MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by squeedles | 2026-01-03 23:11:13+00:00
I have a digital archive of photos going back to the 1930s, and have physical archives of negatives and slides preserved properly. Not everything is scanned, but it will probably remain on my "to do" list permanently. B/W 114 negs from my grandfather contain many unidentified and unidentifiable people, but there are also views of where I grew up 90 years ago.

I agree with you that a certain portion of images are no longer meaningful, but it's tough to say a-priori what those are. So keep them all. The real problem is that photos often have notes on the back, but digital images rarely have any metadata.

I foresaw this problem back in 2002 and have been using a time-oriented naming convention and keeping little XML files with notes. I posted a little rant about it back in the day and made some simple tooling, which has been good enough to keep some basic notes with my photos.

https://pixtag.org/
by array_key_first | 2026-01-03 23:11:26+00:00
> A much larger portion of programmers have meaningful experience writing python than perl or php

Yes, I would agree, and this has value. But if you're in the position of making the decision of what to use and you know both, then that changes things. It's the same thing with Bash. Lots of people, and sysadmins, know bash, so they write bash. But bash is still not the optimal choice for, I'd say, 90% of the stuff it's chosen for. And it's a self-eating beast. Shoving bash where it doesn't go only strengthens it's grip. You're feeding the gremlin, you know?

> Just avoid external dependencies and use /usr/bin/python

I think this is easier said than done and it's also partially cultural. I have seen many, many system scripts that assume a very recent version of python AND assume a bunch of python libraries. This is bad, and people need to stop doing this. At least have the decency to bundle the libraries or, better yet, statically link them using C or C++ or Rust or Zig or whatever. And if that seems overkill to people, I think that means they haven't considered what they're actually doing and if they even need those external libraries.

Bash has this problem, too, and much worse, because it just calls system utilities. So it assumes a very specific running environment.

Anyway, all of that being said, if you're not using any libs than maybe Python is fine, if you know the systems you're targeting will have Python. If not though, I stand by Perl. Just use 5.10 or whatever and boom, that shit will run truly anywhere.
by coffeecoders | 2026-01-03 23:11:33+00:00
I’ve been vibe-coding replacements for the tools I actually use every day. So far: a Notepad, a REST client, a snipping tool, a local gallery and lightweight notes for iPhone.

The motivation isn't novelty. It's control. I don't need ads, onboarding flows and popups, AI sidebars, bloated menus, unnecessary network calls , etc. A notepad should never touch the network. A REST client shouldn’t ship analytics or auto update itself mid-request.

No plugin system. No extensibility story. Just plain/simple software.

As I build these, I have been realizing how much cognitive overhead we’ve normalized in exchange for very little utility.
by w10-1 | 2026-01-03 23:11:46+00:00
While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding.

So some possible reasons:

- Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.

- Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messaging to over-eager users.

- Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is viewed as being too easy to scam

- Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript and devops churn.

- Community: tight job markets make people less community-oriented

Some non-reasons:

- Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist).
by Avicebron | 2026-01-03 23:11:50+00:00
Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed.

AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions).

SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?
by IshKebab | 2026-01-03 23:11:54+00:00
They're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this should have been a question instead of a discussion".

Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.
by adrum | 2026-01-03 23:12:42+00:00
I also wonder if GitHub Discussions was also a (minor) contributing factor to the decline. I recall myself using GitHub Discussions more and more when it came to repo specific issues.

The timeline also matches:

https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...

https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-discus...
by opminion | 2026-01-03 23:13:08+00:00
Not as described. But I would appreciate a connection with certain brands that have helped me solve a problem in the past.
I wish I could go to the same shop and tell them "this was the solution back then, give me the latest iteration".
For example: Moto G phone, Brother laser printer, Gap jeans, Geox cordless shoes. Don't waste any money trying to sell to me, just tell me what you have when I need to replace the previous one.
by etamponi | 2026-01-03 23:13:43+00:00
I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road.

Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (actually Iceberg) website that gave me the final fix.

This is to say that LLMs might be more friendly. But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.

Not sure why someone is thinking this is a good thing.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-03 23:13:44+00:00
It's hard to believe there are people that think letters in an IP have a meaningful impact.

"edgy"? Come on.

And if they used decimal I bet the complaints they didn't use hex would be just as loud and just as certain, since an IP address in dotted decimal is 50% longer than in hex.

