MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hyperpape | 2026-01-23 17:53:54+00:00
> If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment:

So, Steve has the big scary "YOU WILL DIE" statements in there, but he also has this:

> I went ahead and built what’s next. First I predicted it, back in March, in Revenge of the Junior Developer. I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town. I’ve tamed them to where you can use 20–30 at once, productively, on a sustained basis.

"What's next"? Not an experiment. A prediction about how we'll work. The word "productively"? "Productively" is not just "a big fun experiment." "Productively" is what you say when you've got something people should use.

Even when he's giving the warnings, he says things like "If you have any doubt whatsoever, then you can’t use it" implying that it's ready for the right sort of person to use, or "Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding.", implying that working effectively with it is possible.

Every day, I go on Hacker News, and see the responses to a post where someone has an inconsistent message in their blog post like this.

If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.
by pizza234 | 2026-01-23 17:54:13+00:00
> Linux is still not user friendly enough. Products from two decades ago are more user friendly than modern "mainstream" disros.

> Gimp is an ugly beast with a bad name. Nobody's using that unless they're a Linux nerd.

It depends on the use case. The vast majority of computer users nowadays use only the browser and an office suite. Even email clients are a thing of the past.

It's true that Gimp doesn't have a great UX, but who spends time photoretouching on the computer, when one can do it in a few seconds on the phone?
by cowboylowrez | 2026-01-23 17:54:30+00:00
I know the feeling, I went over quota at one of those cloud storage sites or something, they sent me a polite note informing me of the situation and I subsequently deleted a few files and brought the account back within quota. They didn't ban me tho, I'm thinking because they are a relatively normal company where the customer is still valued and not some giant bullshit scam perpetrated by techbros like that tate guy who pimps out camgirls, allegedly.
by dugidugout | 2026-01-23 17:54:37+00:00
> I know pre-AI cheats have ruined some online games, so I'm not sure it's an encouraging thought...

Will you be even more discouraged if I share that "table flipping" and "sleight of hand" have ruined many tabletop games? Are you pressed to find a competitive match in your game-of-choice currently? I can recommend online mahjong! Here is a game that emphasizes art in permutations just as chess does, but every act you make is an exercise in approximating probability so the deterministic wizards are less invasive! In any-case, I'm not so concerned for the well-being of competition.

> Are you saying AI can help detect AI cheats in games? In real time for some games? Maybe! That'd be useful.

I know a few years back valve was testing a NN backed anti-cheat watch system called VACnet, but I didn't follow whether it was useful. There is no reason to assume this won't be improved on!
by jancsika | 2026-01-23 17:55:00+00:00
> First, there is modeling ambiguity, too many ways to represent the same data structure.

Boy, are you telling me!

Boy are you a person, one of whose attributes is telling me!

Boy are you a person whose telling-me attribute is set to true!

Boy-who-is-telling-me, this space is left intentionally blank!

Out of all the key value pairs, you are the boy key and your adjacent sibling string type value is "Telling Me!"

Edit: fixed a CVE
by crimps | 2026-01-23 17:55:10+00:00
I joined them after they were clearly in decline and half of the office was empty. Contrary to some of the comments here, there were enterprise products (Docker EE, private registry, orchestration) and a very large sales team.

There were also a lot of talented, well-paid engineers working on open source side projects with no business value. It just wasn't a very well-run company. You can't take on half a billion dollars in VC just to sell small enterprise support contracts.
by Fervicus | 2026-01-23 17:55:38+00:00
Call me a pessimist, but I don't agree with this blog post at all. The author's views seems a bit biased and narrow based on their social circle perhaps.

> VR is no longer experimental

Till it has practical everyday uses and is at least semi affordable, I would categorize it as experimental still

> Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use, thanks to a clever Ray-Ban partnership (and associated equity stake). 3D printers have become real household products.

I don't know a single person who actually owns a Meta wearable device or a 3D printer. Isn't Meta actually shifting their focus away from metaverse?

> Design matters again. In our devices, and in our lives

Design has been forgotten. Just look at your phones and computers and most of the web.

All I see around me are people swiping away at their screens (most of the time not using their headphones), getting their fix in bursts of 15 seconds, rinse and repeat.

It's getting harder to have fun with tech when you have to deal with things like:

* Operating systems that are actively hostile to their users (Windows and OSX).

* iPhone and Android being the only 2 choice when it comes to phones (the author did mention this). The chances of getting a 3rd player here seems negligible.

* Everyone trying to shove AI down your throat. At no time in the past did we need mandates to use a "useful" thing.

* A couple of players consolidating all the power in the AI space and millions of people having no ethical issues about using products from these companies, or opening up their source code and data for these companies to come suck it all up.

