MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by projektfu | 2026-01-12 22:37:19+00:00
When I was a software developer, I mostly griped about this when I wanted to experiment to see if I would even ask my larger enterprise if they would be interested in looking into it. I always felt like companies were killing a useful marketing stream from the enterprise's own employees. I think Tailscale has really nailed it, though. They give away the store to casual users, but make it so that a business will want to talk to sales to get all the features they need with better pricing per user. Small businesses can survive quite well on the free plan.
by zapzupnz | 2026-01-12 22:37:25+00:00
It's a mountain of little things that add up rather than a few killer features.

It's the way drag and drop is a fundamental interaction in text boxes, the proxy icons in title bars, how dragging a file to an open/save panel changes that panel's current folder rather than actually move a file.

It's how applications are just special folders that are treated like files, how they can update themselves independently of each other or any system packages, how you conventionally put them in the /Applications folder so you can put that folder on the Dock to use directly as a launcher.

It's how all text fields consistently support emacs-style keyboard shortcuts, respond appropriately to the system-provided text editing features such as the built-in Edit menu, text substitutions, and writing features.

It's how you can automate most Mac-assed apps; how you can extend the operating system through app-provided and user-created services to every other application that handles text, files, images, PDFs, through the built-in APIs using AppleScript, Automator, and Shortcuts.

It's how the whole program rather than its last window is the fundamental unit of an application such that document-based applications can exist without a window without also polluting some system tray with an unnecessary icon, how that means workflows expect more than one window open.

It's how there's a universal menu that works for every app, not just conforming ones (i.e. KDE's global menu only shows KDE apps' menus; other apps need a plugin or just don't show at all), how the help menu has a search field to look for menu items, how keyboard shortcuts are bound to the menu items are bound arbitrarily within the program's settings window and can thus be assigned globally in System Settings, how this means all of an application's main features are therefore accessible via the menu bar, how that creates consistency in the menus.

Those are just some things off the top of my head but there are plenty of others, some a bit more user facing, some less. Just examples, a non-exhaustive list.

I'm sure those who don't care about these things will dismiss it but if you've been using a Mac since before macOS, before OS X, or even before Mac OS X, these are things you won't drop for Linux just because the design is a bit uglier.

Of course, if none of these things matter, then the swap is easier. It doesn't mean any DE is a drop-in replacement by any means. Many of the things that make some DEs "Mac-like" are skin deep.
by fastasucan | 2026-01-12 22:37:31+00:00
Depends what I mean with large areas? Ever been to Greenland?

Greenland is about 25% of the US excluding Alaska, the ice sheet covers 80% of that.

This means that the ice free area of Greenland is a bit larger than California. Thats the third largest state in the US. I would say that is a large area.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-12 22:37:33+00:00
It's actually not the best at enwik8 or 9.

The results at https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html explicitly add the size of the compressor itself to the result. Note the "enwik9+prog" column. That's what it's ranked on.

The reason to do this is that it's trivial to create a compressor that 'compresses' a file to 0 bytes. Just have an executable with a dictionary of enwik9 that writes that out given any input. So we always measure what is effectively the Kolmogorov complexity. The data+program as a whole that produces the result we want.

So those results add in the compressor size. The programs there generally have no dictionary built in or in the case of LLM based compressors, no pre-trained data. They effectively build the model as they process data. Not compressing much at all at the start and slowly compressing better and better as they go. This is why these programs do better and better with larger data sets. They start with 0 knowledge. After a GB or so they have very good knowledge of the corpus of human language.

This program here however is pre-trained and shipped with a model. It's 150MB in size! This means it has 150MB of extra starting knowledge over those models in that list. The top models in that list are the better compressors, they'll quickly out learn and overtake this compressor but they just don't have that headstart.

Of course measuring fairly this should be listed with that 150MB program size added to the results when doing a comparison.
by ewoodrich | 2026-01-12 22:37:54+00:00
That seems a bit dramatic.

