MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antirez | 2026-01-18 10:52:28+00:00
When I was 10 I started to regularly go (after school) to an Olivetti store in my hometown, just hanging there with the owners, that would teach me a few things, like how to enter the M24 bad sectors in the BIOS, or how most mechanical writing machines could be "fixed" just by cleaning them. Such machines were so well designed: the best industrial designs of the time. I was already an owner of an Olivetti PC1, probably the strangest MS-DOS machine of that time... Anyway talking about all that I just remembered that the owner had a very odd sense of the humor. One day a customer, that loved to develop the films and print his photos at home, told that he had always issues with the leaky window that would let too light enter his black room. Then the owner told him, are you serious? Now they sell the "black light bulbs" that will suck all the light, and indicated the store, in Canicattì (near Campobello, my home town), and that if he would hurry, there are still the last pieces available. The man jumped into the car to immediately go get a few black light bulbes.
by frognumber | 2026-01-18 10:52:33+00:00
This was painful to read. It become better and simpler with a basic signals & systems background:

- His breaking up images into grids was a poor-man's convolution. Render each letter. Render the image. Dot product.

- His "contrast" setting didn't really work. It was meant to emulate a sharpen filter. Convolve with a kernel appropriate for letter size. He operated over the wrong dimensions (intensity, rather than X-Y)

- Dithering should be done with something like Floyd-Steinberg: You spill over errors to adjacent pixels.

Most of these problems have solutions, and in some cases, optimal ones. They were reinvented, perhaps cleverly, but not as well as those standard solutions.

Bonus:

- Handle above as a global optimization problem. Possible with 2026-era CPUs (and even more-so, GPUs).

- Unicode :)
by Rochus | 2026-01-18 10:54:17+00:00
Thanks, interesting. My concern was less about which language implements std, but rather about the semantic mismatch between Rust's ownership model and hardware behavior (e.g. DMA aliasing, MMIO side effects). So I was curious what work-around you found; do you e.g. use wrapper types with VolatileCell, or just raw pointers?
Show HN: Apex Agent – Connect the Browser to AI via MCP
by rtbruhan00 | 2026-01-18 10:54:26+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a developer and 3D artist, and I wanted my AI (specifically Cursor and Claude Desktop) to have "hands and eyes" in my actual browser while I work.

I tried the official Chrome DevTools MCP, but it felt overkill for my workflow. It requires setting up remote debugging ports and is heavily geared toward performance profiling and deep-dive engineering. I just wanted something "generalized"—like ChatGPT Atlas or Comet—but for my own dev environment.

So, I built Apex Agent.

It’s a lightweight Chrome extension + a tiny Node.js bridge that lets any MCP-compatible AI control your browser session.

Why I built this vs. using the official MCP:
Human-Centric Tools: While the official tool is for debugging, Apex is built for interaction. It has 69+ tools for clicking, typing, scrolling, and taking full-page screenshots.
No Remote Debugging Mess: You don’t need to restart Chrome with special flags or mess with debugging ports. Just connect the extension and go.
Control Your Active Session: It doesn't spawn a separate "headless" instance. It works with the tabs you already have open, which is way more useful for vibe coding or UI testing.
Dev Workflow Ready: I optimized this specifically to work with Cursor. Now I can tell Cursor to "Go to my local dev site, find the submit button, and tell me if the console shows any errors" without leaving my editor.

I’m looking for feedback from the community—what tools are missing for your daily AI workflows?

GitHub: https://github.com/RTBRuhan/ApexAgent

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/apex-agent/pmpkkbjd...
by paganel | 2026-01-18 10:55:48+00:00
> 05:30 is not particularly early,

5:30 is particularly early, especially when it involves normal people's hobbies.

> and if you have a specific niche or quality standard and not just only a bystander,

This is what the OP was saying, that this space has been been invaded by scalpers, people who do tend to have higher "quality standards" because it's in the nature of their "job", they've become aware that the higher quality stuff sells for more so that they're actively chasing it.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-18 10:56:02+00:00
You are confusing that. The biggest advancements in science are the result of the application of leading-edge pure math concepts to physical problems. Netwonian physics, relativistic physics, quantum field theory, Boolean computing, Turing notions of devices for computability, elliptic-curve cryptography, and electromagnetic theory all derived from the practical application of what was originally abstract math play.

Among others.

Of course you never know which math concept will turn out to be physically useful, but clearly enough do that it's worth buying conceptual lottery tickets with the rest.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-18 10:56:29+00:00
>So we've managed to invent a giant plausibility engine that automates the 90% of the process people enjoy leaving just the 90% that people universally hate.