* No real disruption or competition in the browser space. It will be a long time before Ladybird will be usable.

* Bloated, heavy website with popups galore.

* Everything getting a redesign every couple of months for no reason

* You don't own anything anymore. Even building your own PC seems like it will become a thing of the past given how price are rising.

I could go on.
by kami23 | 2026-01-23 17:55:50+00:00
This has been my best way to learn, put one agent on a big task, let it learn things about the problem and any gotchas, and then have it take notes, do it again until I'm happy with the result, if in the middle I think there's two choices that have merit I ask for a subagent to go explore that solution in another worktree and to make all its own decisions, then I compare. I also personally learn a lot about the problem space during the process so my prompts and choices on us sequent iterations use the right language I need to use.
by bufordsharkley | 2026-01-23 17:55:50+00:00
I can't speak from personal experience with the Fiio jm21, but I was a big user of a previous generation of Fiio, and while I imagine some technical leaps forward have been achieved with this generation (the Fiio M1 never, for instance, achieved gapless playback from 2015-2021, even though this was promised with every new software version), taking a quick look at it... this is just an android phone interface! App store? Chrome? I certainly don't want this from a dedicated music device

Beyond this, I'd say that the true advantage of the iPod Classic was a matter of polish and UX:

* Dedicated buttons/wheel/etc that are tactile instead of a touchscreen interface (the Fiio M1 was button-and-wheel based, but it never approached the quality of Apple engineering); I see the jm21 has some side-based buttons for pause/forward/back, which is nice, but a touchscreen as main interface still grates
* A way to interface with your albums that was delightful and visually dense (Cover Flow remains the single greatest music UI put forward)
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-23 17:56:01+00:00
The other day someone here coined JTPP - "Just the prompt, please", expressing preference for reading the prompt instead of the e-mail/article it produced. The reasons for that are rather obvious, but I think it applies to marketing copy in general.

With that in mind, I wonder what the original idea behind this project was - the "prompt" that someone got in their mind, which got them excited enough to build this. Reading the "original prompt" might make it easier to figure the product out. Marketing copy is "how we can make what we have look more alluring to people". The "original prompt" is directly answering "what we actually aspired to build".
by bostik | 2026-01-23 17:56:33+00:00
I have to run part of this by guesswork, because it's based on what I could observe at the time. Never had the courage to dive in to the actual postgres source code, but my educated guess is that it's a side effect of the MVCC model.

Combination of: streaming replication; long-running reads on a replica; lots[þ] of writes to the primary. While the read in the replica is going it will generate a temporary table under the hood (because the read "holds the table open by point in time"). Something in this scenario leaked the state from replica to primary, because after several hours the primary would error out, and the logs showed that it failed to write because the old table was held in place in the replica and the two tables had deviated too far apart in time / versions.

It has seared to my memory because the thing just did not make any sense, and even figuring out WHY the writes had stopped at the primary took quite a bit of digging. I do remember that when the read at the replica was forcefully terminated, the primary was eventually released.

þ: The ballpark would have been tens of millions of rows.
by Xmd5a | 2026-01-23 17:57:06+00:00
> OK! That was like half a dozen great reasons not to use Gas Town. If I haven’t got rid of you yet, then I guess you’re one of the crazy ones. Hang on. This will be a long and complex ride. I’ve tried to go super top-down and simplify as much as I can, but it’s a bit of a textbook.
by pizlonator | 2026-01-23 17:57:08+00:00
> assuming that your critical crypto operations are, at the assembly level, in identifiable labeled blocks, why is this hard?

The compiler won't do you that kind of favor. The crypto code will be smeared in with other junk, reordered according to the compiler's inscrutable whims.

Worse, exactly what kind of nonsense the compiler will do to your algo will depend on compiler version, ABI, OS, and countless spooky-action-at-a-distance properties of your larger project. Like, you could breathe on a non-crypto part of your code, and for complex reasons the compiler now emits different instructions for your crypto. This means that you'll have to revalidate what the compiler output every time you make any change to your code, even if that change doesn't affect the crypto kernels themselves.

> My understanding of timing attacks is that most of them derive from code that uses a looping construct such that performance is O(length(data))

That's not the big risk. The risk is that the compiler does one of the following:

- Introduces a branch on secret data for the purpose of speculation. There's nothing stopping a compiler from doing this. There are many optimizations in LLVM today that will do this (or not) based on heuristics. The moment this happens, you get a timing leak. Note that the branch isn't for a loop - it's the compiler saying "if this value is like this then I can short-circuit the calculation somehow"

- Turns math into a lookup table. This is less common, but again, there's nothing stopping the compiler from doing it. Again, that's a timing leak.