What I learned from all this is that OpenAI is willing to offer a service compatible with my preferred workflow/method of billing and Anthropic clearly is not. That's fine but disappointing, I'm keeping my Codex subscription and letting my Claude subscription lapse but sure, it would be nice if Anthropic changed their mind to keep that option available because yes, I do want it.

I'm a bit perplexed by some comments describing the situation like OpenCode users were getting something for free and stealing from CC users when the plan quota was enforced either way and were paying the same amount for it. Or why you seem to think this post pointing out that Anthropic's direct competitor endorses that method of subscription usage is somehow malicious or manipulative behavior.

Commerce is a two-way street and customers giving feedback/complaining/cancelling when something changes is normal and healthy for competition. As evidenced by OpenAI immediately jumping in to support OpenCode users on Codex without needing to break their TOS.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-12 22:38:39+00:00
Hint: these are not independent, random samplings. Turns out when you eliminate restrictions on campaign finance the people who run corporations, the people who get elected, and the people hired and appointed by those elected all wind up being aligned.

It's like commenting that it's weird everyone in any sort of position of power in Russia just happens to be a Putin supporter.
by behnamoh | 2026-01-12 22:39:00+00:00
> making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc)

I use CC as my harness but switch between third party models thanks to ccs. If Anthropic decided to stop me from using third party models in CC, I wouldn't just go "oh well, let's buy another $200/mo Claude subscription now". No. I'd be like: "Ok, I invested in CC—hooks/skills/whatever—but now let's ask CC to port them all to OpenCode and continue my work there".
by matchagaucho | 2026-01-12 22:39:11+00:00
Credit to the early AI coding startups. They masterfully forked Microsoft VS Code and integrated frontier LLMs into a familiar IDE. Instant audience.

But it was only a matter of time before:
a) Microsoft reclaimed its IDE
b) Frontier model providers reclaimed their models

Sage advice: don’t fill potholes in another company’s roadmap.
by bz_bz_bz | 2026-01-12 22:39:17+00:00
I grew up playing tennis competitively and can't remember a single time someone complained about this. I think only academics consider it a "fairness problem."

Do the authors of this paper also want to rewrite the rules of every American sport that has a "best-of" playoff system (e.g. MLB, NBA, NHL, etc.)?
by protocolture | 2026-01-12 22:39:18+00:00
>So, a belief system.

Nope

>Evidence alone doesn’t produce wisdom. It produces cleverness. Feelings and emotion are faster and vaster in terms of information processing, but provides a very low bandwidth output, basically a gut feeling of “good” or “bad”. Emotion isn’t irrational, it’s pre-verbal compression that contains real insight once it’s unpacked. Most people never unpack it, so an outside observer makes the (incorrect) leap from emotional -> irrational.

Thats a lot of unsubstantiated feels.
by omoikane | 2026-01-12 22:39:51+00:00
Current leader of the Large Text Compression Benchmark is NNCP (compression using neural networks), also by Fabrice Bellard:

https://bellard.org/nncp/

Also, nncp-2024-06-05.tar.gz is just 1180969 bytes, unlike ts_zip-2024-03-02.tar.gz (159228453 bytes, which is bigger than uncompressed enwiki8).
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-12 22:40:15+00:00
The Linux hardening list lists quite some modifications but what hardening is made to SSH compared to a stock config? For Linux they summarize the list of hardened changes but for SSH I couldn't find it.

For SSH it's basically a list of default values with a comment saying "change this if you must". Some summary as to what is hardened compared to a stock SSH install would be nice.
by twoodfin | 2026-01-12 22:40:26+00:00
It’s simpler. Chess is a search through the space of possible moves, looking for a move that’s estimated to be better than the best move you’ve seen so far.

The search is by depth of further moves, and “better” is a function of heuristics (explicit or learned) on the resulting board positions, because most of the time you can’t be sure a move will inevitably result in a win or a loss.

