MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teekert | 2026-01-28 14:50:24+00:00
I have deep respect for Pandas, it, and Jupyter-lab were my intro to programming. And it worked much better for me, I did some "intro to Python" courses, but it was all about strs and ints. And yes, you can add strs together! Wow magic... Not for me. For me it all clicked when I first looped through a pile of Excel files (pd.read_excel()), extracted info I needed and wrote a new Excel file... Mind blown.

From there, of course, you slowly start to learn about types etc, and slowly you start to appreciate libraries and IDEs. But I knew tables, and statistics and graphs, and Pandas (with the visual style of Notebooks) lead me to programming via that familiar world. At first with some frustration about Pandas and needing to write to Excel, do stuff, and read again, but quickly moving into the opposite flow, where Excel itself became the limiting factor and being annoyed when having to use it.

I offered some "Programming for Biologists" courses, to teach people like me to do programming in this way, because it would be much less "dry" (pd.read.excel().barplot() and now you're programming). So far, wherever I offered the courses they said they prefer to teach programming "from the base up". Ah well! I've been told I'm not a programmer, I don't care. I solve problems.
by ryan_rudd | 2026-01-28 14:50:50+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Ryan, a student and solo dev.
I built PushPilot because I was tired of the "context-switching tax". Whenever a client or PM finds a UI bug—like a misaligned button or the wrong hex code—they usually send a screenshot. I have to stop my deep work, find the file in my repo, fix the CSS, and open a PR. It’s a lot of friction for such a small change.

What it actually does: It bridges the gap between the browser and your source code. You click the element on the live site, tweak it in a mini-inspector, and PushPilot opens a Pull Request in your GitHub repo with the code fix already written.

About the Safety & Permissions: I know giving a new tool GitHub access is a big ask. I've focused on keeping it as safe as possible:

Scoped Permissions: It only asks for access to the specific repos you choose.

No Auto-Merge: It only opens a PR. It never touches your main branch directly. You still have to review and hit "Merge" yourself.

Transparent Code: The PR shows you exactly what lines were changed so there are no surprises.

Why it’s cheap right now: I literally just put this live, and I want it to be a tool that freelancers can just "grab and go". I’m charging $9/mo for the solo plan because I’d rather have 100 people using it and giving me feedback than 5 big companies paying more. Since my run costs are extremely low, I don't feel the need to charge a premium while I'm still learning.

It currently works best with React and Tailwind, as that's my own stack. I’d love for you to try it out and tell me if the workflow makes sense or if I’m over-engineering a simple problem.

Why it’s cheap right now: Honestly, I just deployed this, and I want it to be something that a freelancer can just "grab and go." I’m charging $9/mo for the solo plan because I'd rather have 100 users using it and giving me feedback than 5 large companies using it and paying more. My run costs are super low, so I don’t need to charge a premium while I’m still learning.
by ColinWright | 2026-01-28 14:51:25+00:00
Still reading the article, but early on it says:

"Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?"

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB RAM.

That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?
by deknos | 2026-01-28 14:51:26+00:00
additionally:

> This potential shouldn't prevent our inventing new kinds of tool.

Why do i see someone who wants to build an atomic bomb for shit and giggles using this argument, too? As hyperbole as my argument is, the argument given is not good here, as well.

The immutable linux people build tools, without building good tools which actually make it easier for private people at home to adapt a immutable linux to THEIR liking.
by trhway | 2026-01-28 14:51:42+00:00
A major cost in building and operating datacenters is energy, so it does mean that significant share of those money would go into energy development. Large demand is one of the best things for stimulating technology development, and in this case we'd definitely see investment in solar and compact/safer nuclear of which MSRs are a part of.

xAI already brings gas turbines on-site, and i think the trend of on-site energy generation will grow, which will open opportunity (by providing well finaned demand) for compact/mobile/safer nuclear, and BigTech companies are among the best for any new tech development. I expect nuclear engineer positions get opened with Google and the likes :)
by cong-or | 2026-01-28 14:51:50+00:00
At ~$100B in AI funding, the question isn’t capital—it’s physical constraints.

