MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by less_less | 2026-01-22 10:14:57+00:00
See also the paper Ribbon filter: practically smaller than Bloom and Xor: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.02515, which is a similar idea though not by the same authors.

IIRC, binary fuse filters are faster to construct than ribbon filters, but typically not quite as space-efficient. There are also frayed ribbon filters (by me) which are slower and more complex to construct but more space-efficient. There's no paper for those, just a Rust implementation.

Ribbon filters are deployed in Mozilla's Clubcard for distributing compressed certificate revocation lists: https://github.com/mozilla/clubcard and https://jmschanck.info/papers/20250327-clubcard.pdf. CRLs are an almost ideal application of this sort of compressed set tech, since the aggregator runs batch jobs and needs to distribute the set to very many clients. It's not perfectly ideal because CRLs require frequent updates and none of these methods support delta updates. There is a straightforward but inelegant workaround, which is to send a compressed set that represents the delta, and query both on the client.
by croon | 2026-01-22 10:14:59+00:00
When looking at supporters of voter ID laws, look at whether they support free IDs, expansion of DMVs/issuers of IDs, etc.

Similarly, opposition of mail-in-voting typically ignores or supports closing down polling places (in strategically partisan areas), making it difficult for classes of people to vote.

These issues are always (by design) discussed in isolation, while ignoring the intrinsically related issues.

TL;DR: Voter ID laws are fine, only if, coupled with universal free IDs for citizens. And no mail-in-voting would be fine, if voting occured on a national holiday, and polling places were reachable by all eligible voters. This is not supported by any (elected) proponent of voter ID laws or opponent of mail-in-voting.
by pas | 2026-01-22 10:15:06+00:00
yet ... it works "ok" most of the time.

not to mention that people mostly need wikipedia, the news, navigating the infuriating world of websites of big service providers (gov sites, or try to find anything on Microsoft's dark corner of the web), porn and brainrot

but it's awfully hard to make traction on a business that provides this.
by choeger | 2026-01-22 10:15:18+00:00
I think it's important to note that not all collisions are equally dangerous. Consider a sat on a polar orbit colliding with one on a equatorial orbit. Or two satellites on different directions. That is going to be spectacular. Otoh, these kind of collisions are unlikely and should be manageable by just assigning certain shells (say 5km) for every possible direction and orientation.

If two Starlink satellites collide that go roughly in the same direction, it's not exactly a huge problem.

I think the biggest issue is to coordinate this and potentially disallow some excentric orbits.
by Bishonen88 | 2026-01-22 10:15:47+00:00
I made the same realization two weeks ago. Posted about it here, where I rebuilt bare bones todoist with a habit tracker, goal setting and more within a few vibe coding sessions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633092

I think that many existing apps with huge userbases will gradually lose users as the models become better and better. Their biggest advantage is that people don't like change, and thus having to e.g. export data from some tools etc. seems to be a hassle not worth $5 a month.
But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate.

On the other hand, new products will have a much harder time to gather a big userbase. Whenever I'll see a launch of a SaaS asking for $$$, the first question I'll ask myself will be how long it will take LLM to recreate it. And for most cases, I imagine that the time it will take to get 80% of what they have is a few vibe coding sessions (as most newcomers will probably have used LLM themselves to code it up).
by jfengel | 2026-01-22 10:16:35+00:00
The Republican party has a well polished message assigning blame to anyone else: gays, Muslims, illegal immigrants, trans people, feminists, government employees, etc etc etc. If only they can put those people in their places, prosperity will rain down on the proper Americans. As it did in the 1950s when those people didn't exist.

It works. And it will keep working.
by daemin | 2026-01-22 10:16:48+00:00
That actually depends what kind of application you are building and maintaining.

From the sounds of it I assume you're talking about developing and maintaing a SaaS application, where there is no real maintanence of it, and instead what you end up doing is developing it further to support larger data sets and more people. That is of course assuming that the software is successful and the usage is growing.

For traditional desktop software you can declare it finished and then maintanence is minimal and limited to only critical bugs, so you'd have a team of 5 develop it and then 1 person or less maintain it.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-22 10:17:00+00:00
Writing didn't destroy memory, it externalised it and made it stable and shareable. That was absolutely transformative, and far more useful than being able to re-improvise a once-upon-a-time heroic poem from memory.

It hugely enhanced synthetic and contextual memory, which was a huge development.

AI has the potential to do something similar for cognition. It's not very good at it yet, but externalised cognition has the potential to be transformative in ways we can't imagine - in the same way Socrates couldn't imagine Hacker News.

