MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by comp3 | 2026-01-13 14:15:08+00:00
Lmao its actually cute watching Anthropic and its employees desperately finding a way to stuff this into peoples lives - the reality is most people dont give a hoot about this stuff.

The folks working at these technology firms just dont get what the average person - who makes up most of the population - wants. They produce this fluffy stuff which may appeal to the audience here - but that market segment is tiny.

Also the use case of organising a desktop rocked me off my chair. LMAO!
by einpoklum | 2026-01-13 14:16:01+00:00
> The reality is there are some of us who truly just don't care.

I would challenge that, with the same challenge I've heard about how Microsoft and Google reading your email. The challenge is "ok, so can you please log me in to your mailbox and let me read through it?"

It's not that people don't care, it's most that they've been led, or convinced, or manipulated, into failing to notice and realize this state of affairs.
by rafterydj | 2026-01-13 14:16:14+00:00
I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc.

That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.
Show HN: Proton TUI – Unofficial ProtonVPN Terminal Client in Rust
by cdump0 | 2026-01-13 14:16:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a TUI for ProtonVPN because I wanted a better way to browse and filter servers directly from the terminal without relying on the GUI.

It's written in Rust using `ratatui` for the interface.

*The experiment:* This project was almost entirely built by AI coding agents. I acted as the architect/product owner, reviewing code and directing the agents, but wrote very little code manually.

Repo: https://github.com/cdump/proton-tui
by cornholio | 2026-01-13 14:16:51+00:00
Yes, I don't understand how such an experiment could work. You either:

A). contaminate the model with your own knowledge of relativity, leading it on to "discover" what you know, or

B). you will try to simulate a blind operation but without the "competent human physicist knowledgeable up to the the 1900 scientific frontier" component prompting the LLM, because no such person is alive today nor can you simulate them (if you could, then by definition you can use that simulated Einstein to discover relativity, so the problem is moot).

So in both cases you would prove nothing about what a smart and knowledgeable scientist can achieve today from a frontier LLM.
by sofixa | 2026-01-13 14:16:53+00:00
> I actually think that the process around Scottish independence actually demonstrates that the UK is actually relatively sane - a part of the country wanted to consider independence, the government at the time said "OK you can have a referendum", the referendum was held and Scotland voted to stay in the UK.

You cannot ignore the influence of EU membership, both to the referendum vote for Scottish independence, and post-Brexit attitudes. The Scottish independence referendum was impacted by it becoming clear that an EU membership would not be automatic nor even possible (Spain would veto); Brexit happening means that part of what motivated Scotts to remain in the UK was taken from them (they voted overwhelmingly for the UK to remain in the EU).

Then you had the insane Brexit referendum which was non-binding but considered binding, where the "leave" vote could mean any number of things, and blatant nonsense was allowed to be used as slogans (that famous Boris bus), with the government failing to communicate on what the EU is.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-13 14:16:59+00:00
> ICE operates on reasonable suspicion, as they are legally entitled to do.

Speaking of weasel words, "reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime" is a higher standard than you imply. It requires the officer to be able to articulate their reason for suspecting a specific crime. Huh, crime is a funny word, actually. Did you know that overstaying a visa is a civil offense? But I guess it's possible, though perhaps not reasonable to suspect, that she crossed the border illegally.

So, if that's the crime, the agent would need to articulate their reason for suspecting that the woman had illegally crossed the border. Did he ever articulate that reasoning? Did he ever even articulate the crime?

> LEOs tend to shoot at those who resist arrest in a manner that endangers their lives.

Oh, I guess we'll just ignore all that "RAS" stuff, then. If that's the case, the agent didn't have the authority to arrest the woman at all. So, rather than resisting arrest, she was defending herself from an unlawful assaulter (with the intention not to kill, as you seem to admit in another comment). And the assaulter, in a fit of rage from seeing her attempted escape, shot her in the head three times to, er "defend himself" from a moving vehicle.

Honestly, I've read enough of your comments to know you're not stupid. Why go to such lengths to defend these actions of the agent in question? Do you really not think the agent should be expected to behave more professionally? Regardless of the fear he felt, I don't believe you simply can't see how he needlessly escalated the situation well before the woman tried to drive away.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-13 14:17:03+00:00
Yeah, and with it Eclipse wins a second time, especially on embedded where Eclipse CDT forks were replaced by VSCode forks.

"Project Ticino: Microsoft's Erich Gamma on Visual Studio Code past, present, and future"

https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/28/erich_gamma_on_vs_cod...
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-01-13 14:17:39+00:00
I would assume it is because of the extra distractions now. Everything becoming "smarter" and more addictive. How many were looking at their phones, hurrying back to catch the increasingly manipulative "news", or frustrated because their voice assistant didn't understand them?