> If that's true, wouldn't it be easy to identify whether a specific, user-selected critical section of compiled/assembly-output code was vulnerable to a side channel by checking it for nonterminal jumps (or generating a very simple/shallow-depth CFG and checking for cycles)?

Theoretically, but first you'd have to decompile the assembly to work out which parts of it are even part of the crypto.

Here's a good way to think about it: writing assembly by hand is way easier than analyzing the assembly generated by a compiler. And, if you write it by hand, you only have to validate it if you make changes to that assembly, not anytime you breathed on the compiler or its inputs.
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-23 17:57:17+00:00
Sounds mostly valid, if I ever get something more 'advanced' I may look back on my time with this machine the same way I look at my early history with (2D) printers - dot matrix, then HP500 inkjet with a sheet feeder and other such luxuries to the current HP and Canon lasers.

Having said that I must say that the firmware update did make quite a bit of difference. I have yet to print out any of those flow/bridging/temperature towers, I did get a few bad starts related to bed adhesion but those are 'common 3D printer problems' not related to the machine. Using some of my daughters' hair spray solved that for the most.
by VTimofeenko | 2026-01-23 17:57:34+00:00
Not an iPhone person, however when I force shutdown a laptop I am hacking away on, I do feel like I am strangling it with a pillow to ease it's suffering. But that feeling comes purely from my side, the machine shows no signs of life at that point anyway.

Are you referring to something like the GPRS staccato coming from speakers catching a cell phone call or the almost imperceptible flyback whine of a CRT?
by hackrmn | 2026-01-23 17:57:37+00:00
I am one of those people who will call out those patronisingly asserting something like "Oh, god, XML! So happy we could finally evolve past _that_".

And yeah, XML wasn't perfect -- people harping on it are literally flogging a dead horse. Had the horse been given a pasture, it would have recovered. Instead we have very tiny pig-horses like JSON and YAML and three dozen other "weekend project candidates to someone's claim to fame and CS history" which haven't got half of XML's _useful_ features -- like namespaces, being one.

YAML has anchors, which is a useful feature in itself -- so no, we don't just regress or reinvent the wheel, there's room for improving XML. The tragedy is throwing the baby with the bathwater, or so it seems to me that we have.

Giving XML largely the collective boot was the wrong decision. That's my firm opinion. Tools like XSLT haven't got an equal today -- these for better and for worse need XML in some capacity, and are much more extensible (no pun intended) than abominations like Jinja or what have you. XSLT was _designed_ while Jinja for one, appears to have been grown in a petri dish of sorts.

The hipster-like obsession with every new thing on the hill gave us HTML 5, with its weird context-sensitive parser rules where some tags can be closed, some must be closed and some must not be closed and so on. On top of it it mandates some forgiving behaviour on part of the parser, making best-effort assumptions that kind of get it to render the document but not the one you wanted -- add modern scripting and you are sitting there debugging subtly but by-design hidden errors -- instead of what was the case with XML that demanded you had the basic capacity to write the forward slash in the right places. But no, that was apparently too hard.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-23 17:57:39+00:00
If they're using a 100% vibe-coded tool that they've never read the code of to replace something that would require government approval, for use on real-world patients, they're probably committing medical malpractice as we speak. Let us pray that is not the case.

It doesn't matter if the tool "needs" to be marketed. There is a market of paying customers. If other people are paying $200/month, both your and their lives would be improved significantly offer a $100/month replacement software. For all the talk about LLMs replacing the need for packaged software, people are still paying for packaged software, and while they are, you could be making large amounts of money while saving them money. Unless, of course, your vibe-coded app isn't actually remotely capable of replacing the software in question.
by Ronsenshi | 2026-01-23 17:57:51+00:00
> I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.

I go to tech meetups regularly. The speed at which any conversation end up on the topic of AI is extremely grating to me. No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code.

At what point are we going to see the loss of practical skills if people keep on relying on LLMs for all their thinking?
by sylens | 2026-01-23 17:58:02+00:00
The jm21 runs Android, does that not make it a multi-purpose device without tactile, bespoke controls and against the main focus of the article?

I'd also argue that the manual[0] leaves something to be desired compared to those original iPods.

[0] https://fiio-user-manual.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/EN/JM2...
by alephnerd | 2026-01-23 17:58:02+00:00
> Isn't that why people fight to get into Ivy League universities or Ecole Normale Superieure

Going to Harvard or Yale doesn't mean I have the ability to call a couple people who can pressure someone at the SEC to speed up the review of an S-1 or can pressure a city council to re-zone agricultural land to residential land to build a housing complex.

And more critically, if I find someone to do that, then my competitor will find out and take me to court.

On the other hand, if someone even finds out that I do something like that in CZ or Poland, they have no choice but to roll with it because otherwise they will be frozen out from dealflow.