On top of that, hex would make IPv4 a lot easier to use because of how subnets get optimized. Instead of constantly rounding to weird multiples of 8 or 16 or 32 you'd only have to deal with one hex digit at a time. And in most deployments you could skip the address math entirely by sizing your subnets 4 bits at a time: /16, /20, /24, /28.
by shmerl | 2026-01-03 23:13:46+00:00
> Warfare is not the only option

If one side is already engaged in warfare, then yes, it's the only option. But of course Putin wants everyone to immediately capitulate and of course he would say that fighting back shouldn't be an option. Who besides his Axis Sallies would repeat such idea though?

And if you are looking for war mongering, look no further than Putin himself.

History always puts things in their place and Putin will end up like his role model from WW II too.
by markhahn | 2026-01-03 23:14:40+00:00
Dredging is immoral - so incredibly destructive to the ecosystem. Do you harvest apples by bulldozing the orchard and sifting out the fruit? It's bad enough that so much of our farming is still based on tilling.

I don't really understand why nodule gathering isn't already done - just with some kind of robotic fingers or aimed suction devices. It's not as if nodules are hard to discriminate. Sure, there would be some interesting engineering challenges to operating equipment at scale in that environment, but it's undergrad-engineering-club-level, not rocket science...
by dm03514 | 2026-01-03 23:15:01+00:00
TurboOps.io - a workflow engine for humans!

https://turboops.io/platform/public-tracker

Our first offering is a tracker for makers, small businesses and contractors to show job status. Create a real time status page for your products, build trust and reduce customer inquiries.

We’re working on email notification support right now and have evidence (tracking numbers, job pictures, contracts/documents, etc) support coming next week!
by alexwasserman | 2026-01-03 23:15:09+00:00
I've very carefully hoarded photos. I don't miss the photos, but I really miss the meta-data, more-so for scanned real photos. I loved photography back in the day, and so took a lot of film photos. Even having scanned them in I've ended up with meta-data around the scan or import date, rather than actual data.

And, anything from a digital camera will be missing things like GPS location, which phones include and I think is great. I've used location search so many times to find photos. I can't always remember when we went somewhere, but pretty often someone will ask about a photo from a trip to X place, and then location search finds it easily.

Photos themselves have bounced between iPhoto, Aperture, Photos, etc but largely remained intact.

The library is backed up to the usual 3 places: a local server (nightly rsync to a ZFS array), stored in iCloud, and in Backblaze, so hopefully safe. And of course, all are on my laptop too.
by ben_w | 2026-01-03 23:15:11+00:00
From what I've heard, "primary residence" is a different issue, something along the line of US banks asking this at time of issue and never checking about updates.

Saying the property is worth more or less than it is… I don't know how this would even happen. The countries in which I've looked at mortgages, the banks don't give an option for a self-assessment. Is the US not like that? Or is it specifically a thing for getting a loan secured on a property that you already own rather than a new purchase?
by johnnyfived | 2026-01-03 23:15:27+00:00
I vibe coded https://domainhq.ai entirely in a few days with Opus, as in, this was a secondary focus and I never bothered to write any specs. Halfway through I had to ask it to convert it all to React because it was vanilla HTML and I didn't realize (that is not a flex).

I have a .ai domain that I feel is somewhat premium, and seemed to be getting lowball offers from domain brokers. And those I spoke to didn't seem like they were very up-to-date with market news and trends. Exploring services like Namebio were very limited and expensive; the subscription usage for building this was less than the price of a monthly membership (the domain is a different story!).

Domainhq.ai suggested its own domain to buy with its brainstorm feature, and tracks domain sales and expired domains, with reports generated by Claude as it perpetually analyzes price history over time.

The domain was a bit of an investment but I do like it, and the app itself is running 24-7 on a spare Macbook I wasn't using, so I plan to host it myself without paying for cloud servers, and the LLM features are using my personal subscription rather than API credits.

I do plan to add registrations and paid subscriptions (at a fair price, and will make things robust then); I get the irony here, but I also encourage anybody else who needs a niche tool to play around with their own vibe coding sessions to get something usable. Stuff like this does make me question the longevity of tech as a stable career.
by 8organicbits | 2026-01-03 23:15:32+00:00
It's unfortunate that SO hasn't found a way to leverage LLMs. Lots of questions benefit from some initial search, which is hard enough that moderators likely felt frustrated with actual duplicates, or close enough duplicates, and LLMs seem able to assist. However I hope we don't lose the rare gem answers that SO also had, those expert responses that share not just a programming solution but deeper insight.
by frozenlettuce | 2026-01-03 23:15:38+00:00
Last month I worked on some new features (like unlocking units) and some fixes to my browser autobattler https://lfarroco.itch.io/mana-battle .
I've been working on adding an async PVP mode to it (using Supabase db and edge functions), should be up in the next few weeks.
Learned a lot about shipping Electron apps and using shaders with webgl, might write a blog post about it later
by nsdc | 2026-01-03 23:15:49+00:00
[PALTOWN Development Foundation] | Full Stack Developer - HIPAA Project | Remote | Contract $35-50K

Cancer patient support and education nonprofit needs experienced full-stack dev for meaningful 10-12 week contract.

