MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by miguelbemartin | 2026-01-11 16:17:50+00:00
I've heard this a few times already on Twitter, but wouldn't your time be better spent in other areas? even if it is 10 or 15 mins? I am having a hard time understanding this sentiment from SEM.

If it's something that anyone could do in just 10 minutes, it could be another simple task for the ICs working with you.
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-11 16:18:30+00:00
I remember jones-ing for that computer. It was too expensive though. Then I got a series of books about how to build an Elektor Junior, which was a cheaper alternative. I did that, I loved it; and then in short order the BBC Micro stole my heart. The through-line was the 6502, which retains a place in my heart even today. It's fascinating to me that there still remains interest in that CPU even today, with papers and publications and repos. That CPU has had a great innings. Both simple enough and complex enough. It went on to power the Apple, the Pet, various Acorns. It's interesting to look at the family tree, even the ARM chips have a family association (say, cousins through the Acorn line).
by ashish01 | 2026-01-11 16:18:38+00:00
I have an old Lenovo IdeaPad with fairly modest hardware, and I have both Fedora and Windows installed. About 90% of the time I use Fedora, and it works fine overall. The only thing that bothers me is that Firefox on Fedora feels noticeably more sluggish compared to Edge or Firefox on Windows. Maybe it’s just a perception issue, but I’d love to know what others are using as their web browser on Linux.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-11 16:19:49+00:00
> the more isolated, and the more textually representable, the better: system programming is particularly apt

I’ve written complete GUIs in 3D on the front end. This GUI was non traditional. It allows you to playback, pause speed up, slow down and rewind a gps track like a movie. There is real time color changing and drawing of the track as the playback occurs.

Using mapbox to do this straight would be to slow. I told the AI to optimize it by going straight into shader extensions for mapbox to optimize GPU code.

Make no mistake. LLMs are incredible for things that are non systems based that require interaction with 3D and GUIs.
by benoau | 2026-01-11 16:20:38+00:00
> "Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer."

Classic.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-11 16:20:41+00:00
Last I checked, Tesla had over $30 billion in cash. Even in the worst case scenario, Tesla could shrink to be a large-ish and niche manufacturer. Until the cash is depleted and production falls to where factory utilization is low enough that fixed costs start to dominate unit margin, it's a business that can continue.

There's plenty to puzzle over: Why not spend part of the cash pile to make robots or semi's or a new model or... less vaporous? I don't suppose we'll know until the stock price prompts Elon or his board to ask that question.
by nsbk | 2026-01-11 16:20:55+00:00
I actually forked the repo, modified the Dockerfile and build/run scripts targeting Ampere and the whole setup is running seamlessly on my 3090, Magpie is running fine and using under 3Gb of memory, ~2Gb for nemotron STT, and ~18Gb for Nemotron Nano 30b. Latencies are great and the turn detection works really well!

I'm going to use this setup as the base for a language learning App for my gf :)
by stevenalowe | 2026-01-11 16:21:05+00:00
“According to the sources, the President has asked the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to prepare the invasion plan, but it is being resisted by the joint chiefs of staff on the grounds that it would be illegal - and would not be supported by Congress.”

“A diplomatic source said: 'The generals think Trump's Greenland plan is crazy and illegal. So they are trying to deflect him with other major military operations. They say it's like dealing with a five-year-old'”
by leonidasv | 2026-01-11 16:21:34+00:00
Unless we figure out how to make 1 billion+ tokens multimodal context windows (in a commercially viable way) and connect them to Google Docs/Slack/Notion/Zoom meetings/etc, I don't think it will simplify that much. Most of the work is adjusting your mental model to the fact that the agent is a stateless machine that starts from scratch every single time and has little-to-no knowledge besides what's in the code, so you have to be very specific about the context of the task in some ways.

It's different from assigning a task to a co-worker who already knows the business rules and cross-implications of the code in the real world. The agent can't see the broader picture of the stuff it's making, it can go from ignoring obvious (to a human that was present in the last planning meeting) edge cases to coding defensively against hundreds of edge cases that will never occur, if you don't add that to your prompt/context material.
by ericbarrett | 2026-01-11 16:21:36+00:00
> After it’s over, they’ll like you a little more or a little less. They’ll be more or less likely to bring you problems. They’ll be more or less likely to recommend you or avoid you. And just as important, you’re training them on the type of problems to bring you.