OK, for me it is the last 10% that is of any interest whatsoever. And I think that has been the case with any developer I've ever worked with I consider to be a good developer.

OK the first 90% can have spots of enjoyment, like a nice gentle Sunday drive stopping off at Dairy Queen, but it's not normally what one would call "interesting".
by defrost | 2026-01-18 10:57:13+00:00
A key point is that it's an electoral system from hundreds of years past that was never intended to be a two party system, one set up by founders who in the large wre not even fans of party politics (one, two, or more).

It is a system that by it's design is more or less doomed to iterate into a Hotelling's law quagmire of two nose to nose opposing sides neither of which represents any kind of majority or popular view.

The US electoral system is well past due for a revamp, as recommended by it's founders who judged it "good enough" for a while ... until a despot appeared.
by nehal3m | 2026-01-18 10:58:33+00:00
I managed some 200 ThinkPad branded laptops around 2018-2020 and that era had issues with Thunderbolt firmware. I believe something wrote to it's memory that was meant as WORM storage, breaking things eventually. I went around all the T480's to update the firmware. In my experience the docks were craptacular but the laptops were pretty solid.
by vinc | 2026-01-18 10:59:58+00:00
I went from a X200 to work on my hobby OS 5 years ago, to a T440p with 16 GB of RAM for my daily computing, then upgraded to a T480 that I could fit with 64GB of RAM, and I finally added a X270 for a more compact form when I'm outside.

They were all very inexpensive due to their age (when RAM was still cheap) and I'm really happy about them, I work from a console and a browser, they are perfect for my usage. I wouldn't use any other kind of laptop.
by ubercow13 | 2026-01-18 11:00:01+00:00
Those icons were incredibly visually distinct, despite being meaningless. I still know exactly what they are for instantly, in my peripheral vision, years after using many of them.

Modern icons are not only not comprehensible but not visually distinct (Tahoe making everything the same shape, many apps removing all colour from toolbar icons, various distinct if anachronistic symbolic icons like Save being replaced with slighly different orientations and arrangements of arrows and rounded rectangles...).

This severely impacts the efficiency of user interaction, especially after the first time you use something, at least for me. It's not a knee jerk reaction, it's a reaction to actually feeling it becoming harder to use my computer.
by DenisDolya | 2026-01-18 11:00:12+00:00
I built this tool to explore Linux capabilities and privilege escalation vectors. In version 1.1, I’ve achieved a major personal goal: completely removing the libcap dependency. To keep the tool truly standalone and portable, I replaced the library with a custom implementation using native Linux syscalls (capget/capset).
My core philosophy is "zero-bloat": no malloc (everything is stack-based or static to ensure stability), zero external dependencies, and a minimal footprint. Every byte in the binary must be justified.
The backstory: due to limited hardware access, I developed and debugged this entire update directly on my smartphone. This constraint forced me to be a more disciplined architect, ensuring the code is as efficient as possible. It now compiles and runs out-of-the-box on x86, ARM, and other architectures without needing any extra system headers. I hope you find it useful for your audits or learning—whatever your goals may be
by spacedcowboy | 2026-01-18 11:00:25+00:00
As someone who still misses the skeuomorphic design of things like "Books", the first icon is dramatically more expressive than any of the others.

These days I do a search for an app by learning its colour, and using that to narrow down the options. There's much less visual associativity of "this icon" === "this app". I really oughtn't have to execute a hash-table search just to find the damn app I want.
by microtonal | 2026-01-18 11:00:39+00:00
I think it's even simpler than that. Trump wants accolades next to his name - one of the few presidents to have won the Nobel Peace Prize and one of the few presidents that added land to the US.

Instead he will soon be remembered as the worst US president ever - even after his first term he was already third-worst in most rankings and his second term is orders of magnitude worse.
by LightBug1 | 2026-01-18 11:01:04+00:00
That's true. I made several complaints about that TFL before capitulating and just settling to their for noise-cancelling headphones.

Never been happier.

The clincher was noticing that the drivers themselves had access to ear defenders ... TFL said that that's because they're down there for extended periods of time. But really ... not buying that. So am I.

Also has the ancillary benefits of blocking out those rare times (for me) when people do have their phone on speaker or are having a chat.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-18 11:02:21+00:00
> I really wish the EU leaned heavily into the cloud basic building blocks.

...

> VMs, S3, function, container registry, database, block storage, firewall etc

You think those are building blocks? I think that those are the very tippy-top of the tech stack!

Because, okay, lets say you have already got those things I quoted.

What are you going to run them on (CPU, RAM, storage, etc)? How are they going to talk to each other (Routers, switches, etc)?