Since 2000 all of these things, and the amount of tech per household in general, have gone up quite a bit. I'm surprised it wasn't listed as a hypothesis worth looking at.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-13 14:17:58+00:00
Yeah, a lot of this is just .. well, I hesitate to use the over used phrase "deep state", but a lot of it is the work of people in the security institutions who "advise" the government, rather than the changing cast of the thin democratic bit on the front. There's long been authoritarianism in response to the fear of terrorism, from the IRA onwards. Then there's things like the "spycops" scandal, which make you wonder whether certain protest groups are deliberately engaging in really unpopular stunts in order to facilitate a crackdown.

The British public are in an odd place on this. There's a lot of "folk libertarianism", but that mostly consists of not having ID cards, while at the same time supporting all sorts of crackdowns on protest as soon as it's mildly inconvenient.

And then there's immigration. As in the US, it's a magic bullet for discourse that allows any amount of authoritarianism (or headshots to soccer moms) as long as you promise it will be used against immigrants.
by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn | 2026-01-13 14:18:36+00:00
Presumably only some Scottish people have an interest in undermining the UK? Latest (2024) results from YouGov suggest yes/no is 34/49 to the question 'Should Scotland be an independent country?' [1]

1. https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Internal_Ind...
by troupo | 2026-01-13 14:19:28+00:00
> These flags don't magically change LLM formalisms. You can read more about how floating point operations produce non-determinism here:

Basically what you're saying is "for 99.9% of use cases and how people use them they are non-deterministic, and you have to very carefully work around that non-determinism to the point of having workarounds for your GPU and making them even more unusable"

> In this context, forcing single-threading bypasses FP-hardware's non-associativity issues that crop up with multi-threaded reduction.

Translation: yup, they are non-deterministic under normal conditions. Which the paper explicitly states:

--- start quote ---

existing LLM serving frameworks exhibit non-deterministic behavior: identical inputs can yield different outputs when system configurations (e.g., tensor parallel (TP) size, batch size) vary, even under greedy decoding. This arises from the non-associativity of floating-point arithmetic and inconsistent reduction orders across GPUs.

--- end quote ---

> If you still don't have bit-replicated outputs for the same input sequence, either something is seriously wrong with your computer or you should get in touch with a reputable metatheoretician because you've just discovered something very significant.

Basically what you're saying is: If you do all of the following, then the output will be deterministic:

- workaround for GPUs with num_thread 1

- temperature set to 0

- top_k to 0

- top_p to 0

- context window to 0 (or always do a single run from a new session)

Then the output will be the same all the time. Otherwise even "non-shitty corp runners" or whatever will keep giving different answers for the same question: https://gist.github.com/dmitriid/5eb0848c6b274bd8c5eb12e6633...

Edit. So what we should be saying is that "LLM models as they are normally used are very/completely non-deterministic".

> Perhaps in the future you can learn from this experience and start with a post like the first part of this

So why didn't you?
by amiga386 | 2026-01-13 14:19:29+00:00
Touche. But you miss that not all social media (e.g. blogs and forums, instant messaging) are "social media platforms".

Also, the trick doesn't work with social media platforms in the same way. Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, where is it now? He didn't get the same control and power he got when he bought The Times and The Sun and could tell the staff who wrote the content what to say to their passive readers.
Show HN: WhenNOT – scheduling longer team events by asking when not
by bartoszhernas | 2026-01-13 14:19:30+00:00
I had problems scheduling company get together. 3 days in next 3 months, 12 people, whats the best date for that? I've build the solution to my problem (human coded haha) and recently is started getting traction which is nice, so we added Slack integration (Claude coded).

WhenNOT flips the question: instead of "when are you available?", we ask "when are you NOT available?"

It's completely free - no premium tiers, no limits. I built it because I needed it for my own team.
by codingdave | 2026-01-13 14:19:39+00:00
> indies cannot get popular because of how the internet centralizes things

Are you joking? Some mainstream artists got their start on YouTube. Many indie artists perform there and have followings, and that is just one potential site to share your work. Sure, to become a household name you gotta grow from there and it is a tough road, but the ability to put out your music is crazy stronger today than in days of yore. I think you have an overly high bar set for what it means to "get popular"
by SPICLK2 | 2026-01-13 14:19:42+00:00
That is an interesting precedent. However, Ukraine is not a breakaway state from an existing EU member state (or a state which has been in the EU). There are numerous regions in the EU on a similar path, and none have yet succeeded (including Kosovo, which has been independent since 2008).

I'm also not talking about the defence of Scotland itself, I'm noting that monitoring and curtailing Russian naval activity in the Baltic Sea corridor is of wider strategic importance. If Scotland became unable to do this, Russia would have an easy exit path for naval vessels from its Baltic Sea ports.