Indeed. I still remember the time Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta, replied to flame me, a line engineer of six months, in an internal discussion. It must have been, what, 15 years ago? The topic is long faded from my memory. Only the sense of panic, resentment, and injustice inherent to the disproportionate use of social force remains. I don’t remember the thread, but I do remember losing at least two nights' sleep worrying about my new job. Truly, it is sage advice.
by jerf | 2026-01-11 16:22:17+00:00
Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of HTML5 is that it specifies exactly what to do with tag soup. The rules are worth a glance at some time, just to see how rather absurdly complicated they are to do the job of picking up the pieces of who knows how many terabytes and petabytes of garbage HTML were generated before they were codified in an attempt to remain backwards compatible with the various browsers prior to that. And then you'll understand why I'm not going to even begin to attempt to answer your question about how browsers handle various tag combinations. Instead my point is only that, with HTML5, there is in fact a very concrete answer that is no longer up to the browsers trying to each individually spackle over the various and sundry gaps in the standards.

But honestly no answer to "what does the browser do with this sort of thing" fits into an HN comment anymore. I'm glad there's a standard, but there's a better branch of the multiverse where the specification of what to do with bad HTML was written from the beginning and is much, much simpler.
by amanaplanacanal | 2026-01-11 16:22:21+00:00
Current quicken doesn't run on Linux, and the web version doesn't connect to any online investment accounts as far as I know, only bank accounts.

Ableton would still have the issue of: which plugins can I still somehow get to work? And which do I just lose? And then: how reliable is it? Does it really just work, or am I gonna be fighting glitches all the time?

I suspect part of the problem might be a mental block on my end. I spent 25 years as a sysadmin before I retired, and the idea of going back to that is just not acceptable. And I know it would be hundreds of hours because that's what I spent last time I tried to make the switch a few months ago.
by zeroonetwothree | 2026-01-11 16:22:21+00:00
For example, my friend doesn’t know programming but his job involves some tedious spreadsheet operations. He was able to use an LLM to generate a Python script to automate part of this work. Saving about 30 min/day. He didn’t review the code at all, but he did review the output to the spreadsheet and that’s all that matters.

His workplace has no one with programming skills, this is automation that would never have happened. Of course it’s not exactly replacing a human or anything. I suppose he could have hired someone to write the script but he never really thought to do that.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-11 16:22:26+00:00
One thing I'm curious about is I hear stories about people getting hacked and losing their FB/IG/Tiktok accouts then fighting to get them back. You never hear details but I can only assume they're reusing passwords or they're using guessable passwords. For reference, anything 10 characters or less has to be viewed as guessable in this day and age.

I've long-viewed password managers are mandatory. Every site get its own 20+ character randomly generated password. I don't care if the hash gets leaked. It's not getting cracked. For years this has been 1Password. Initially it was LastPass but 1Password is just more slick.

The annoyance is all the arbitrary rules sites create about you have to use special characters or you can't or they have different, non-overlapping requirements on password length or the absolute worst is forced password rotation.

I don't generally try and get non-tech friends and family use password managers however because it's still kinda clunky to use and generate. Passkeys are kinda better I guess? But they're far from universal and I don't expect them ever to be.

Anyway, this kind of leak from Meta kinda surprises me. Leaking information that ties a physical address to an email address? That's a massive breach and not normally one you expect form a company employing thousands of engineers.

I will say this: IG operates as its own domain within Meta and AFAIK they still use a completely separate code base in Python/Django. Facebook proper is in Hack (almost entirely) and has excellent tooling and systems to detect weak endpoints and PII leaks of this sort such that leaky endpoints (or however this information leaked; I didn't see any details in the article) really just don't happen.

This has long been a point of friction within Meta engineerings. It's defensible to say it's not worth rewriting but IG are constantly playing catch up with what the rest of the company gets for "free". How many billion+ dollar settlements does it take before this equation changes?

And yes I believe that leaking physical addresses is going to cost th ecompany more than a billion dollars. It may get people killed. That's how serious this is.
by tcbawo | 2026-01-11 16:22:29+00:00
I am pretty sure that my previous attempts at a Linux desktop have failed because I would tweak my setup by installing packages and updates until I broke it and needed to reinstall. But I want my machine to be indestructible and "just work". Waiting day(s) to diagnose and fix an issue just isn't worth it. I have been contemplating a switch to Linux again. This time, I will embrace a LTS distribution and virtualization so that my tinkering doesn't break things. I always want a safe level to fall back to.
Also, I would enthusiastically pay for a support subscription. I know they are out there. Which companies/organizations have the most positive impact in the open source community?
by dahart | 2026-01-11 16:22:35+00:00
I agree that training on copyrighted material is violating the law, but not for the reasons you stated.

That said, this comment is funny to me because I’ve done the same thing too, take some signal of disagreement, and assume the signal means I’m right and there’s a low-key conspiracy to hold me down, when it was far more likely that either I was at least a bit wrong, or said something in an off-putting way. In this case, I tend to agree with the general spirit of the sibling comment by @williamcotton in that it seems like you’re inventing some criteria that are not covered by copyright law. Copyrights cover the “fixation” of a work, meaning they protect only its exact presentation. Copyrights do not cover the Madlibs or Cliff Notes scenarios you proposed. (Do think about Cliff Notes in particular and what it implies about AI - Cliff Notes are explicitly legal.)