Of course we identify with cognition in a way we didn't do with rote memory. But we should possibly identify more with synthetic and creative cognition - in the sense of exploring interesting problem spaces of all kinds - than with "I need code to..."
by holoduke | 2026-01-22 10:17:12+00:00
I think I now went all in about 2, 3 months ago. It does make a lot of mistakes and its cowboy style 4.0. I cant remember a case were everything became a broken chaos. I think the AI does a much better job in maintaining my machines than i could do. Its able to configure low level stuff like fail2ban, iftables perfectly fine. Its much better in reading logs or solving issues. Once in a while it makes a mistake, like misconfiguring firewal rules and lock me out. All solvable issues. Software wise its also better. Yes you are prompting in circles sometimes. But thats fine. Usually it will fix the issue I have after a few iterations. Its not so much different that normal development, but on a higher level. You are dealing with a senior developer behaving like a child.
by tlb | 2026-01-22 10:17:15+00:00
At the speeds we're familiar with, basketballs and golf balls have elastic collisions. At orbital speeds, satellites are nearly inelastic. So fragment exit velocities lie between the two initial velocities, kv1 + (1-k)v2 for some k that depends on where each fragment came from. If they're colliding, the velocities must be somewhat different, so the weighted average speed has to be lower than orbital speed. So fragments usually don't survive many orbits.
by Shank | 2026-01-22 10:17:48+00:00
First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free.

Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $30 of my time.

But for an app whose use case doesn’t change and is recurring for no reason? Yeah there’s probably not much value in recurring payments outside of wanting to support the developer. I pay a lot of indie devs out of the goodness of my heart, and I’ll continue to do that.

But the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.
by misja111 | 2026-01-22 10:17:53+00:00
> The virtues of APL that strike the programmer most sharply are its terseness — complicated acts can be described briefly, its flexibility — there are a large number of ways to state even moderately complicated tasks (the language provides choices that match divergent views of algorithm construction), and its composability

I had an introduction to APL in university and what I absolutely hated was this terseness. I guess when you're a mathematician APL is more natural but to me, as a programmer, I much prefer to have some extra verbosity to make my code more (human-)readable.
by internet_points | 2026-01-22 10:19:10+00:00
This looks very nice, I love that you're making a real solution to avoid the dark patterns of companies like Spotify. I used Subsonic for a while as a simple way to curate music for kids and keep them off Spotify, but eventually my oldest got past the "listen to the same album over and over again" stage, and adding everything to Subsonic became a chore, so we succumbed to giving her an account. Yet I really don't like how Spotify has been adding direct messaging, Wrapped, Jams, discovery etc. – stuff that on the face of it looks fun (for adults), but when you see the addictive effect it has on the tweens it's just horrible. Technically I guess Spotify is now illegal for <16yo's in Australia.

For my youngest, I installed Qobuz, which has all the music, but much fewer features. They reportedly pay artists more per stream than any of the other apps (I guess because they don't have so many expenses for social media app development). Your app UI looks much cleaner though :)
by glimshe | 2026-01-22 10:20:14+00:00
I'm not arguing which system is best. I'm just saying this isn't a big advantage for a lot of startups from a purely financial perspective, which was the original point.

Sure, one startup will go down because the young founder had cancer, but that's not common enough to skew the average case too much.

40+ founders like me often had an opportunity to save for healthcare costs with the high salaries in the US plus Obamacare.

It's a fact that people in the US create lots of startups. Maybe the system could be much better (still not comparing to Europe) but it isn't too bad to be honest.
by 0dayz | 2026-01-22 10:21:13+00:00
It's a bit tiring seeing these extreme positions on Ai sticking out time and time again, Ai is not some cure all for code stagnation or creating products nor is it destroying productivity.

It's a tool, and this study at most indicates that we don't use as much brain power for the specific tasks of coding but do they look into for instance maintenance or management of code?

As that is what you'll be relegated to when vibe coding.
by jraph | 2026-01-22 10:21:37+00:00
> hopefully that's a good reference

It is!

> what with Atlassian's price increases

And the end of their self hosting offerings (Server, Data Center), which is currently driving a lot of people towards XWiki, for other reasons than money. XWiki SAS being mainly in Europe makes it attractive to EU users too.

> do you have any migration tips?

I don't have specific migration tips. I hope the docs are complete enough!

However, I may suggest having a look at XWiki SAS's professional offering: https://store.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Confluence%...

The Confluence Migration Toolkit is based on the Confluence XML module you found, but it adds a nice and convenient UI, converts some more macros that XWiki SAS sells, there's support, and there's consulting for larger migration projects or projects with special requirements.

(note: despite some paying features, everything is open source)

(disclaimer in case it was not obvious, I work for XWiki SAS)
by risyachka | 2026-01-22 10:21:44+00:00
Thats not cheaper than paying a subscription.
In fact this is at least 3x-10x more expensive.

