MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Loughla | 2026-01-07 17:06:20+00:00
That definitely brings an experience from college into focus for me. We were cleaning out the back room and came across a luggage set that had slipped behind some shelves and was missed for like 3 years. It was originally priced at $400 but was so old or was clearanced at $40. I bought it, thanking my lucky stars that we had luggage for our upcoming honeymoon.

About a week later, loss prevention called me in and asked me a ton of questions about the luggage and how it came to be behind the shelves. It was before I worked there so I had no idea. The whole thing seemed weird to me at the time. Now it makes sense. Wild.
by eru | 2026-01-07 17:06:21+00:00
> inflation is by definition a reduction in the purchasing power of a fixed wage

So what? Nominal wages can go up just fine. They do that all the time.

> it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money

No. That would only be true, if economic actors were too stupid to anticipate expected inflation. People ain't that stupid.
by hollandburke | 2026-01-07 17:06:31+00:00
Author of the post here.

I appreciate the spirited debate and I agree with most of it - on both sides. It's a strange place to be where I think both arguments for and against this case make perfect sense. All I have to go on then is my personal experience, which is the only objective thing I've got. This entire profession feels stochastic these days.

A few points of clarification...

1. I don't speak for anyone but myself. I'm wrong at least half the time so you've been warned.

2. I didn't use any fancy workflows to build these things. Just used dictation to talk to GitHub Copilot in VS Code. There is a custom agent prompt toward the end of the post I used, but it's mostly to coerce Opus 4.5 into using subagents and context7 - the only MCP I used. There is no plan, implement - nothing like that. On occasion I would have it generate a plan or summary, but no fancy prompt needed to do that - just ask for it. The agent harness in VS Code for Opus 4.5 is remarkably good.

3. When I say AI is going to replace developers, I mean that in the sense that it will do what we are doing now. It already is for me. That said, I think there's a strong case that we will have more devs - not less. Think about it - if anyone with solid systems knowledge can build anything, the only way you can ship more differentiating features than me is to build more of them. That is going to take more people, not more agents. Agents can only scale as far as the humans who manage them.

New account because now you know who I am :)
by instagib | 2026-01-07 17:06:42+00:00
This is how controversial things get introduced. People who are not going for re-election, retiring, or were recently instated will be forgotten versus the party as a whole.

Look at the shutdown vote and other consequential votes where they need to reach across party lines.

It does get conversations going though and could be re-introduced again soon.

She or others can get some good deals from their party to push bills, votes, or speeches in exchange for donations or speaking venues.
Show HN: ZK-auctions – experimenting with zero-knowledge sealed-bid auctions
by ndrwnaguib | 2026-01-07 17:06:43+00:00
I wanted to share a small research / engineering project I’ve been working on: zk-auctions, an experiment in building sealed-bid auctions using zero-knowledge proofs.

The basic idea is to let participants submit bids privately, then prove (in zero knowledge) that the auction was evaluated correctly without revealing losing bids. The current implementation uses RISC Zero to generate proofs and explores different auction mechanics and constraints. It’s very much an exploration of the design space rather than a production-ready system.

This project was supported by a grant from the Ethereum Foundation (Privacy, Scaling, and Explorations team), which helped make the experimentation possible — grateful for that support.

Code and documentation are here:
https://github.com/ndrwnaguib/zk-auctions

Happy to answer questions or hear thoughts, especially from folks who’ve worked on zk systems, auctions, or verifiable computation.
by immibis | 2026-01-07 17:06:59+00:00
I was disappointed this wasn't about how money itself works - instead it's about various financial arrangements you can use to scam people.

There's a lot of stuff to talk about with how money works! Like, when I use my Visa card issued by a New Zealand branch of an Australian bank to buy something in Europe, there are zillions of moving parts there.

The fact that money doesn't actually move internationally but yet appears to, and the fact that currency exchange can be done despite that. And that 60% of everything is backed by US dollars (rapidly dropping now). How bank transfers work with and without a common central bank; the different mechanisms countries set up to streamline them.

And, the fact that it's not really centrally controlled, and anyone (like Satoshi Nakamoto) can make a currency and there's not really anything a government can do to prevent currencies it doesn't like, and despite that we do mostly have one government-issued currency per country.
by Jiro | 2026-01-07 17:07:15+00:00
This article is nonsense. It's taking advantage of the fact that the problems with LLMs are being described with very broad wording, and then noticing that you can fit human behavior into those descriptions because of how broadly they are worded.

It's like getting a gorilla to fly an airplane, noticing that it crashed the airplane, and saying "humans sometimes crash airplanes too". Both gorillas and humans do things that fit into the broad category "crash an airplane" but the details and circumstances are different.
by dns_snek | 2026-01-07 17:07:23+00:00
> Also, when you have an LLM that is too agreeable...

