MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindcrash | 2026-01-04 11:35:52+00:00
> but browsers only support the Flatpak stack

Well, I think you should blame Google and Mozilla for that.

KDE (through Discover, https://apps.kde.org/discover/) and GNOME (through Software, https://apps.gnome.org/Software/) both have innate support for Flatpak.

So, given that the majority of normie Linux users will use Flatpak to install a browser, they will just use and support that in the browser (because the underlying DE wil more than likely have Flatpak support integrated too) and go on with their day to day.

Means that people who don't want to deal with Flatpak have to deal with Flatpak too unfortunately.
by zingar | 2026-01-04 11:35:53+00:00
I have lots of non-AI software experience but nothing with AI (apart from using LLMs like everyone else). Also I did an introductory university course in AI 20 years ago that I’ve completely forgotten.

Where do I get to if I go through this material?

Enough to build… what? Or contribute on… ? Enough knowledge to have useful conversations on …? Enough knowledge to understand where to … is useful and why?

Where are the limits, what is it that the AI researchers have that this wouldn’t give?
by philipswood | 2026-01-04 11:37:00+00:00
Um...

> This experiment was inspired by @swyx’s tweet about Ted Chiang’s short story “Understand” (1991). The story imagines a superintelligent AI’s inner experience—its reasoning, self-awareness, and evolution. After reading it and following the Hacker News discussion, ...

Umm...
I <3 love <3 Understand by Ted Chiang,
But the story is about super intelligent *humans*.

Like Tatja Grimm's World or the movie Limitless.

PS:
Referenced tweet for the interested:
https://x.com/swyx/status/2006976415451996358

Ted C
by integralid | 2026-01-04 11:38:30+00:00
>Things could not be worse than they have been.

Things can always get worse.

The GP didn't say changing Maduro to other president is bad, but that "periods of violent transition" can have dire consequences for the regular people. And US seems to be in it for the money, not to liberate the downtrodden.

I wish them peace and prosperity, though.
by shreytrypathi | 2026-01-04 11:38:46+00:00
Living in Delhi, I wake up every day to grey skies and a constant headache. I realized that for most people, AQI numbers are just abstract data. Hearing "AQI 450" is scary, but it doesn't really land until you see what that actually looks like.

Indians become so habitual to the smog that we forget what the real world is supposed to look like.

So I built ShowMeAQI.

It’s a tool to visualize air pollution in real-time, bridging the gap between cold data and the air we breathe.

Would love some feedback!
by everdrive | 2026-01-04 11:39:15+00:00
>I also got many job offers

This was during the same era that you had many people losing their jobs or reputations because of outrage mobs on the platform. I wouldn't claim that Twitter had no positive aspects at all, but that the negatives far outweighed the positive. (and yes, the outrage mobs are at least just as bad, potentially worse, but just pointed at different targets.)

The toxicity that you're decrying was also there before, maybe just not in your circles or aimed at you.
by shoobiedoo | 2026-01-04 11:40:07+00:00
It really was magical. It felt like the wild west. I used to buy a copy of 2600 and sit in a cafe reading it just feeling like I could do anything or go anywhere, which I guess I could to a degree back in those days.

I left my system administration position in the 2010s because it brought back none of anything remotely close to those vibes. Staring at a cloud admin panel in a website all day made me start to hate computers. It was then I realized it was always just going to be a hobby if I wanted to keep it the way I remembered. Fine by me
by Sporktacular | 2026-01-04 11:42:28+00:00
So true. I think everyone should remember exactly that anytime a MAGA tribesman uses the language of reason and compassion to gain an air of respectability. They have no concern for truth or ethics and don't deserve the legitimacy of respectful discourse. Identify it early, call them out on it, smash their hollow arguments and show everyone how little respect it earns. Reason's due for a comeback.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-04 11:44:30+00:00
This is the real reason to make the wayland switch.