Personally, I’ve had a lot of personal forward progress on HN when I assume that downvotes mean I said something wrong, and work through where my own assumptions are bad, and try to update them. This is an important step especially when I think I’m right.

I’m often tempted to ask for downvote explanations too, but FWIW, it never helps, and aside from HN guidelines asking people to avoid complaining about downvotes, I find it also helps to think of downvotes as symmetric to upvotes. We don’t comment on or demand an explanation for an upvote, and an upvote can be given for many reasons - it’s not only used for agreement, it can be given for style, humor, weight, engagement, pity, and many other reasons. Realizing downvotes are similar and don’t only mean disagreement helps me not feel personally attacked, and that can help me stay more open to reflecting on what I did that is earning the downvotes. They don’t always make sense, but over time I can see more places I went wrong.
by n3storm | 2026-01-11 16:23:03+00:00
I am a linux user for 26 years. And used windows since 3.11 up to 2005. After that point I just helped people with windows, never worked with it.

I had this friend while my kid went to school with his kid, he was a musician.
He absolutely was frightened of even handling me the mouse of his windows 7 setup in case I break his DAW, cherry audio tools and midi mixers just by me showing him a website.
Also helped to switch some dlls (hi didn't know how to kill background task to release dll to be replaced) and edit windows registry cause he needed an upgrade for some pirated software.

I have seen many more nightmarish stuff hapenning in windows, even on holy sacred windows xp.

On the other hand my mother has been using debian xfce in her acer touch screen laptop for 15 years. No issues. Many elder people got in shock when windows 8 made all those changes.

So whenever windows users talk about linux confusion I smirk.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-11 16:23:09+00:00
You can ask it to generate the why, even if it the agent isn’t doing that by default. At least you can ask it to encode how it is mapping your request to code, and to make sure that the original request is documented, so you can record why it did something at least, even if it can’t have insight into why you made the request in the first place. The same applies to successive changes.
by zahlman | 2026-01-11 16:23:38+00:00
The problem I'm anticipating isn't so much "the codebase grows beyond the agent-system's comprehension" so much as "the agent-system doesn't care about good architecture" (at least unless it's explicitly directed to). So the codebase grows beyond the codebase's natural size when things are redundantly rewritten and stuffed into inappropriate places, or ill-fitting architectural patterns are aped.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-11 16:23:54+00:00
> if the cost of “better” is worth it to the buyer. Can they see the difference? Do they care?

This is exactly the phenomenon of markets for "lemons":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

(for the HN readers: a related concept is "information asymmetry in markets").

George Akerlof (the author of this paper), Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz got a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.
by habinero | 2026-01-11 16:24:07+00:00
No, they just have a different job than I do and they (and you, I suspect) don't understand the difference.

Software engineers are not paid to write code, we're paid to solve problems. Writing code is a byproduct.

Like, my job is "make sure our customers accounts are secure". Sometimes that involves writing code, sometimes it involves drafting policy, sometimes it involves presentations or hashing out ideas. It's on me to figure it out.

Writing the code is the easy part.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2026-01-11 16:25:20+00:00
> It probably didn't help that XHTML did not offer any new features over tag-soup HTML syntax.

Well, this is not entirely true: XML namespaces enabled attaching arbitrary data to XHTML elements in a much more elegant, orthogonal way than the half-assed solution HTML5 ended up with (the data-* attribute set), and embedding other XML applications like XForms, SVG and MathML (though I am not sure how widely supported this was at the time; some of this was backported into HTML5 anyway, in a way that later led to CVEs). But this is rather niche.
by criddell | 2026-01-11 16:25:21+00:00
No, I haven’t tried that yet. I don’t really want to turn on auto mode when it’s iterating on my credit card and it looks like it’s in an infinite loop… Is that a silly thing to be worried about?

I work mostly in C++ (MFC applications on Windows) and assembly language (analyzing crash reports).

For the C++ work, the AIs do all kinds of unsafe things like casting away constness or doing hacks to expose private class internals. What they give me is sometimes enough to get unstuck though which is nice.

For crash reports (a disassembly around the crash site and a stack trace) they are pretty useless and that’s coming from someone who considers himself to be a total novice at assembly. (Looking to up my x64 / WinDbg game and any pointers to resources would be appreciated!)

I do prototyping in Python and Claude is excellent at that.
by joseda-hg | 2026-01-11 16:25:28+00:00
> Being paid never hurt its adoption at all in the UK. Teenagers like me were perfectly happy to pay 99p to get inter-platform IM.