It makes no sense, IMO, to have all your software but nowhere to run them. Better to throw that money at ARM/RISC-V development, and you'll literally get startups starting up to build the software for that hardware.

All you're proposing now is (re)building software for a US stack.
by yodsanklai | 2026-01-18 11:05:29+00:00
Everybody in my team has either a PhD or a MS. My (big tech) company rarely hires people without a college degree, unless they have outstanding accomplishments. In my case, it was a requirement or I wouldn't be working in tech.

In term of training, lectures were unequal, but overall I learned a lot. Would have been impossible to achieve the same level of knowledge on my own. The problem isn't the content, but the discipline to learn things on your own without validation, over several years. That'd take a high level of maturity I didn't have at 18.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-18 11:07:04+00:00
While what you say is true in general, it is by far not the most important cause for the misleading Intel documentation regarding trigonometric functions.

While the documentation was wrong, here the actual problem is that the argument range reduction for trigonometric functions can generate very big errors.

The original cause is a bad tradition inherited from the 19th century and taught until today in schools, to measure the plane angles in radians. Because the period of the trigonometric functions is a transcendental number when the angles are measured in radians, it is unavoidable to have rounding errors during argument range reduction, which can be very big for certain values.

A couple of centuries ago, the use of radians was preferred by mathematicians and physicists, because they were concerned mostly with symbolic computations with pen and paper. For symbolic computations, the use of radians makes the proportionality constants in the formulae for the derivatives and primitives of the trigonometric functions equal to 1, simplifying this use case.

When the 19th century scientists reached the stage of the solution of a problem where numeric computations must be done, they abandoned the use of radians, as they are much too cumbersome, and they switched to the use of sexagesimal degrees for measuring the angles, and then they did the computations using printed tables for the trigonometric and logarithmic functions.

Unfortunately, when the first mathematical libraries were created for automatic computers, e.g. for FORTRAN and ALGOL, the people who submitted jobs to computers were used from the school days to use formulae with trigonometric functions that have their arguments measured in radians, so this is how the functions SIN, COS and the like have been standardized in most programming languages.

However, this choice is very wrong, because it removes a multiplication with a constant from the very rare cases when derivatives or primitives are computed by moving the multiplication with that constant into each function evaluation, which happens much more often. Even worse is that this introduces rounding errors in a large part of the function evaluations and some times, as explained in the parent article, these errors are very big.

The correct alternative is to measure the plane angles in cycles, not in radians. (A cycle is 2Pi radians.)

In this variant, all argument range reductions are fast and exact, without any rounding errors. The 2Pi constant is moved into the derivative and primitive formulae, but those are computed much more rarely, and even where they exist the constant multiplication can almost always be computed at compile-time, as you have mentioned, because the function whose derivative or primitive is needed almost always has an argument that is the product of time with frequency or of length with wavenumber.
by MagnumOpus | 2026-01-18 11:07:29+00:00
One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…

(Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)
by noufalibrahim | 2026-01-18 11:08:50+00:00
I've been using Thinkpads exclusively from 2005 or so. My first was a T40 I got from work. Then I got a T42 of my own. I used it heavily till the fan gave out. After that, I got an X200 which I used for a long time. The keyboard got damaged because of a spill. I replaced it but somehow, the motherboard got shorted out and it died. I then bought a second hand X240 (roughly 2013) and used it as my primary machines. Replaced the battery (twice), fan, hand rest. And it's still running. My kids use it to play some simple games. My main machine right now is an X1 carbon (which I'm not really happy with compared to the others but it's okay for now).

I used a Macbook for about 2.5 years in between. Didn't like it (hardware was decent. Software was terrible). I also bought a Dell latitude (which was okay and is being used now as headless machine at my workplace for tinkering).

But my primary machine is a Thinkpad and I don't expect to see that changing in the near future.
by rl3 | 2026-01-18 11:08:52+00:00
>I find it odd to completely disavow someone because you don’t agree 100% with their politics.

"politics":

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
by ljm | 2026-01-18 11:09:42+00:00
Older versions of MacOS had an elegance to them. It’s lost some of that over the years.

The overall trend towards minimalism has ironed out much of what made it unique and it hasn’t always succeeded in improving UX. Even Liquid Glass and the ability to tint the icons (to make them even more indistinguishable) depends on the detail being kept to a minimum.
by rishabhpoddar | 2026-01-18 11:09:47+00:00
Im a former YC founder, I recommend to NOT raise external money from anyone, unless there is literally no other choice.

Raising money has been marketed as success by VCs and they have done a great job of it. Remember, that in reality, raising money is sign that your business is not doing well.. not the other way around.