It doesn't really matter if you like or dislike wayland, the major DE have decided they don't like X11 and they are making the switch to wayland. X11 code is actively being removed from these desktop environments.

If you want to use X11, you can either stay on an old unmaintained DE or switch to a smaller one that supports X11. But you should realize that with wayland being the thing major DEs are targeting, your experience with X11 will likely degrade with time.
by monerozcash | 2026-01-04 11:44:46+00:00
>> "The opposition has been very public in their lobbying for foreign intervention in Venezuela" is not an assumption, it is a direct reference to evidence

>... and is not the statement in question.

>The statement in question is your "they were invited in".

I think "they were invited in" inherently follows from the "lobbying for foreign intervention".

Unless you have some alternative explanation as to what the Venezuelan opposition could possibly have been pursuing during their extensive international lobbying tours, "they were invited in" is the simplest and most reasonable hypothesis.

The alternative is that they were just lobbying for fun and didn't actually hope to achieve any change in Venezuela, but that seems kind of silly.
by baxuz | 2026-01-04 11:45:00+00:00
A bit of a tangential topic — what would you recommend to someone who wants to get into computer vision and 3D (NERFs, photogrammetry, 3DGS etc)?

For someone who has a middling amount of math knowledge, what would you recommend?

I went to uni 15y ago, but only had "proper" math in the first 2 semesters, let's says something akin to Calculus 1 and Linear Algebra 1. Hated math back then, plus I had horrible habits.
by qiqitori | 2026-01-04 11:47:27+00:00
I built a basic version of Tennis for Two a while back, using regular op amps. Some modern oscilloscopes have bad X-Y mode implementations, but most non-extremely-cheap scopes are probably decent enough. https://blog.qiqitori.com/2024/08/implementing-tennis-for-tw...

I'm also planning on selling a kit in the near future!
Open source AI diagram generator (Draw.io, Mermaid)
by twwch | 2026-01-04 11:47:36+00:00
Hi everyone,

I've been working on AI Agents recently and noticed a common frustration: most AI diagramming tools generate static images (PNG/JPG). If the AI gets one detail wrong, you can't easily fix it—you have to regenerate the whole thing.

I wanted a tool that generates editable code and renders it interactively. So I built DeepDiagram.

It’s an open-source web platform that uses a Multi-Agent architecture. Instead of a single prompt trying to do everything, a Router analyzes your intent and directs it to a specialized agent (e.g., a Draw.io expert, a Data Visualization expert, or a Flowchart expert).

Demos
Mind Map & Data Charts (ECharts):

Draw.io Generation (XML based):

Mermaid Diagrams:

Tech Stack
Orchestration: LangGraph (Python) for the ReAct loop and state management.

Frontend: React 19, Vite, TailwindCSS, Zustand.

Backend: FastAPI (Python 3.10+).

Streaming: Uses SSE (Server-Sent Events) for real-time preview (typewriter effect).

Rendering Engines: React Flow, Apache ECharts, Mermaid.js, and Draw.io (Atlas theme).

Key Features
Draw.io Agent: Generates compatible XML. You can edit the result directly in the canvas.

Data Chart Agent: Paste raw data (CSV/JSON/Text), and it visualizes it using ECharts (Bar/Line/Pie).

Branching & Time Travel: Since AI isn't perfect, I implemented a Git-like branching system. You can "retry" a message, creating a new branch, or navigate back to previous states to see the agent's thought process.

Self-Hosted: Docker Compose support included. Works great with OpenAI or DeepSeek V3 (highly recommended for cost/performance).

Links
GitHub (AGPL-3.0): https://github.com/twwch/DeepDiagram

It's still in the early stages, but I'd love to hear your feedback or see your PRs!
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2026-01-04 11:48:08+00:00
Taking the proposition as true, what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? I am asking this in good faith, I literally naively do not understand what the "bad" bit is.