It's not a question of whether an LLM should be agreeable or argumentative. It should aim to be correct - it should be agreeable about subjective details and matters of taste, it should be argumentative when the user is wrong about a matter of fact or made an error, and it should be inquisitive and capable of actually re-evaluating a stance in a coherent and logically sound manner when challenged by the user instead of either "digging in" or just blindly agreeing.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-07 17:07:24+00:00
Man, I wanted to like Teams folder mounts.. what a mess.

Aside: WTF isn't the Teams wiki using markdown files you can edit and sync locally? I mean if this has changed since I last tried, cool... but that's the single biggest thing I wanted from this. Now, I just put a _docs directory into my projects and have markdown files in there sync'd to the git repo... I've given up on files in teams for the most part.

Also with teams, splitting up chats and meating chats is a pain... the "activity" indicator doesn't tell you WTF subtab for chat something is in now. I used to at least halfway like teams if you avoided (over)using features, now it's just a craptastic mess.
by tracyspacy | 2026-01-07 17:07:33+00:00
## Implementation Details

I'm using a 64-bit layout:

- Bits 63-51: Quiet NaN signature (0x7FFC...)
- Bits 50-18: 32-bit payload (integers, string pool indices, etc.)
- Bits 17-3: Unused/ (15 bits)
- Bits 2-0: 3-bit type tag

So it allows me to have 5 tagged types: `TRUE_VAL`, `FALSE_VAL`, `STRING_VAL`, `CALLDATA_VAL`, `U32_VAL`

This is for a domain-specific VM I'm building for programmable task management (think "Vim for todo apps" - small core with scriptable behaviors). The VM is stack-based with:

- String pooling (indices stored as NaN-boxed values)
- Instruction pooling (bytecode reuse)
- Call stack for task instructions execution.
by 112233 | 2026-01-07 17:07:36+00:00
Mounting WebDAV -- if you are in a situation, where you have to do it (e.g. own^W^W^Wnextcloud) is such an adventure. Everything - mac, win, linux - supports WebDAV. You mount and it works! Then you notice HOW it works: files are downloaded in full before program can access them, some operations are super slow, some fail or time out, plaintext credentials in mysterious places...

I heard DeltaV is very advanced, and Subversion supported it. I'm afraid to ask.
by theamk | 2026-01-07 17:07:48+00:00
> The results show that about 30% of these 2,000 "mediocre" books are rated as literarily important or of high quality according to other criteria—for example, whether they are considered classics, are part of education or have had great cultural significance.

I am not surprised. I found that a lot of books that are considered classics and were required reading in high school are very boring... I would not call them "good read" at all, and I would not recommend them to anyone else.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-07 17:07:55+00:00
More or less, this is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children debate. It'd be nice to always be able to learn the best known things up front, it's not usually a particularly practical approach to learning a complex field.

I.e. planting a terrible idea is alright so long as by the end the terrible idea was able to be replaced down the line in less time than trying to learn everything "correctly" from the get go. The latter part is where I felt the class failed, it held on to bad idea through the end instead of quickly replacing it with the "next level" of conceptual thinking.
by troupo | 2026-01-07 17:08:29+00:00
> ou were the one complaining about how the tools aren't giving you the results you expected.

They are not giving me the results people claim they give. It is distinctly different from not giving the results I want.

> If you're using these tools daily and having a hard time, either you're working on something very different from the bulk of people using the tools and your problems or legitimate, or you aren't and it's a skill issue.

Indeed. And your rational/friendly discourse that you claim you're having would start with trying to figure that out. Did you? No, you didn't. You immediately assumed your opponent is a clueless idiot who is somehow against AI and is incapable or learning or something.

> If you want to take politeness as being patronizing, I'm happy to stop bothering.

No. It's not politeness. It's smugness. You literally started your interaction in this thread with a "git gud or else" and even managed to complain later that "you dislike it when they attack your use of AI as a skill issue". While continuously attacking others.

> you don't seem like a pleasant human being to interact with

Says the person who has contributed nothing to the conversation except his arrogance, smugness, holier-than-thou attitude, engaged in nothing but personal attacks, complained about non-existent grievances and when called out on this behavior completed his "friendly and rational discourse" with a "fuck you".

Well, fuck you, too.

Adieu.
by troupo | 2026-01-07 17:08:33+00:00
I get by because I also have long-term memory, and experience, and I can learn. LLMs have none of that, and every new session is rebuilding the world anew.

And even my short-term memory is significantly larger than the at most 50% of the 200k-token context window that Claude has. It runs out of context before my short-term memory is probably not even 1% full, for the same task (and I'm capable of more context-switching in the meantime).