So any particular move evaluation might take more or less time before the algorithm gives up on it—or chooses it as the new winner. To throw a consistent amount of compute at each move, the simple thing to do is give the engine consistent amounts of time per move.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-12 22:40:32+00:00
>Bizarrely, voter turnout among younger people remains low.

in the grand scheme of history, it's not odd. Voter turnout correlates decently with age. It's an anamoly when they do get out and vote, like in 2008.

That's partially an effect of

1. not having compulsory voting

2. needing to actively register in order to be viable to vote, as opposed to simply being delivered a ballot like many other countries

3. the decades of "no politics at the table" policies to help expose the civic duties to the youth. And since it's not a flashy topic to talk about, they won't really bring it up themselves, or simply have non-informed views.

4. careful strategies to try and disenfranchise voters who may otherwise oppose a party. This is what "both sides are the same" does in a system without #1.

Not to mention the proliferation of social targeted media ads changing the landscape and active loopholes used to try and de-register voters. These all hit youth the most to vote a certain way (or not at all).
by tastyface | 2026-01-12 22:40:33+00:00
As a fellow white person: WTF, no. Some white people losing their jobs to "imported people", or someone saying something mean about white people on Twitter, is not in any way comparable to generations of a repressed and segregated ethnic group struggling under the shadow of chattel slavery in a society that actively hates their guts. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts happened in the *mid-sixties* FFS. Remind me when white people got the right to vote?
by Storment33 | 2026-01-12 22:41:18+00:00
Yes there are a few things you can't do locally. But the vast majority of complaints I see 90%+ are for builds/tests etc that should have the same local feedback loops. CI shouldn't be anything special, it should be a 'shell as a service' with some privileged credentials for pushing artefacts.

> Release automation. Test reporting. Artifact upload.

Those I can actually all do locally for my open source projects on GitHub, if I the correct credentials in my env. It is all automated(which I developed/tested locally) but I can break glass if needed.
by bolangi | 2026-01-12 22:41:33+00:00
After first experiences with linux shell scripting, sed, awk, and C in 1990s, I found perl a welcome refuge. Way more featureful than DOS .bat files or BASIC! Its capabilities (perl + cpan) have always well exceeded my need for CS goodness. People do complain about the syntax, oddly, without mentioning the numerous ways perl was designed to make common tasks easy to do. The "use strict" pragma, and early adoption of testing culture are two examples where perl led the programming community. With the continued maturing of the language and ecosystem, I can only smile at the naysayers and wish them happiness whatever the language.
by grafikui | 2026-01-12 22:41:46+00:00
Earlier this week I launched Transactional AI v0.1 to solve a problem I kept hitting: AI agents that half-executed and left systems in broken states.

The core idea: apply the Saga pattern (from distributed systems) to AI workflows. Every step has automatic rollback. If OpenAI succeeds but Stripe fails, the system automatically deletes the AI-generated content and refunds—no manual cleanup.

v0.2 adds production features based on feedback:

Distributed Execution (v0.2.0):

Redis-based distributed locking (prevents race conditions with multiple workers)
PostgreSQL storage adapter (ACID compliance for regulated industries)
Retry policies with exponential backoff (handles flaky LLM APIs)
Observability & Reliability (v0.2.1):

Event hooks for monitoring (12 lifecycle events: step start/complete/fail/timeout/retry, compensation events, transaction lifecycle)
Per-step timeouts (kill hung OpenAI calls after 30s)
Testing utilities (in-memory storage/locks, no Redis/Postgres needed for tests)
Example:

const tx = new Transaction('workflow-123', storage, {
lock: new RedisLock('redis://localhost'),
events: {
onStepTimeout: (step, ms) => alerting.sendAlert(`${step} hung after ${ms}ms`),
onStepFailed: (step, err, attempt) => logger.error(`${step} failed`, { err, attempt })
}
});

await tx.run(async (t) => {
const report = await t.step('generate-ai-report', {
do: async () => await openai.createCompletion({...}),
undo: async (result) => await db.reports.delete(result.id),
retry: { attempts: 3, backoffMs: 2000 },
timeout: 30000
});

await t.step('charge-customer', {
do: async () => await stripe.charges.create({...}),
undo: async (charge) => await stripe.refunds.create({ charge: charge.id }),
timeout: 10000
});

});
If anything fails: Automatic rollback in reverse order. Report deleted, payment refunded.