Data centers need power (H100s are ~700W each), and recent capacity additions were mostly pre-allocated. Chip supply is also constrained by CoWoS packaging, not fab capacity, and expansions take years.

If power, packaging, and GPUs are fixed in the near term, does $100B mostly drive inflation in AI infrastructure prices rather than materially more deployed compute? Are we seeing the real cost of a usable GPU cluster rise faster than actual capacity?

Has anyone modeled what $100B actually buys in deployable compute over the next 2–3 years given these constraints—and whether that figure is shrinking as more capital piles in?
by seba_dos1 | 2026-01-28 14:52:35+00:00
> There's no way this platform would pass muster with any bank

"Any bank"? Although the bank I use locks NFC payments behind such checks (which is not a big loss since a physical debit card offers the same functionality), anything else still works otherwise. Most of the things are available through the website (which fits well on mobile too), and mobile BLIK payments can be done from the Android app which works inside Waydroid with microG.

There's no reason other banks can't work the same way and it's outraging when they don't. Look around for a better bank.
by Bluecobra | 2026-01-28 14:52:46+00:00
They could never get that cart right. I tried using that cart again last week and it was still glitchy and it seems like you waste more time screwing around with the cart. I found it quicker to just use the normal check out since nobody shops there anyway. At my local store, you could go there on a Saturday afternoon and find only one cashier with no line. The Trader Joe’s nearby would be absolutely jammed.
by vrnvu | 2026-01-28 14:53:00+00:00
Made me think. Every time I see a “Postman collection” or similar artifacts, my heart skips a bit. Use curl. Run it interactively in the terminal. When it works, move it into a shell script where you can simply check the status code. Voilà, magic! you’ve got yourself a simple but valuable integration test.

Instead of juggling dashboards and collections of requests, or relying on your shell history as Matklad mentions, you have it in a file that you can commit and plug into CI. Win-win.

At some point, that testing shell script can be integrated into your codebase using your working language and build tooling.
by Peroni | 2026-01-28 14:53:11+00:00
There's a lot of references in the report to companies "reporting difficulties in filling vacancies" with no clarity on what constitutes 'difficulties'.

Also, the data notes that 83% of the companies surveyed were small enterprises (with 10-49 employees or self-employed persons). It's no surprise that these companies find it more difficult as they tend to be more budget-conscious, meaning they struggle to compete with bigger company salary levels.
by jedisct1 | 2026-01-28 14:53:30+00:00
Claude is good at writing code, not so good at reasoning, and I would never trust or deploy to production something solely written by Claude.

GPT-5.2 is not as good for coding, but much better at thinking and finding bugs, inconsistencies and edge cases.

The only decent way I found to use AI agents is by doing multiple steps between Claude and GPT, asking GPT to review every step of every plan and every single code change from Claude, and manually reviewing and tweaking questions and responses both way, until all the parties, including myself, agree. I also sometimes introduce other models like Qwen and K2 in the mix, for a different perspective.

And gosh, by doing so you immediately realize how dumb, unreliable and dangerous code generated by Claude alone is.

It's a slow and expensive process and at the end of the day, it doesn't save me time at all. But, perhaps counterintuitively, it gives me more confidence in the end result. The code is guaranteed to have tons of tests and assurance for edge cases that I may not have thought about.
by nomorewords | 2026-01-28 14:53:32+00:00
At least in Bulgaria, 60% of people don't vote. Granted that we aren't that socially active as a country, I think that any amount of parties wouldn't bring much difference. Until the system starts working again, as in convicting criminals, preventing policymakers from benefiting from "timely" investments and overall bringing the wealth gap down, I don't think that you'd be able to reach all of the people
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-28 14:53:35+00:00
Yeah, my mind battled with what websites to use as examples for adding support, Wikipedia should have been an obvious one, that's on me!