And so even the "Opus 4.5 really is at a new tier" runs into the very same limitations all models have been running into since the beginning.
by xtiansimon | 2026-01-07 17:08:34+00:00
And electronic mouth to taste water.

Residents in Bethpage, NY are dealing with Grumman water contamination or “plume”.

https://youtu.be/vgezHCoqiUo?si=1wn7Grt8vpAnzJ_Z

I live on Long Island and drink well water. I’d sure like a home monitor.
by girzel | 2026-01-07 17:08:38+00:00
It is a practice that leads, as a consequence, to insight. Insight is not information that might be read from a book, it is experience that uses observation to arrive at understanding and transformation. You can't just "decide to have" the experience without doing the work of transforming yourself through observation. People who have gone far in the practice do tend to say that there was never any goal to begin with, that they ended up where they started, but that's more of a metaphor than anything else. Someone who travels around the world and ends up where they started is in a very different place than someone who never left home.
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-07 17:08:54+00:00
Gnome options have a habit of disappearing. I've followed the project from its conception to the current iteration, used v1 and v2 interchangeably with KDE and eventually moved to Xmonad with whatever applications I need. Gnome 1 was hackish and geeky, Gnome 2 polished off the hackishness and turned an ugly but promising duckling into a fully-functional duck. Then came v3 and with that the opinionated paring-down of options started for real. It became almost obligatory to install one or more 'gnome tweaks' tools to make things work as they used to. Strangely enough this quest for 'simplicity' has forced many Gnome users to (re)turn to hackish tools like gnome-tweaks to make their computers works like they want as opposed to the way the Gnome team insists they should work.
by dadlerj | 2026-01-07 17:08:58+00:00
Introducing tin, an open-source VCS for AI coding conversations, and my holiday hack project https://github.com/dadlerj/tin

Today, all real design work happens in conversations with AI agents, and those conversations disappear into local caches. tin turns those threads into first-class, version-controlled artifacts, permanently linked to the code they produced.

tin retains the human thinking behind the code, the history of decisions that led to the code, and the provenance of the code. It provides a structural linkage between agent conversations and code changes.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-07 17:09:16+00:00
>haven't got a grip on what intelligence actually is

Because intelligence isn't a thing, it's a bunch of different things that some intelligent things have more or less (or none of).

This is why measures of intelligence always fail because we try to binary it which doesn't work. Intelligence is spikey. Intelligence scales from very small and dumb to very smart. But even the things that are very smart on a lot of things still do very dumb things. We also measure human intelligence as a function of all humans and LLM intelligence on a particular model.

So yea, this is why nothing seems to make sense.
by bullen | 2026-01-07 17:09:20+00:00
It's still flakey, but with the open panthor driver things are working well.

It's usable as is.

By the time linux catches up hardware might be very expensive or missing completely.

So my thinking is buy now, use as is, and maybe later we get better software... The point is the 3588 can actually replace my X86 desktop for ALL purposes except Unity/Unreal which I am glad to not run.
by sib | 2026-01-07 17:10:05+00:00
>> The climate controls should be physical buttons.

So, if I'm using physical buttons, how do I set the temperature to 24° (75° for US-folks) without looking away from the road?

Or set the radio to 106.9MHz? Or the cruise control to 88km/h (55mph)?

In all cases, I still need to look at an indicator.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-07 17:10:38+00:00
Maybe! I could certainly see something like the firmware switches on something way heavier that pulls down an already marginal supply.

Remember the very early Raspberry Pis that had the polyfuses that dropped a little too much voltage from the "5V" supply, so a combination of shitty phone charger, shitty charging cable, and everything just being a little too warm/cold/wrong kind of moonlight would just make them not boot at all?
by ericmay | 2026-01-07 17:10:38+00:00
It's a little of both but the built environment is the primary issue.

We have neighbors - sometimes we need someone to grab a package, or we make too much food and we share, &c. or we run into each other walking to a restaurant or through the park. But this isn't the norm. We live in a neighborhood built before the introduction of cars, so homes are built a little bit closer together, but not too close, and we have mixed-use developments and a good level of density to support restaurants and other amenities.

You can't have spontaneous interactions like that easily in the United States because we build too much sprawl, visiting people or showing up to a bar requires a drive, and in the end you wind up just staying at home participating in surrogate activities like social media.

It really comes down solely to cars and car-only infrastructure that degrades our social interactions to an extreme extent.