PROJECT: Build secure, mobile-friendly front-end for Airtable database with SSO integration (Hivebrite), (potentially) HIPAA-compliant AWS hosting with BAA, and PDF export functionality.

STACK: Your recommendation (we prefer React/Vue + Node.js/Python, AWS with HIPAA compliance)

REQUIREMENTS:
* HIPAA-compliant app development experience
* SSO/IdP implementation
* AWS with Business Associate Agreement setup
* Airtable API integration
* Clear communication with non-technical stakeholders

SCALE: Small, includes de-identified patient information, straightforward data interface

WHY IT MATTERS: Help cancer patients find treatment options that could extend their lives.

Details here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z8fWTmDHJndBDH11sz8_707B...
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-03 23:16:26+00:00
> Do you harvest apples by bulldozing the orchard and sifting out the fruit?

Isn't this how we harvest cranberries?

> don't really understand why nodule gathering isn't already done - just with some kind of robotic fingers or aimed suction devices

The nodules may facilitate some weird deep-sea electrolysis that lets these ecosystems respire. Removing the nodules delicately is better than dredging. But it may still be a death sentence.
by chrsw | 2026-01-03 23:17:27+00:00
For me, my usage of SO started declining as LLMs rose. Occasionally I still end up there, usually because a chat response referenced a SO thread. I was willing to put up with the toxicity as long as the site still had technical value for me.

But still, machines leave me wanting. Where do people go to ask real humans novel technical questions these days?
by ThreatSystems | 2026-01-03 23:17:56+00:00
I'm building a training platform for cyber security and secure development practices. Mainly to address the junior to mid engineer gaps of "depth" across general cyber security and software engineering skills. I've encountered quite a few folk who have surface level knowledge but when having to problem solve production ready problems are blocked quite quickly, it's depth of knowledge which is missing. If anyone is interested reach out in a preview / providing some thoughts, reach out - my emails in my profile!
by mothballed | 2026-01-03 23:18:44+00:00
The US has sent nun rapers all across Latin America, puppet leaders, outright military takeovers, and everything in-between. The people we make enemies with haven't forgiven us for all those things, and I can't imagine there is much remaining unaccounted overlap between people that disagreed with all the other stuff, and those who were ok with the other stuff but not this.

This is one of those weird moments where I have a hard time wondering what new people we can even piss off that somehow weren't already against us from prior LA incursions.
by ben_w | 2026-01-03 23:18:50+00:00
That's not what I said.

There's ways to invest in stocks that are not cheating, for example.

Or, you know, they might have done what I myself am doing right now and be landlords. That's not cheating. Or at least, I don't think it is, I don't know what the Chinese government considers it to be, what with communism and all.

For this context: cheating is in the sense of "large bets where the cost of failure will be paid by the state and yet they get to keep the profits in the event of success": I think that if any of them have made such bets, those bets have paid off. I think that if any such bet had been made and failed, it would have been noticed by people outside China.

As I said:

From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".

Key parts: "from the outside", and "appears".

In the event they make a bet and it fails and we spot it, that specific chain is what would make it cease to "appear" to be so "from the outside".
by gnabgib | 2026-01-03 23:19:09+00:00
Just discussed 8 days ago (133 points, 96 comments) albeit about a core:os post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389925

2024 (104 points, 102 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38836512

2022 (90 points, 43 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394000
by ikawe | 2026-01-03 23:19:09+00:00
Transit routing is provided by OpenTripPlanner, so the deployment artifact is their OTP serialized graph format.

So it’s not really incremental with respect to the existing transit zone deployment. I just mean I can redeploy a single transit zone with the latest GTFS without having to touch the other transit zones, tileserver, geocoder, etc.