Architecture:

TypeScript, 21 passing tests, strict mode
Storage adapters: File (dev), Redis (performance), Postgres (ACID), Memory (tests)
Lock adapters: NoOp (single process), Redis (distributed), Mock (tests)
CLI inspector: tai-inspect for debugging transaction state
No heavyweight orchestration engines (Temporal, AWS Step Functions). Just a 450-line TypeScript library.

Production readiness: 8.0/10 (up from 6.5 in v0.1)

Considering for v0.3.0: compensation retry policies, parallel steps, OpenTelemetry integration, MongoDB/DynamoDB adapters.

GitHub: https://github.com/Grafikui/Transactional-ai
NPM: npm install transactional-ai

Happy to answer questions about the implementation, saga patterns, or production experiences!
by joshtynjala | 2026-01-12 22:41:51+00:00
If you have a pihole or something that blocks ads/tracking for your entire network, try configuring it to exclude to your Apple TV. My Paramount+ app went from crashing daily to no crashes in many months.

Technically, you could also configure the pihole to allow the specific hosts that the Paramount+ app needs to access. However, I found that there were many hosts, and they also change from time to time, so it can be annoying to keep them updated when the app starts crashing again.
by 1f60c | 2026-01-12 22:43:06+00:00
Anthropic blog posts have always caused a blank page for me, so I had Claude Code dig into it using an 11 MB HAR of a session that reproduces the problem, and it used grep and sed(!) to find the issue in just under 5 minutes (4m56s).

Turns out that the data-prevent-flicker attribute is never removed if the Intellimize script fails to load. I use DNS-based adblock and I can confirm that allowlisting api.intellimize.co solves the problem, but it would be great if this could be fixed for good, and I hope this helps.
by neilv | 2026-01-12 22:43:09+00:00
I agree that this is another factor, and I'd like to get into some nuance of it...

If we go back to the RMS school of code sharing, which influenced much of contemporary open source, they're very big on licensing to control how the code is shared.

This was actually a break from some of the earlier thinking by some programmers (not all), that code is implicitly public domain, or should be. RMS said, yes, sharing is good, but we need rules to keep the sharing happening.

Once "open source" was coined (by ESR, et al.) they were also big on licensing, including RMS's licenses, but most of the reasons were more about commercial needs.

Since then, people participate in open source for a variety of reasons, many of them commercial-adjacent.

But I suspect most people don't think much about the hard-earned licenses that helped create the current environment, in which this wealth of loose sharing and collaborating is happening.

We're only starting to see the effects when some AI companies ignore the long tradition of licenses that built open source.

Writers and illustrators, on the other hand, as you say, don't that that tradition and institution. (There's also things like the sometimes tolerated gray area of fanfic using others' characters and situations, but AFAIK not official and organized like open source.)

And so maybe the essence of what's happening is more readily obvious to writers and illustrators, than it is to programmers.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-12 22:43:09+00:00
As others have stated, there's fabs all over the world. They're insufficient in quality and quantity to satisfy current demand at current prices but they're there and can do a lot of it, especially as demand and requirements get reduced to meet what's available.

Don't get me wrong, it would suck, but probably suck less than when everything shut down for covid.

>Car manufacturing grinds to a halt.

>New appliances cannot be manufactured

Until they figure out how to repeal the laws that mandate the features/specs that require the semiconductors in the types and volumes that would be a non-starter.

Maybe your washer doesn't need to detect how much stuff you put in and second guess your water setting?