-edit-

I do want to mention, at least when I was a kid/teenager I recall we used to show up to people's houses uninvited/unannounced too. But we did not talk to our neighbors. That was a weird thing. There are some cultural things here. But also even if we wanted to visit someone, well, gotta hop in the car. Maybe stop and get gas, and the next thing you know, eh it's too much effort. Might as way stay home. That's kind of how that works. The car-only model that is implemented in most of America, particularly the cities not so much rural areas, is a leading cause of cultural and social malaise I believe in the West.
by vaultsandbox | 2026-01-07 17:10:49+00:00
I get the concern. WeKan is a great example of why licensing boundaries matter.

That is exactly why I licensed the SDKs and the Frontend as MIT. Since the gateway is a standalone service and your application only links to the MIT-licensed SDK, there is no risk of infection. Your code stays MIT, it just talks to an AGPL service over the network.

I wanted the gateway to be protected (AGPL) while making integration (MIT) zero-risk for any project. The gateway should be self-contained and equal for my open-source version and the commercial solution that uses the gateway instead of building on it.

Thanks for the insight!
by tracker1 | 2026-01-07 17:10:56+00:00
I am pretty sure we'll see Desktop Linux in the US cross the 10% mark this year... however, I don't think it will get much higher without first party sales support from OEMs. Most people don't change their OS and just use what came with it, which today is mostly Windows or MacOS.

I'd really love if some vendors would license Pop from System76 for more, broader hardware support. I think it's just about the best out of the box experience in Linux for most users.
by NovemberWhiskey | 2026-01-07 17:11:09+00:00
"Soft" realtime just means that you have a time-utility function that doesn't step-change to zero at an a priori deadline. Virtually everything in the real world is at least a soft realtime system.

I don't disagree with you that it's a realtime problem, I do however think that "just" is doing a lot of work there.
by kypro | 2026-01-07 17:11:30+00:00
You shouldn't trust the messengers of "the science", however the science speaks for it's self.

I got really into reading about nutritional science a few years ago and there's a surprising amount of stuff which people don't think is bad for them which probably is. Eating 3 meals a day with snacking between meals is probably a significant contributor to diabetes and CVD, for example. Yet a lot of people believe it's unhealthy or strange to only eat once a day.

Similarly fruit drinks are bad when a lot of people think they are good, and we probably over empathise problems with "red meat" these days – the main risks with there are more specifically with processed red meats like sausages and also how the meat is cooked.

If people care about their health they should be curious enough to ask questions and read scientific papers themselves.
by wtcactus | 2026-01-07 17:11:37+00:00
This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer sends Jerry’s broken video player in the mail to claim the postal service broke it and get money for it.

“It’s a write off Jerry. It costs them nothing. They just write it off!”

Of course that Kramer also didn’t had any idea of what a “write off” was. He was also just throwing words around to justify theft.
by bombcar | 2026-01-07 17:11:41+00:00
Yep, anywhere clearance is handled by "computer" and not someone physically noting and putting a sticker on it you have this happening.

If you find something wedged behind a shelf it's sometimes a customer just putting something back where it doesn't belong, other times it's the long-con.

Some stores won't clearance below a certain point because of this; they'd rather ship pallets off at 20% "loss" to an outlet broker than enable clearance shrinkage.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-07 17:11:54+00:00
> But those are my criteria

Correct, I'm just saying that I think your criteria supports my opinion. As you say, we disagree about this. Fair enough. I'm not telling anyone not to use OneDrive. We all make that sort of decision for ourselves.

All I'm saying is that OneDrive hosed me in a terrible way, so I'm no longer willing to risk using it. Particularly since it doesn't really address any need I have and if I did have such a need, there are better tools (for me) available.

The other dangerous tools you've mentioned haven't ever burned me.
by 10xDev | 2026-01-07 17:12:21+00:00
Calories are fake.

I am saying this as someone very much in shape. I can do 20 pull ups and 30 dips non-stop. I weigh myself every morning. I am big on seafood and typically eat clean. I still gain body fat on days I work out if I ever dare snack on anything. You have to be incredibly strict because I have no idea what they are putting in some of these things anymore.

It is even worse than statistics tell you because BMI will put people in the green even if they are visibly overweight because they have little muscle mass.

Edit: of course someone probably out of shape will downvote.
by aldarion | 2026-01-07 17:12:28+00:00
"Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients?"

Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.

Obesity really exploded when consumption shifted from butter towards margarine and vegetable oils:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consump...

If anything, consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is the issue:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...

But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2026-01-07 17:12:30+00:00
I will admit that a level of fatigue has reached me as well. I am not even sure what would be an appropriate remedy at this point. My information has been all over the place given multiple breaches the past few years ( and, I might add, my kid's info too as we visited a hospital for her once ).

Anyway, short of collapsing current data broker system, I am not sure what the answer is. Experian debacle showed us they are too politically entrenched to be touched by regular means.

At this point, I am going through life assuming most of my data is up for grabs. That is not a healthy way to live though.