Deployment/rollback is handled by k8s config.
by RomanPushkin | 2026-01-03 23:19:10+00:00
https://interviewcop.com - let me know what you think. The idea is that we have so many cheating apps that it hurts both businesses and legit software engineers like myself. I'm trying to solve this problem and make interviews great again. I'm looking for sales cofounder and funding. I have a demo that works like a charm, and I'm very close to rolling this out.
by gcanyon | 2026-01-03 23:19:53+00:00
I say this out of genuine surprise, not judgment -- I never would have guessed that native Typescript is significantly faster than native Python. To be fair, I don't know if "significantly" is justified. I get that Typescript is typed (heh) and Python is not, but compared to my daily driver language (also not typed) Python is so much faster that I subconsciously think of typing as not being the major performance unlock. But I guess once you optimize the rest, typing is (nearly) the final boss of performance.
by chowells | 2026-01-03 23:20:04+00:00
You've described three different features with three different sets of semantics. Which set of semantics is honored? Unknown!

This is not software engineering. This is an appeal to faith. Software engineering requires precise semantics, not whatever the compiler feels like doing. You can't even declare that this feature has no semantics, because it actually introduces a vector for UB. This is the sort of "feature" that should not be in any language selling itself as an improved C. It would be far better to reduce the scope to the point where the feature can have precise semantics.
by solenoid0937 | 2026-01-03 23:21:14+00:00
Of course each of these countries are ignoring international law in various respects and doing things in their self interest.

Anything as brazen as capturing a president? Not yet. But I can absolutely see them doing this if they deem the cost/benefit great enough.

I wouldn't be surprised if China goes further and launches a full-scale invasion of Taiwan in the next decade, they've certainly been preparing for it according to our intel.
by delichon | 2026-01-03 23:21:30+00:00
It must have looked like Stack Overflow had a big lead that gave them a big network-effect that they could take to the bank. Instead it followed Friendster. The actual vulnerability of a big network is an encouraging sign for creative destruction. X, Google, Facebook, et al. may be more collapsible than they look.

I keep hoping that the technology has advanced enough to make it practical to do with decentralized protocols.
by metalman | 2026-01-03 23:21:32+00:00
oh no!, some tedious beurocratic "legal" definition of child abuse would have to be amended, and therby threaten certain agencies who consider child abuse to be under there sole, authority.
Children are dying, and bieng lured into any and all ilegal activities, the main platforms are targeting children for every reason, but with pictures of puppys and buterfly's and sing song characters that then segue into the darkest corners of the internet, 3 redirects away, any time, anywhere
by echelon | 2026-01-03 23:21:36+00:00
Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community.

Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up.

No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO heavy-handed moderation memes.

Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer.

You would be able to see which questions were too long-tail or difficult for the AI to answer, and humans could jump in to patch things up. This could be gamified with points.

This would serve as fantastic LLM training material for local LLMs. The authors of the site could put in a clause saying that "training is allowed as long as you publish your weights + model".

Someone please build this.

Edit: Removed "LLMs did not kill Stack Overflow." first sentence as suggested. Perhaps that wasn't entirely accurate, and the rest of the argument stands better on its own legs.
by strenholme | 2026-01-03 23:21:47+00:00
Good riddance to bad rubbish (TLDR: Questions are now almost never being asked on Stack overflow).

The most annoying example I can think of (but can’t link to, alas) is when I Googled for an answer to a technical question, and got an annoying Stack Overflow answer which didn’t answer the question, telling the person to just Google the answer.
by taikon | 2026-01-03 23:22:07+00:00
I'm making a concave split ergonomic keyboard that we plan to run a clinical trial on for hand/wrist RSI. Was originally planning on releasing it in Jan but it's getting delayed until sometime in March. Concurrently waiting on ethics board approval to run a preclinical trail for when it's ready.

https://taiko.taikohub.com
by kidandcat | 2026-01-03 23:22:07+00:00
I rely on Telegram authentication (when you setup it, your telegram user ID is saved in a config file and any message not from your user ID is ignored).

Each person setup will be different, but in my case my telegram account is more important than my computer. I have important info and messages there, and on the other side, for any dangerous action on my computer, you will need OTP codes, passwords which I keep secure in Proton Pass, etc.
by vbezhenar | 2026-01-03 23:22:12+00:00
It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me.
by pzo | 2026-01-03 23:22:34+00:00
not only corporate but also many small shops still running some dedicated software for PoS. Maybe wine will work but it's a lot of hassle still and too risky for trying something that critical to work for such PoS scenarios. Also not sure if situation changed but at least 5 years ago most ATMs in asia were running windows based on talk with my friend working in this field.