> The model that is being discussed for the public broadcasters is that they will be financed by a certain fixed percentage of the country's GDP

Yet the power of the purse for state media will be removed from the media itself and given to the state, thus reducing CT and CRo's independence. This disincentivizes the publication of politically controversial statements.

-----

Just becuase the US is seeing degradation of institutions does not mean much of Europe is not facing similar problems.

Ignore it at your peril.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-23 17:58:14+00:00
The way I see it there are a few goals for Turso as opposed to SQLite...

One is to be more open to contribution, which is of arguable value for a pretty "complete" project.

Another is to be able to better support a client-server and distribution model for resilience over only in-process options, which is harder. This is while being file compatible with SQLite for the database itself.

Another aspect is multi-threaded support (mutli-read in particular), which is part of the impetus for rewriting in Rust over the fork, for what may well be a dramatic performance improvement.

Cloudflare and Turso as companies are both using SQLite's interfaces and structure at a core piece of their distributed database offerings... There's definitely different characteristics for use/scale if you're going that route. I've also found CockroachDB to be interesting along with the now deprecated RethinkDB's approach. That doesn't even get into the more prominent distributed cloud db options out there.

In the end they're all just different approaches to solving similar issues.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-23 17:58:20+00:00
Confession of a Quasi-Hoarder:

I have a tendency to keep unfinished projects, many of which are at the "collection of supplies needed" stage. During Covid isolation and depression, combined with a mentally ill roommate who added to all of it, it just overwhelmed my life.

I had to evict the roommate, sadly, for my own self-preservation. I am happy to say that, AFAIK, he's in a better place today, and receiving treatment. MOST of his stuff left with him; a small remnant is stashed in corners of my basement and attic, and I throw out a sackful whenever I remember to do so.

The rest... I extended an invite over Thanksgiving to a friend iby a temp job, far from her family. In return, we agreed she would help me clean up. She had learned from her daughter doing the same for her after her husband died, and very thoughtfully did just as I asked. She'd hold up something and say, "Are you going to finish this project?", and I'd say "Yes, someday... No... Throw it." She'd call me over after assembling a pile, and I'd give approval to throwing it.

I had agency, and am certain I agreed to everything that went curbside. IIRC we filled 5 construction trash bags.

For weeks afterwards, I would continue the trend with another half bag or so a week.

It's given me a new trajectory. Someone ITT described a hoarder disliking empty spaces in their house; I have a romantic image in my head of a magician-type of person with a cluttered but ever-useful house. I am now replacing that with a romantic image of a clean, ordered house, with select places for ordered piles of stuff.

I'm typing from my "office", where hundreds of tools sit within well-labeled bins, one bin deep, all readable from the center of the room. Order. Piles. And for the first time in my life, looking for a thing is something I can do in my head: "Go to my office. On the left wall, just below eye level, on the center of the shelf is a bin labeled 'SHARP THINGS'. You can find an exacto blade there." I can tell you where to find envelopes, DVI cables, electrical tape, and magnifying glasses, from memory. The room is the opposite of a heap... even if I have over a dozen screwdrivers in the bin labeled 'SCREWDRIVERS'.

I say I'm a quasi-hoarder, because I've known people at the actual extreme. A friend who owns three houses, all filled to the brim, with only walkways through the stuff.

Anyway... That's my confession. I have a lot of sympathy for those at the extreme end, because the dysfunction agues me as well. But a friend devoting a couple days to helping me really did a lot to empower me on a new direction in life.
by benabbott | 2026-01-23 17:58:25+00:00
Won't this make running Starlink more expensive?

Lower orbits > Increased atmospheric drag > More fuel expended to maintain orbit > Heavier sats due to more fuel > Increased launch cost per unit

Or even: Lower orbits > Increased atmospheric drag > Quicker orbit decay > Shorter lifespan of sats > More frequent launches

Forgive my Kerbal-based space knowledge here.
by shermantanktop | 2026-01-23 17:58:38+00:00
Yegge is just running arbitrage on an information gap.

It's the same chasm that all the AI vendors are exploiting: the gap between people who have some idea what is going on and the vast mass of people who don't but are addicted to excitement or fear of the future.

Yegge is being fake-playful about it but if you have read any of his other writing, this tracks. None of it is to be taken very seriously because he values provocation and mischief a little too highly, but bits of it have some ideas worth thinking about.
by pm215 | 2026-01-23 17:59:19+00:00
I'm pretty sure my Dad got ours because they were being sold off very cheaply after TI pulled out of the home computer market. Like you I ended up learning BASIC on it because as an abandoned system all we had was a few cartridge games, some user-group programs, and typed in BASIC. It worked out pretty well really. (Later we got an Amstrad CPC 6128, which had a much bigger commercial games market.)