In your example, Ireland as an EU member has significantly more access to military resources than otherwise.
by bellamoon544 | 2026-01-13 14:20:04+00:00
AI Job List is a focused job board for AI-native roles, built to cut through the noise of generic hiring platforms. It curates real, active openings across engineering, research, product, and design, so you can quickly see who’s actually hiring in AI right now. Jobs are vetted and updated regularly, with an emphasis on clarity over volume. Listings are easy to scan, consistently structured, and organized around roles and companies that are genuinely building with AI, not just using it as a buzzword. The site is intentionally simple, fast, and designed for checking in as the market evolves.
by isoprophlex | 2026-01-13 14:20:22+00:00
God fucking damn not you too, Apple. Adobe isn't a role model to emulate. I hate Adobe's practices. The whole world hates Adobe's practices. I want to pay for a thing with my money and then use it without worrying about ongoing costs, the UI changing, features breaking, or shit being shoved down my throat because some seedy PM wants a raise.

EDIT: I know you can still buy the software... but for how long?
by ericmay | 2026-01-13 14:20:33+00:00
As someone who doesn’t use these products (FB, TikTok, Twitter, &c) I think it’s very clearly time to require proof of citizenship and formal ID verification to at least post content.

I’m not suggesting all of the Internet needs to go that way, but for large social media platforms I don’t see why not. You can argue that journalists need anonymity but I’m confident we can find a workaround or solution there.

I understand there’s this hacker spirit of doing things anonymous and I get it, and agree with it, but these platforms are the most mainstream things imaginable and they are way past the point of having gotten out of control.

You can’t have MAGA/Hamas/Iran/Antifa/Russia/Cuba/China/India/Pakistan all participating in shaping public opinion and sowing disinformation without contest. I’m surprised that western countries have been somewhat resilient to all of this BS by and large (nothing is collapsing, just degrading), but for how long?
by sofixa | 2026-01-13 14:20:53+00:00
> Since Independent Scotland is very likely to rejoin EU

That is in no way clear because Spain has previously (during the Scottish independence referendum) indicated they would veto such a thing (because they don't want to give Catalonia any ideas or hopes).

But in any case, a Scottish independence would force the UK to find, and invest a lot in, a new base for its nuclear submarines. Scotland is also the most important UK part of GIUK gap, where there is a lot of infrastructure to catch and track Russian assets entering the North Atlantic. UK losing access to that is not good for it nor for the US with their special relationship.

A Scotland in the EU can also create tensions between the UK and the EU, which would also be good for Russia.
by jasongill | 2026-01-13 14:21:06+00:00
It's $12.99/mo or $129/yr for a subscription that includes Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, MainStage, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers

Educational discount with verification required drops the price to $2.99/mo / $29.99/yr.

The regular-price subscription includes family sharing, education price does not.

One-time purchase versions remain available: Final Cut Pro ($299.99), Logic Pro ($199.99), Pixelmator Pro ($49.99), Motion ($49.99), Compressor ($49.99), and MainStage ($29.99).

Comes out January 28th
by pjc50 | 2026-01-13 14:21:38+00:00
> Are you outraged by all police shootings?

Only the unjustified ones, which is quite a lot of them in the US. They should automatically result in at least a public inquiry.

> On average three people are killed by LE per day.

In the US. This is a stupidly high number.

On average three people per year are killed by police in England&Wales. https://www.inquest.org.uk/fatal-police-shootings
by troupo | 2026-01-13 14:21:59+00:00
The "imaginary arguments" in question:

- "If the agent/LLM you use doesn't automatically does this, I suggest you try something better, like Codex or Claude Code."

- "you don't really seem like you're looking for improving"

- "Hopefully at least someone who wants to improve comes across it so this whole conversation wasn't a complete waste of time"

- "judging by this thread, it's pretty clear what the problem is. I hope you figure it out someday"

- "you need to understand how to use them. But again, maybe you don't want"

Aka what I said previously.

At this point, adieu.
by terminalbraid | 2026-01-13 14:22:13+00:00
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.

This is a zero-barrier-to-entry forum (not even an email required!) that has the eyes of a people prone to being involved with startups. Why would you think in any way this would be better than an average equivalent? Because you don't personally notice it?
by psychoslave | 2026-01-13 14:22:22+00:00
I get your point on how the words meanings evolves.

Also it’s fine that anyone name things as it comes to their mind — as long as the other side get what is meant at least, I guess.

On the other it doesn’t hurt much anyone to call an oxymoron thus, or exchange in vacuous manner about terminology or its evolution.