You're not the only one to say this, maybe there is a value in a minimal HTML+CSS browser that still works with the modern (non-JS using) web, although I'm not sure how much.

Another idea I had, was to pile another experiment on top of this one, more about "N humans + N agents = one browser", in a collaborative fashion, lets see if that ends up happening :)
by belorn | 2026-01-28 14:54:05+00:00
I don't get it. If you install openbsd, you get dependencies that openbsd developers has chosen. You can try to remove every aspect of those choices but at some point it won't be openbsd anymore.

Is the claim here that Red Hat is unnecessary coupling their critical parts of the distribution in ways that other distributions would not do? A few examples here would be nice.
by labarilem | 2026-01-28 14:54:10+00:00
Cool project!

I'm building something quite similar at https://hn-games.marcolabarile.me/

I manually curate the data and add images too. Code and data are open: https://github.com/labarilem/hn-games

I've posted this project some time ago to HN but it didn't get much attention unfortunately.

NOTE: Data includes games up to April 2024, I add more games when I have some spare time and plan to catch up to today's games asap.
by regenschutz | 2026-01-28 14:54:28+00:00
I was using Crixet before I switched over to Typst[0] for all of my writing. However, back when I did use Crixet, I never used its AI features. It was just a much better alternative to Overleaf for me. Sad to see that AI will be forced on all Crixet users now.

[0]: https://typst.app
by spicyusername | 2026-01-28 14:54:43+00:00
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but most places for most people are fine. Good even. Great, by historical standards. But that just goes to show how much room the US has to decline, and how well off the average American really is by global standards, even if they don't subjectively feel that way. Donald Trump and the politics of the last few decades have definitely been pushing things the wrong direction, but most people in most places live relatively well, by global standards. As it is, all we would need is a decade of politics and policies gently tugging the right direction and we'd be good to go.

Is stuff really as bad as it looks or are media somehow exaggerating things?

Kind of both at the same time.
America is a huge place.
So if you live in Minneapolis, or in one of the cities where ICE is heavily targeting immigrants and are non-white, it's as bad as the media makes it sound.

If you live anywhere else, which in most cases are places thousands of miles away, it's business as usual. You have money, you go to work, the grocery store is full, you see your friends on the weekends. The only bad things in life are home prices and the news.
by _verandaguy | 2026-01-28 14:55:11+00:00
It's been said before, but this prediction isn't amazing, imo.

I look forward to Bartosz's articles because they're rock-solid sources of information and the visualizations are both easy-to-understand and surprisingly light on performance. It's all shockingly digestible.

Honestly, as popular science writing goes, this is art as far as I'm concerned, and art is best when it comes from a place of passion and conviction, something AI will never be able to reproduce.
by kjshsh123 | 2026-01-28 14:55:18+00:00
This isn't a view thing though. We have the data. What you're saying is what Piketty said.

Only issue is, when you account for depreciation, you find that r>g applied to housing (so boomer NIMBYs) not billionaires.

This is not a Karl Marx thing, but a Henry George thing.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-...
by Flammy | 2026-01-28 14:55:23+00:00
Good luck to all. I'm curious what areas are impacted. This is what I've heard was cut in October:

Amazon Games

Visual search / Amazon Lens teams

Advertising org

Devices / Fire TV / RBKS

Prime Video

Alexa

Payments

Pharmacy and Health-related bets

Games (beyond the named studios)

Recruiting / HR

Catalog / Retail support teams
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-28 14:56:28+00:00
I would agree with that, but then you have the situation of "how?" - I volunteered for an organization that had a large part of their funds embezzled by the Treasurer. When they were arrested and charged with theft, the prosecutor came to an association meeting and asked what our thoughts were. The person had sufficient income that they could reasonably pay back the money in a (relatively) quick time frame, and the prosecutor noted that "in these types of cases, often the victim has to choose between retribution/punishment, and recompense" - not that we were choosing his punishment, but he was asking our input.