To offer a counter example, it definitely did in Venezuela, at least in the beginning, where it initially lost dominance to BBM

Back then online payments were not that common, and most cards had weird restrictions on using USD in general
by coffeefirst | 2026-01-11 16:26:28+00:00
I would argue the stricter rules did take off, most people always close <p>, it's pretty common to see <img/> over <img>—especially from people who write a lot of React.

But.

The future of HTML will forever contain content that was first handtyped in Notepad++ in 2001 or created in Wordpress in 2008. It's the right move for the browser to stay forgiving, even if you have rules in your personal styleguide.
by lifetimerubyist | 2026-01-11 16:26:32+00:00
Out of incessant curiosity and borderline obsession - I installed KDE, then I enabled the experimental Wayland support for Proton and tried the game again.

It runs great now. The Wayland support didn't seem to do anything when I was using Gnome but it's a noticeable difference on KDE. As long as I disable vsync which locks the framerate at 30fps for some reason. But overall the game is very playable on Linux now.

Guess I'm switching to KDE.
by bwfan123 | 2026-01-11 16:27:11+00:00
I am not sure why the OP is painting it as a "us-vs-them" - pro or anti-AI ? AI is a tool. Use it if it helps.

I would draw an analogy here between building software and building a home.

When building a home we have a user providing the requirements, the architect/structural engineer providing the blueprint to satisfy the reqs, the civil engineer overseeing the construction, and the mason laying the bricks. Some projects may have a project-manager coordinating these activities.

Building software is similar in many aspects to building a structure. If developers think of themselves as a mason they are limiting their perspective. If AI can help lay the bricks use it ! If it can help with the blueprint or the design use it. It is a fantastic tool in the tool belt of the profession. I think of it as a power-tool and want to keep its batteries charged to use it at any time.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-11 16:27:31+00:00
I think we're always going to have that: there will always be That One Software that doesn't work on Linux, and you need to keep another OS around just to run it. I was able to get rid of Windows everywhere in my home except for one gaming PC, where I keep it around just for Fortnite, because of Epic's insistence on using their nasty kernel-level anti-cheat. So I keep that one machine around isolated from the rest of my network, for the sole purpose of playing one game.

I'm now in the process of un-Appleing my home too, and it's going pretty well, but I know I'll need to keep a single Mac somewhere in the corner of my garage in case I need to use Xcode to build an iOS app or something.
by seec | 2026-01-11 16:27:54+00:00
Same.
Something like the Citroen AMI but with better range and speed, probably slighty bigger and around 10K.

I doubt it's going to happen because that would kill a large part of the market : every familly that needs 2 cars just because they go to work to different places but would only use a single car for the heavy duty or long range needs.
At the start it would be a hard sell for many because of social status but overtime people end up voting with their wallet, so it could work. But that would be a pretty bad deal for the industry, so they'll only turn to that if they can't sell anything else.

Nowadays even the smallest cars starts around 20k, which is absurd and it even affect the second hand market because cars maintain their value better thanks to this pricing.
by notahacker | 2026-01-11 16:27:54+00:00
HTML is a markup language to format text, not a programming or data serialization language so end users have always preferred to see imperfectly coded or incompletely loaded web pages imperfectly rendered over receiving a failure message, particularly on 90s dialup. Same applies to most other markup languages.

The web owes its success to having low barriers to entry and very quickly became a mixture of pages hand coded by people who weren't programmers, content produced by CMS systems which included stuff the content author didn't directly control and weren't necessarily reliable at putting tags into the right place, and third party widgets activated by pasting in whatever code the third party had given you. And browsers became really good at attempting to rendering erroneous and ambiguous markup (and for that matter were usually out of date or plain bad at rigidly implementing standards)

There was a movement to serve XHTML as XML via the application/xhtml+xml MIME type never took off because browsers didn't do anything with it except loading a user-hostile error page if a closing tag was missed (or refusing to load it at all in the case of IE6 and older browsers), and if you wanted to do clever transformation of your source data, there were ways to achieve that other than formatting the markup sent to the browser as a subset of XML
by furyofantares | 2026-01-11 16:27:56+00:00
I think I'm also very good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs, and I disagree pretty heavily with you.

It is just way easier for someone to get up to speed today than it was a year ago. Partly because capabilities have gotten better and much of what was learned 6+ months ago no longer needs to be learned. But also partly because there is just much more information out there about how to get good results, you might have coworkers or friends you can talk to who have gotten good results, you can read comments on HN or blog posts from people who have gotten good results, etc.

I mean, ok, I don't think someone can fully catch up in a few weeks. I'll grant that for sure. But I think they can get up to speed much faster than they could have a year ago.

Of course, they will have to put in the effort at that time. And people who have been putting it off may be less likely to ever do that. So I think people will get left behind. But I think the alarm to raise is more, "hey, it's a deep topic and you're going to have to put in the effort" rather than "you better start now or else it's gonna be too late".