 0 to my body, mind or sleep. I just don't feel the effect at all, I drink it purely for the taste.

There is no human in this world who could say something similar about heroin.
by chmod775 | 2026-01-11 19:15:03+00:00
More specifically it becomes a property of window, which is the global object.

So <div id="hello"> becomes accessible as window["hello"], which means you can just directly write hello.innerText = "Hi!".

Since this may conflicts with any of the hundreds of other properties on window, it's generally not something that should be used.

Historically it wasn't too uncommon to see it, but since it doesn't work well with typescript, it's very rare now.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-11 19:15:07+00:00
I have a portable external screen that I carry in my backpack when I travel and when I work away from home.

https://a.co/d/6P7gfGA

And this stand

Metal Tablet Stand, a Portable... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4KH2GH3

The monitor is both powered and the video comes from one USB cord. My MacBook Pro can run 5-6 hours while powering the monitor. I couldn’t do that if the laptop by itself only last 3 hours.

Every now and then I use my iPad as a third monitor.
by VoxelBoy | 2026-01-11 19:15:22+00:00
VersionAlert: https://versionalert.com

For a couple of years now, I’ve wanted to build a service that lets you subscribe to new version notifications for any kind of software—desktop apps, drivers, packages, and more. As a Unity developer and consultant myself, I’ve always wanted to know the moment a new version becomes available. I value being at the bleeding edge, especially since a large part of the value I bring as a consultant comes from both the breadth and depth of my knowledge of the Unity engine.

That’s why I’m currently working on a niche version of the broader VersionAlert idea specifically for Unity, which is why the domain currently redirects to https://versionalert.com/unity
.

The only other service I’ve found that really addresses this need is https://newreleases.io
. I actually spoke with the very nice husband-and-wife team behind it and even offered to buy the whole project, but their asking price was about 10× higher than what I was offering—which I understand, no hard feelings. I still wish them the best of luck.

If anyone is aware of other projects or services in this space, I'd be happy to learn about them and chat.
by throw-qqqqq | 2026-01-11 19:15:31+00:00
>> … desktop Linux still has rough edges …

> My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.

Is this perhaps an issue of fractional scaling? I’ve run Openbox/Blackbox on Linux for ~15 years and never had these issues. Not 100% sure I understand the issue at least.

Things look mostly fine (to me) and even if they don’t, the apps still work as they should (no blur). AFAIK Openbox/X11 just uses the DPI the monitor reports and things scale as they should.

Sounds like an issue with Gnome/KDE to me, not with Linux?

I may be wrong, I’m not seeking a super polished look or want to tweak my UIs a lot.
by nullbound | 2026-01-11 19:16:10+00:00
We did have some movement in the director logic before and, I forgot the zombie game in question, some of it seems pretty well served for the most part. I still think there is some room for a proper game master type that you refer to ( adjusting the challenge to what the player seems to be to do ).

I was personally thinking of making NPC less npcy ( not completely unlike dwarf fortress, but expanded ).
by tmerc | 2026-01-11 19:16:15+00:00
They sell your location data, driving habits, etc. then the insurance company buys it and raises your rates. I declined it when I bought my Subaru and they registered my car to someone else's email address, giving someone else access to those features. That module is now on a shelf in my garage. I park in gear (manual) so remote start can launch my car into a wall.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/how-figure-out-what-yo...
by solomonb | 2026-01-11 19:16:35+00:00
Still working on my new LPFM radio station https://www.kpbj.fm

We are a 501c(3) and are actively fundraising to build a tower here in Shadow Hills and are launching our live stream and regular schedule February 1st. So far we have about 60 shows in the schedule.

If you're in Los Angeles and have an interest in radio, please hit me up.
by epistasis | 2026-01-11 19:16:37+00:00
As technology improves, we have less and less need for nuclear. The continent with the greatest need for nuclear is Europe, and these German grid modelers have taken a look at the EU grid with the latest data and decided that additional baseload generation (like nuclear) is not required and will likely increase costs if built:

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
by martin-t | 2026-01-11 19:16:41+00:00
The thing is a model trained on the same input as current models except Quake and Quake derivatives would not generate such code. (You'd have to prompt it with descriptions of quake physics since it wouldn't know what you mean, depending on whether only code or all mentions were excluded.)

The quake special behaviors are results of essentially bugs which were kept because it led to fun gameplay. The model would almost certainly generate explicit handling for these behaviors because the original quake code is very obviously not the only reasonable way to do it. And in that case the model and its output is derivative work of the training input.

The issue is such an experiment (training a model with specific content excluded) would cost (tens/hundreds of?) millions of dollars and the only companies able to do it are not exactly incentivized to try.