And this is comparing to being subscribed many years in a row.
With SaaS you can unsub and sub only when you need it again.

With your side project - a weekend of your life is invested and you will never get it back.

This is the worst use of your time if you measure it in $.
If you make it for fun - sure. In all other terms it is a complete loss.
by empiricus | 2026-01-22 10:22:20+00:00
Trying to read the math behind quantum chemistry, it is never clear to me which parts are fundamental, which parts are tricks, which parts are needed just for close form expressions, which parts are computational approximations, and which are the limitations? For a subject that should be fundamental for future technological advances, and highly dependent on the growth of computation resources, it seems to me exceptionally opaque and I suspect not well presented?
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-22 10:22:45+00:00
Linux is already pretty decent on memory even with a DE like gnome/cinnamon running. I have an 15 year old laptop with Cinnamon / Arch and it uses 700-800MB once booted.

Frequently the issue isn't memory (I've maxed the memory out at 8GB).

Older systems have issues with composing the web pages itself. A lot of people blame JS, but a lot of the time JS isn't the issue e.g VSCode & Discord runs nicely on the laptop.

e.g. YouTube has a feature called ambient mode, this adds like a white gradient around the video element. On old intel iGPUs this absolutely wrecks video playback performance and you get about 15FPS video. Turning this off the video plays smoothly. The backdrop IIRC is a CSS gradient, the GPU/CPU doesn't have the grunt to render the backdrop gradient with the video on top at a smooth FPS.

So while you might have the memory for the extra tabs, browsing can be a sluggish experience because the GPU/CPU just can't execute the code on the page well.
by croon | 2026-01-22 10:23:20+00:00
I have had this discussion many times before, with people smarter than me, and I have not yet reached a counter argument to the idea that if you can only prove that you voted (and not couple each vote to a voter), how can you prove that innumerable votes were added to the record, or that your vote is correct?

You can either couple every vote to a voter and risk oppressive monitoring of votes at scale or coercion at micro level, OR you can have decoupled voting proving that your vote was counted, but not have convincing proof that your vote or anyone else's are accurate.

Please prove me wrong because I would love it if it was possible.

Edit: Booth-voting solves this by:

* linearly scaling cost of multi-party verification of identity at time of voting

* your vote being anonymous and being decoupled from you at time of deposit

* you trust the system at scale since each step in the chain-of-custody has many-eyes-verification

* vote amount is grouped by location so vote insertion can't happen at scale without coordinating with each involved polling place to fudge each of their numbers

* you can't insert into one place without having a random 100k population increase in a polling place overnight
by muvlon | 2026-01-22 10:23:26+00:00
Sure, you need a tiny bit of asm to do the actual syscall. That's not what I'm talking about. Most syscalls are easy to wrap, clone is slightly harder but doable (as evidenced by glibc). clone3 is for all intents and purposes impossible to write a general C wrapper for. It allows you to create situations such as threads that share virtual memory but not file descriptors, or vice-versa. That is, it can leave the caller in a situation that violates core assumptions by libc.
by metalman | 2026-01-22 10:23:46+00:00
My first solar pannel was given to me in Takilma ,Oregon, early 90's, and performed the magical feat of restarting my camper bus
by charging it's battery.
That panel was purchased by the guy I was aprenticing with from the founder of Real Goods, who he knew personaly, the founder of Real Goods was the worlds first retailer of solar pannels, and the only seller for years.
Now that solar power is fully verticaly integrated, ie: solar is building solar, the real economics of that will be felt in every market, and bucking it is a lost battle.
by Bishonen88 | 2026-01-22 10:23:55+00:00
Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license.
In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess.

Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.
by oliverjanssen | 2026-01-22 10:25:17+00:00
Thanks! Yeah the dark patterns in streaming apps are rough, especially for kids. Wrapped and all that social stuff is designed to keep you hooked.

Give Muky a try if you want! Qobuz is nice – would love to add more services like Qobuz or Deezer at some point, as long as the API is good and offline listening is supported. And yeah, wish more services would adopt a user-centric payment model – would be so much better for artists.
by eviks | 2026-01-22 10:26:08+00:00
The part where I can eliminate the workflow of investigating and killing some misbehaving background process by preventing it from launching.

Or when I changed popup symbol pickers to insert symbols faster, which you can't do now since those symbol files became protected.

A few I don't remember whether it was SIP or SSV, and then many I'm not even aware of, they just haven't been implemented by other people due to these restrictions.

> As a long-time power user of macOS, I don't even need to disable SIP.