As in - he could afford to pay if his job was kept, etc. But charge him with the felony, he would likely lose that job and the ability to repay anything in any meaningful manner.

Then you have the State of Florida, who charges you $75/day if you are in jail at all, regardless of the outcome of your case, charges being dropped or dismissed. You could be arrested for a BS traffic stop on Friday, the prosecutor drops it on Monday morning, three days incarceration. Or a not guilty finding. Doesn't matter.

And then, failure to pay this is a Class B Felony.
by axus | 2026-01-28 14:57:12+00:00
As a complete guess, I would say that 90% of Linux systems are run by "big tech drones". And also by small companies using technology.

Open source operating systems are not a zero sum game. Yes there is a certain gravitational pull from all the work contributed by the big companies. If you aren't contributing "for-hire", then you choose what you want to work on, and what you want to use.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-01-28 14:57:32+00:00
True, not every dev has the power of a multi-billion dollar company behind them. But a few do.

My point was, if enough people really considered this a big deal then at least one huge tech company might have invested in a solution that provides a lighter weight solution that's truely multiplatform (desktop and mobile).

I don't have much visibility on how decisions to maintain massive open-source infrastructure projects are made, and no doubt there are significant business case inputs to them, but they must be at least partially technical. So, as I see it, the lack of such things give insight that even developers don't prioritise them.

As I mentioned, Flutter is almost there and maybe its lack of uptake is just enough to show that there really isn't demand (though I expect the main reason is its use of the Dart programming language, which is very nice but niche).
by lapcat | 2026-01-28 14:57:32+00:00
The chart I found most interesting was "U.S. Political Ideology Identification, 1992-2025".

Conservative has remained more or less static the whole time, 36% in 1992, 35% in 2025, which I guess makes a kind of sense, while moderate has dropped 10%, with a corresponding increase in liberal.

I would personally call this social progress, though of course conservatives would disagree. On the other hand, the specific political policies supported by self-described conservatives and liberals has sometimes changed radically over those years, which can make my eyes roll and my head spin, so I think it's a separate question whether US political policy itself has become too conservative or too liberal. The leaders of both parties tend to advance the interests of themselves and their donors over the interests of their voters or the public at large.
by mynameajeff | 2026-01-28 14:57:33+00:00
The bag weight sensors was something I was very happy to see go away. I hated self checkouts for years because it was a miserable experience of it freezing every third item and requiring someone to come get it working again. I only realized this tech had changed when COVID forced me to try self checkout again and it was suddenly a very pleasant experience, though one I have to imagine causes a lot of shrink for stores.
by just6979 | 2026-01-28 14:57:35+00:00
Wait, so you have the LLM review, then you review (selectively choose) the proposed review, then you (or the LLM?) review the reviewed review? But often times (so, the majority?) the initial LLM review is useless, so you're reviewing reviews that won't pass review...

Sounds incredibly pointless. But at least you're spending those tokens your boss was forced to buy so the board can tell the investors that they've jumped on the bandwagon, hooray!
by cong-or | 2026-01-28 14:57:37+00:00
What’s the latency on a hostcall? A PCIe round-trip for something like File::open is fine—that’s slow I/O anyway. But if a println! from GPU code blocks on a host round-trip every time, that completely changes how you’d use it for debugging.

Is there device-side buffering, or does each write actually wait for the host?
by beastman82 | 2026-01-28 14:57:51+00:00
> The image (above) shows long radio-emitting filaments up to 150 light–years long unspooling from the heart of the galaxy. These structures, whose origin remains unknown, were first observed in 1984, but the new image revealed 10 times more than had ever been seen before.

I don't understand how this isn't the biggest news in astronomy. Gigantic filaments of energy passing through the milky way
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-28 14:58:30+00:00
>in iraq, the insurgency was the former iraqi military, not just random citizens with small arms

We are quite far from a situation of mass repression of citizens in the United States like you see in Iran. But if it came to that, I imagine the 15 million+ veterans in this country might have something to say about it. They outnumber active duty military personnel by a factor of 5.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-28 14:58:52+00:00
Other crimes besides not being a browser:

- out of bounds read of argv

- shell injection from bad urls

- leaks memory

- hard coded, published api token (hidden behind scrolling to the right)

- worst of all, not actually funny.