What are the statistical odds a $15k Nissan Kix being sold in the desert will ever benefit from ABS?

>no new iPhone for five years. No new electronic hardware at all

It's not absolute like that. It's more like move the decimal one place on everything and that makes whole classes of products non-viable.

>New appliances cannot be manufactured. What does the [severe reduction in proportion to their semiconductor and irreplaceable foreign part contents] absence of new durable goods do to the economy?

Fixed for realism.

Demand is elastic to some extent. Prices go up. Industries shrink, alternatives grow.

In any case, it's a relative transfer of wealth and power from most of HN to their plumber and landscaper and those otherwise less affected.
I built an ingestion engine because I hate mundane tasks
by scannyai | 2026-01-12 22:44:54+00:00
There is nothing quite as soul-crushing as manually copy-pasting data from a PDF invoice into a database field.

It's a waste of human intelligence.

I tried existing tools, but they broke whenever a document layout changed.
I needed something robust enough to handle variable inputs without constant babysitting.

I built Scanny AI using vision models to understand document structure rather than just relying on brittle regex or raw OCR.

It identifies fields spatially and syncs structured JSON to tools like HubSpot.

It's built for people who hate boring work.

API docs here if you want to break it: scanny-ai.com
by actuallyalys | 2026-01-12 22:45:31+00:00
I feel like this idea would work better at a somewhat larger scale, like a small to medium datacenter heating an apartment or office building. The downside is for any of these systems is that when it's too hot outside that heat becomes a liability so you'd have to have the infrastructure to divert heat as well. The other downside is that you'd be replacing a very well understood technology with minimal maintenance requirements with a relatively complex technology with more extensive and complex maintenance requirements.
Ask HN: Speculate About a Hypothetical Cyber Exploit That Would Leverage AI
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-01-12 22:45:47+00:00
It seems kinda inevitable. Some modern-day equivalent of the latter-day Kevin Mitnick is bound to be out there somewhere. Wouldn't you think?

I was trying to imagine…

• What sort of AI-related exploit is more likely to be one of the first?

• What might be the nature of a cyberattack the black hat vibe coders might be vibing up for us?

Of course, I hope I'm wrong. I hope that all the MCP servers or whatever and the other AI network infrastructure is as secure as we're told they are.
by Mongoose | 2026-01-12 22:45:49+00:00
Agent orchestration seems to be the new hot problem to be solved in the ecosystem. See also Steve Yegge's most recent posts [1]. Curious to see what tools emerge as the winners of the Cambrian explosion we're probably about to see.

[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-future-of-coding-agents-e...
by danaris | 2026-01-12 22:46:13+00:00
I've talked with a number of people online from Europe (particularly the UK) who came in with the assumption that a parliamentary system was the default. (I don't consider this a mark against them: everyone is likely to start out with the assumption that the first thing they learn about is the default. They were just part of that day's lucky 10,000.)

There are a great many reasons why people might misunderstand why so many people voted for Trump, and most of them start with assuming your own experience is universal, at least in certain realms. I suspect that, for people outside the US, not really understanding our voting/electoral system is one of the top ones, and it's a very understandable one. I prefer to go for it first, because the one I consider next most likely is a bit less charitable: assuming that everyone shares your privileges. (ie, "surely no one could possibly be so uneducated as to think that Trump was anything but a liar and a fascist." Buddy, you can't even imagine how bad the American education system can be, or how hard it is to care about anything other than the bare necessities when you're poor...)
by ivraatiems | 2026-01-12 22:47:17+00:00
XFCE and LXDE are saviors for old machines. I frequently install Xubuntu and Lubuntu on old Chromebooks (e. g. HP Chromebook 14 from around 10 years ago, 2GB RAM, Celeron processor), and you can quickly get a fully functional, usable system. I'm not writing code on them, but you can easily use them for all the things the average person needs on a daily basis from their computer.

It's great that these projects have not given into "the times" or tried to become things they're not. They're great at what they do and I hope they remain that way.