Ok, so you're just not that power, but this is not about you, can you imagine other people can do different customizations?

Your defeatist attitude to customization is common, but that still doesn't explain why you think it doesn't matter
by shakna | 2026-01-22 10:26:23+00:00
JVM bytecode is well specified. [0]

Racket is not [1]. It's just the internal representation that the compiler uses. Sort of like marshalling in Python.

[0] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-6.ht...

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/raco/API_for_Making_Bytecode.ht...
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-22 10:26:44+00:00
birefringence -> cloud dial ("I only count the cloudy hours")

back from the days of "turn on tune in drop out": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eWqdLTii-I

Generation 2 "P"hút Hơn? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnUhhuPOiNE

Hà Nội seems like it would benefit from getting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_Canal off (out of) the ground?
by MikeRichardson | 2026-01-22 10:27:02+00:00
The "no cameras/no phones" rule is absolutely enforced in Harris County, Texas, although as an election worker I have never seen this escalate beyond "Please put away your phone". Workers are to ask the voter to put it away and if not done so immediately they are to notify the election judge (top official for that location/precinct). Judge will approach and ask again and cite the actual Texas law and show the voter a posterboard with the law printed in at least 4 different languages.

At this point, if the voter has not checked in yet, we can refuse to do so. Either way, if the phone/camera is still out after the judge has asked and shown them the law, judge is to immediately call the constable's office (police), who have been positioned nearby (but never directly at any vote center, due to possible intimidation). The constable can and will remove the man from the vote center. (It's never escalated that far!) (arresting that voter for any length of time might be problematic on election day for obvious reasons).

The most common complaint is "but I wrote up all my selections on there!" and for these voters we can provide a paper "sample ballot" and even a pen and they are free to mark their selections outside of the room and then come back to vote on the machine. One location was a church that was even gracious enough to allow a gentleman to AirPrint his notes.

Also of note, we do not have any kind of a "booth", however, the machines are typically placed rather far apart, and no one is allowed to queue at or near the machines, or linger there after voting, so I believe that privacy is effectively maintained. (Workers including judges are not even allowed to linger there unless assisting a voter who has specifically asked for help, and even then, there's more rules - if the voter needs help actually making the selections for candidates, now you need at least one judge and one clerk, one of whom must observe and ensure that the voter's selections were made correctly.)

We also got rid of the problematic "digital only" machines several years ago, but this post is too long already.
by g947o | 2026-01-22 10:27:44+00:00
Or with most language specific extensions disabled by default.

I almost disable all extensions except the ones I use all the time. Then I enable specific ones at workspace level.

Yes, it's annoying. But as an extension author, I know how some badly written extension can significantly slow down the experience, both during startup and editing. I even profiled other people's extensions and submitted feedback.
by BlackFly | 2026-01-22 10:28:39+00:00
If you realize that what we remember are the extremized strawman versions of the complaints then you can realize that they were not wrong.

Writing did eliminate the need for memorization. How many people could quote a poem today? When oral history was predominant, it was necessary in each tribe for someone to learn the stories. We have much less of that today. Writing preserves accuracy much more (up to conquerors burning down libraries, whereas it would have taken genocide before), but to hear a person stand up and quote Desiderata from memory is a touching experience to the human condition.

Scribes took over that act of memorization. Copying something lends itself to memorization. If you have ever volunteered extensively for project Gutenberg you can also witness a similar experience: reading for typos solidifies the story into your mind in a way that casual writing doesn't. In losing scribes we lost prioritization of texts and this class of person with intimate knowledge of important historical works. With the addition of copyright we have even lost some texts. We gained the higher availability of works and lower marginal costs. The lower marginal costs led to...

Pulp fiction. I think very few people (but I would be disappointed if it was no one) would argue that Dan Brown's da Vinci Code is on the same level as War and Peace. From here magazines were created, even cheaper paper, rags some would call them (or use that to refer to tabloids). Of course this also enabled newspapers to flourish. People started to read things for entertainment, text lost its solemnity. The importance of written word diminished on average as the words being printed became more banal.

TV and the internet led to the destruction of printed news, and so on. This is already a wall of text so I won't continue, but you can see how it goes:

Technology is a double edged sword, we may gain something but we also can and did lose some things. Whether it was progress or not is generally a normative question that often a majority agrees with in one sense or another but there are generational differences in those norms.

In the same way that overuse of a calculator leads to atrophy of arithmetic skills, overuse of a car leads to atrophy of walking muscles, why wouldn't overuse of a tool to write essays for you lead to atrophy of your ability to write an essay? The real reason to doubt the study is because its conclusion seems so obvious that it may be too easy for some to believe and hide poor statistical power or p-hacking.