But the last one is hard to judge without posting and seeing the response, live and learn!
by josu | 2026-01-28 14:59:43+00:00
> invested in (...) anything else practical.

I don't understand how this is the top comment. LLMs have unlocked a lot of value for me personally, and arguably for the society as a whole. They are also one of the coolest technologies I've tried in years. As a technologist, I'm really glad that money is pouring in and allowing us to find its limits.
by neuroblaster | 2026-01-28 14:59:58+00:00
I guess at this point it is safe to say that whenever you see "rewrite in Rust", it is simply means there is no one to maintain the software anymore. They are saying this pretty openly that they weren't able to patch xfwm4.

I only fear that this is manifestation of a wider phenomenon when new software developers are unable to maintain software created by old software developers. If that is so, they will try to simplify the software to what they can actually maintain and rewrite it into a form in which they can maintain it.

If i assume this is true, then all of this is annoying, but actually makes sense: Wayland is simpler than X11, so people will tend to maintain Wayland-related software rather than X11-related. Rust won't let unskilled coders to make some mistakes, so from their point of view it is going to be simpler to rewrite something in Rust.

Although, goodbye network-transparency, goodbye performance, goodbye stability. Oh well, but it's that time of the year.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-28 15:00:03+00:00
>2) LLMs are extremely useful right now for certain niche tasks, especially software engineering.

Don't get lost in the tech scene sauce, programming is a small sliver of what people are using LLMs for. OpenAI's report in September pegged it at ~4% of tokens being for software generation. Sure Anthropic is probably 80% or something, but only a small sliver of LLM users are using Anthropic.

The question is if regular people will pay cell phone level subscription costs ($70-$100/mo) for LLMs. If so, then we are probably not in a bubble, and the ROI will have a 5-10 yr horizon, which is totally tenable.

500,000,000 people paying $75/mo is $450B/yr. Yeah, chinese models, but look at what they did to tiktok. No way they are going to let the Chinese government be peoples confidants.
by estsauver | 2026-01-28 15:00:35+00:00
I think it's actually already there. It's definitely possible to make these sorts of explainers with something like a Claude Code, you just have to spend a fair amount of time making sure that it's actually doing what you expect it to do. I think the biggest danger with something like a Claude Code is that you get something that looks functionally correct but that the details are suddenly wrong on. I wrote a little bit about this on my blog for some of the places that I've done visualizations actually, and I think it's remarkably easy to iterate on them now.

https://estsauver.com/blog/scaling-visualizations
by Aurornis | 2026-01-28 15:00:36+00:00
> the meta-skill of learning to use the LLM depreciates too. Today's LLM is gonna go away someday, the way you have to use it will change. You will be on a forever treadmill, always learning the vagaries of using the new shiny model (and paying for the privilege!)

I haven’t found this to be true at all, at least so far.

As models improve I find that I can start dropping old tricks and techniques that were necessary to keep old models in line. Prompts get shorter with each new model improvement.

It’s not really a cycle where you’re re-learning all the time or the information becomes outdated. The same prompt structure techniques are usually portable across LLMs.
by skylurk | 2026-01-28 15:00:44+00:00
You are not wrong, but for this example you can do something like this to run in threads:

import polars as pl

pl.DataFrame({"a": [1, 2, 3]}).write_parquet("test.parquet")

def print_shape(df: pl.DataFrame) -> pl.DataFrame:
print(df.shape)
return df

lazy_frames = [
pl.scan_parquet("test.parquet").map_batches(print_shape) for _ in range(100)
]
pl.collect_all(lazy_frames, comm_subplan_elim=False)

(comm_subplan_elim is important)