Furthermore, a lot of people hope that raising money will help them get distribution and customers' trust. Thats NOT true. We raised a decent amount of money from YC and other VCs, and despite that, the thing that helped us most for distribution was content SEO and posting on reddit + no customer ever told us that they were using our product cause we raised $X from these VCs..

People also expect that well known VCs will help you magically solve issues in your company. That's not true either.. VCs may seem very smart, but when it comes to the details of solving issues about your company, they literally can't help, cause they don't know as much as you do about your business.

Another reason people want to raise money is cause they can't afford to quit their jobs and rely on their startups. In this case, well, do not quit your job.. work on your startup as side project until it's already generating 1.5-2x your annual salary, in a stable way. Remember this way, you dont have a deadline for your startup based on your runway, which is GREAT not only from your startup's survival point of view, but also from a mental health point of view.

I would also like to talk about hiring. A lot of people just assume that raising money is needed cause that way they can hire people and grow faster. This is again, not true.. usually, hiring people means you are actually going to slow things down unless you know EXACTLY what you want to hire for, which is rare for a startup. Even if you find a great person for the job, they will take at least a few months to be full productive, and if your startup is not growing like crazy (which is true for most startups), the person will likely leave (cause they are good and will find a better company) = wasted time.

I would like to say that money you raise for your company is NOT your personal money. You can't just spend it on buying stuff for yourself. In fact, even taking a decent salary from that money is looked down upon, unless your startup is doing really well already.

Finally, VCs play a numbers game. They invest in 100s of companies hoping one of them will give out a massive return and cover the losses for everyone else + make a huge profit. You are, statistically, in the ones that won't make it, and you will be written off.. at this point, you will have an entity, owing a large part of your company who literally doesn't care about you.

All of the being said, here are the reasons of why you SHOULD raise money:
- Your business model only works at scale.
- Your initial investment costs are very high: This is usually never true for software companies.
- You are trying to impress your partner and / or friends in the short term and give them the illusion that you are successful already (lol).
by vercaemert | 2026-01-18 11:10:53+00:00
I was hoping there'd be more discussion about the model itself. I find the last couple of generations of Pro models fascinating.

Personally, I've been applying them to hard OCR problems. Many varied languages concurrently, wildly varying page structure, and poor scan quality; my dataset has all of these things. The models take 30 minutes a page, but the accuracy is basically 100% (it'll still striggle with perfectly-placed bits of mold). The next best model (Google's flagship) rests closer to 80%.

I'll be VERY intrigued to see what the next 2, 5, 10 years does to the price of this level of model.
by yomismoaqui | 2026-01-18 11:11:34+00:00
As engineers we have to aspire to be like that old martial arts master that wins the fight with the simplest move.

When we are learning difficult techniques we want to show them (who doesn't like to show others that he can execute a perfect "Kick of the crescent Dragon from the West"?). But the old master knows that moving aside and sticking out a foot is enough to defeat that rival. More so, maybe that master knows that not fighting is the best solution for solving that problem.

As I'm getting old I want to be more like this.
by robertk | 2026-01-18 11:11:40+00:00
It’s slightly biased. ( P(even) = 0.5702; Bias = +0.0702 (about 7 percentage points toward heads) ). You can use this Claude Code prompt to determine how much:

Use your web search tool call. Fetch a list of English words and find their incident frequency in common text (as a proxy for likelihood of someone knowing or thinking of the word on the fly). Take all words 10 characters or longer. Consider their parity (even number of letters or odd). What is the likelihood a coin comes up heads if and only if a word is even when sampled by incidence rate? You can compute this by grouping even and odd words, and summing up their respective incident rates in numerator and denominator. Report back how biased away this is from 0.5. Then do the same for words at least 9 characters to avoid “even start bias” given slight Zipf distribution statistics by word length. Average the two for a “fair sample” of the bias. Then run a bootstrap estimator with random choice of “at least N chars” (8 <= N <= 15) and random subsets of the dictionary (say 50% of words or whatever makes statistical sense). Report back the estimate of the bias with confidence interval (multiple bootstrap methods). How biased is this method from exactly random bits (0.5 prob heads/tails) at various confidence intervals?
by Frotag | 2026-01-18 11:11:45+00:00
This site shows up on google a lot but it's a bit sketchy that there isn't a link to the source / license text. Not to mention the SEO heavy descriptions.

> Free Download Wallet 460 SVG vector file in monocolor and multicolor type for Sketch and Figma from Wallet 460 Vectors svg vector

Plus I've found the license listed isn't always accurate. For example the emojione icons are listed as MIT. But the actual repo says CC 4.0, with the non-artwork being MIT.

https://www.svgrepo.com/svg/404123/skull-and-crossbones

https://github.com/joypixels/emojione/