On the specific example you give, I’m not an expert, but it seems dubious to me. In x+1=2, terms like x are called unknowns. Prove me wrong, but I would rather bet that Euler used unknown (quantitas incognita) unless he was specifically discussing variable quantities (quantitas variabilis) to describe, well, quantities that change. Probably he used also French and German equivalents, but if Euler spoke any English that’s not reflected in his publications.
by simianwords | 2026-01-13 14:22:50+00:00
>AI in its current form has no actual sense of truth or ethics.

This is untrue. It does have sense of truth and ethics. Although it does get few things wrong from time to time but you can't reliably get it to say something blatantly incorrect (at least with thinking enabled). I would say it is more truthful than any human on average. Ethically I don't think you can get it to do or say something unethical.
by ckozlowski | 2026-01-13 14:22:54+00:00
5yo parent here. Agreed. And sometimes they just need to chill.

I agree with the overall sentiment. Too much screen time is bad. Kids need to get out and play, indoors or out. In our house, it's a lot of biking and playing with friends outside, Legos, Brio, Magnatiles, matchbox cars, or just crafts.

But sometimes they're frazzled, out of sorts, and would benefit from just being able to sit and chill.

So we'll put on something for him that we're comfortable with. Tumble Leaf, Blaze & The Monster Machines, Trash Truck, or the occasional Ghibli movie.

We do not give him a tablet or other portable device. He sits and watches on the couch, we set a expectation, and stick to that.

I think controlling the device is important. Keeping the screen as something we control and not something he carries around seems to allow us better control and helps him understand the limits in play. 90% of the time, we have no fuss.

And it's not bad. In moderation, TV can be just fine. Often it genuinely helps him soothe and relax (Especially if he's been really active and engaged all day), and as you said, helps us get something done. Two episodes of one of his favorite shows is great to help him unwind while we're making dinner.

But we keep time/episode limits as well, and that seems to keep things in balance along with the aforementioned things.
by 0xmattf | 2026-01-13 14:23:02+00:00
I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I opened up a laptop with Windows 8 installed. I had just gotten rid of a Windows smartphone because I hated it. Boom, now it's on my laptop! That made me switch to Linux full-time for the next ~8 years.

If my employer didn't use Windows, I probably never would have used it again. But yeah... why would I want the worst part of Windows 8 on any *nix system?
by andsoitis | 2026-01-13 14:23:15+00:00
Thanks for explaining your thinking.

> It’s very hard to calculate exactly how much the ecosystem inside a country borders can offset, but a good enough metric is its landmass.

I think this is a flawed basis, because weather patterns, sea rise, etc. don't honor country borders. Only highly localized pollution is somewhat "constrained", but country borders are even porous to that.

So I still don't know that it is an effective incentive to find a better balance. Per capita also has its problems, like penalizing less-developed countries from developing their societies, industries.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-13 14:23:15+00:00
When there are no more new buyers to sell devices, or new versions of existing software packages, the only way to keep the curve growing for shareholders and MBAs is to sell subscriptions.

It is also the only way to convince developers to pay for software.

Having a part hosted on some server is so much better than whatever anti-piracy schemes one can think of, and provides the continuous growth curve for printing money.

Thus subscriptions aren't going away in the modern software world.
by diffeomorphism | 2026-01-13 14:23:17+00:00
When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was?

Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years.
Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.

The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-13 14:23:23+00:00
I am gen-z and I am part of the foss community (I think) and one of the issues about new generations of FOSS tech leaders is that even if one tries to do so.

Something about Richard stallman really is out of this world where he made people care about Open source in the first place.

I genuinely don't know how people can relicate it. I had even tried and gone through such phase once but the comments weren't really helpful back then on hackernews

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430 (Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that)
by pjc50 | 2026-01-13 14:23:27+00:00
The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.

(to the extent that armed revolution worked in the UK, the IRA were helped only slightly by US-backed supplies of Armalite rifles, and much more by a large supply of Libyan high explosives. Guns are a much less effective political weapon than the car or truck or hotel bomb)
by drnick1 | 2026-01-13 14:23:54+00:00
The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made.

Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
by sirwhinesalot | 2026-01-13 14:24:05+00:00
And here's the ruining of Pixelmator Pro everyone was waiting for. I paid one time 20 euros for it (discounted). And I would gladly pay again even full price for a new major version.

I don't want yet another subscription.

I see that they can still be bought (for now) but I wonder how long that will last.
by acomjean | 2026-01-13 14:24:21+00:00
Subscription model so it’s adobes model. But you can buy “one time”. Though they have a tendency to just end product support (aperture software was canceled leaving a lot of bad taste for photographers that used it)

Wonder what Adobe thinks of this. Their support for Mac was pretty important in getting OS X off the ground, now they’re competing with a unified stack.

When I was a Mac user I remember buying Logic express 9 (I still have the disk). The price is a good deal, but you really are all in forever..