---

And then there's the thing that current LLMs are fundamentally impossible to create without such large amounts of code as training data. I honestly don't care what the letter of the law is, to any reasonable person, that makes them derivative work of the training input and claiming otherwise is a scam and theft.

I always wonder if people arguing otherwise think they're gonna get something out of it when the dust settles or if they genuinely think society should take stuff from a subgroup of people against their will when it can to enrich itself.
by j-o-m | 2026-01-11 19:16:44+00:00
Working on finally releasing the programming language I’ve been working on for quite a while.

I’m setting up the basic site, which is not a huge deal, but I’ve been inspired by more recent language designers having a streaming presence, so I am working through test runs of streaming my development.

I hope to start with demos of the basic language features and then move on to streaming both a reimplementation of my compiler and on a Rocq implementation of the syntax and semantics of the language for proof work.

The language has a rather small niche at first glance, so I’m hoping to use the streaming as a way to explore areas of appeal and maybe draw some interest. A low level concurrent and parallel ‘functional’ language with very non-traditional syntax and a modal, dependent type theory is not going to appeal to everyone, but hopefully I can find some interest eventually, even if just to hang out on chat and talk about the subject.
by atrettel | 2026-01-11 19:17:03+00:00
Before I started the project, I was already vaguely familiar with the notion of an inverted index [1]. That small bit of knowledge meant that I knew where to start looking for more information and saved me a ton of time. Inverted indices form the bulk of many search engines, with the big unknown being how you implement it. I just had to find an adequate data structure for my application.

To figure that out, I remember searching for articles on how to implement inverted indices. Once I had a list of candidate strategies and data structures, I used Wikipedia supplemented by some textbooks like Skiena's [2] and occasionally some (somewhat outdated) information from NIST [3]. I found Wikipedia quite detailed for all of the data structures for this problem, so it was pretty easy to compare the tradeoffs between different design choices here. I originally wanted to implement the inverted index as a hash table but decided to use a trie because it makes wildcard search easier to implement.

After I developed most of the backend, I looked for books on "information retrieval" in general. I found a history book (Bourne and Hahn 2003) on the development of these kind of search systems [4]. I read some portions of this book, and that helped confirm many of the design choices that I made. I actually was just doing what people traditionally did when they first built these systems in the 1960s and 1970s, albeit with more modern tools and much more information on hand.

The harder part of this project for me was writing the interpreter. I actually found YouTube videos on how to write recursive descent parsers to be the most helpful there, particular this one [5]. Textbooks were too theoretical and not concrete enough, though Crafting Interpreters was sometimes helpful [6].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index

[2] https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54256-6

[3] https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/

[4] https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3543.001.0001

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SToUyjAsaFk

[6] https://craftinginterpreters.com/
by mrkurt | 2026-01-11 19:17:18+00:00
Good point about quietly grabbing env vars, we can warn about that on first run. All it's getting are these:

var envVars []string
shellEnvVars := []string{
"BASH_VERSION",
"ZSH_VERSION",
"FISH_VERSION",
"KSH_VERSION",
"tcsh",
"SHELL",
}

It's also reading terminfo. It's not handling absolute paths to shells properly, though.

If you want to skip this, running `sprite exec -tty /bin/bash --login` or similar avoids the magic.
by dustfinger | 2026-01-11 19:17:37+00:00
I am curious what are people using for release notes in their own projects? Towncrier, GitHub Releases, something else?

If anyone tries my script on their repo and runs into issues, I am happy to help troubleshoot. Also, the output is actually plain Markdown (no JSX). The only Docusaurus specific bit is the YAML frontmatter header. If you are not using Docusaurus, you can just strip that header and rename .mdx to .md.
by foopalooter | 2026-01-11 19:17:38+00:00
Yep, once I read microsoft was going to integrate that abomination co-pilot into the taskbar and desktop in general, I wiped my windows partition for good. I didn't even back anything up. I have fedora servers at work, but I just need a stable and performant OS at home to do some remote work, hobby coding, and connect to some telescope equipment. So I just run Ubuntu LTS - why? because I don't need to spend my time nerding out on ricing a linux distro, I have better things to do with my time. The same goes for Windows, I have better things to do than try to get an operating system to work - and there lies the big rub. Linux is easy enough now for anyone who is decent at windows to learn and use, and it's free, upgradable, tons of support available, and WORKS BETTER.

As I'm typing this, on my work windows PC, the taskbar icons aren't rendering. Generally the graphics are slow, Microsoft outlook randomly freezes my entire computer, and occasionally my USB drives turn on/off if I'm plugged into a docking station. I experience exactly zero of these issues when running