Like, ok, its 2030 and X11 is dead, no one works on it anymore and 90% of Linux users use Wayland, what did they gain? I know they did employ Pottering but not anymore, and AFAIK they contribute a non-trivial amount of code up stream to, Linux, Gnome? KDE? If more users are on wayland they can pressure Gnome to ... what?

I sort of get an argument around systemd and this, in that they can push I guess their target feature sets into systemd and force the rest of the eco-system to follow them, but, well I guess I don't get that argument either, cause they can already put any special sauce they want in Redhat's shipped systemd implementation and if its good it will be picked up, if its bad it wont be?

I guess, if Redhat maintains systemd & wayland, then they could choke out community contributions by ignoring them or whatever, but wouldn't we just see forks? Arch would just ship with cooler-systemd or whatever?
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-04 11:48:09+00:00
I never really understood Infinite Jest, and I've tried to read it several times over the past couple of decades. I don't really get on with the "wacky wacky wacky" nonsense humour, and the constant sesquipedalian polysyllablism in every incongruent sentence makes it read like it was written by a smartarse 14-year-old who has just found they can look up long words in a thesaurus and thinks it makes them sound clever.

It's hard work to read with no payoff, I guess unless you like endless drivelling descriptions of drug use, which I don't.
by rjzzleep | 2026-01-04 11:49:36+00:00
I use it as my daily driver. I used Sway for a very long time, tried Hyprland for a bit and am now running niri as my daily driver. Sway and niri are wlroots based, Hyprland at some point rolled its own because they didn't want to wait for wlroots protocol extensions. Sometimes I have to switch to Gnome to do screen sharing.

2026 and you will still run into plenty of issues with random behaviour, especially if you run anything based on wlroots. Wine apps will randomly have pointer location issues if you run multiple displays. Crashes, video sharing issues with random apps, 10 bit issues. Maybe in 2027 we'll finally make it. But I feel like these 20 years of development could have been better spent on something that doesn't end up with 4 or more implementations.
by awesan | 2026-01-04 11:50:13+00:00
I feel like no one serious uses the uncle Bob style of programming anymore (where each line is extracted into its own method). This was a thing for a while but anyone who's tried to fix bugs in a codebase like that knows exactly what this article is talking about. It's a constant frustration of pressing the "go to definition" key over and over, and going back and forth between separate pieces that run in sequence.

I don't know how that book ever got as big as it did, all you have to do is try it to know that it's very annoying and does not help readability at all.
by frumiousirc | 2026-01-04 11:50:15+00:00
Yes, I got lost in the numbers and made a blunder by misinterpreting what we mean by frequency resolution expressed in "BPM" instead of Hz.

It is correct to say "0.0046237213 Hz which is 0.27742328 BPM". My mistake was to interpret 0.27742328 BPM as the limit of frequency resolution in units of BPM. Rather, any BPM measured must be an exact multiple of 0.27742328 BPM.

Thanks for pointing out my mistake!

> (regardless of track length, which already smells suspect)

Frequency resolution being dependent on the number of samples is a very well known property of basic sampling theory and signal analysis.

In fact, one can interpolate the frequency spectrum by zero-padding the time samples. This increases the resolution in an artificial way because it is after all an interpolation. However, a longer song has more natural frequency resolution than a shorter song.

Note, this frequency resolution is not related to fidelity which is some messy human related thing that is over a sliding window of shorter duration that I don't pretend to understand.

BTW, the opposite is also possible. You can zero-pad the spectrum as a means of resampling (interpolating) the time domain. This is slower but more spectrally correct than say time-domain linear or cubic interpolation.

These techniques require an FFT and so are somewhat expensive to apply to long signals like an entire song, as I did for the plot. Daft Punk's HBFS takes about 8 seconds on one CPU core with Numpy's FFT.
by ben_w | 2026-01-04 11:51:37+00:00
> and also oil is over (meaning oil will go into terminal decline probably before 2028 and that will be the end of the oil companies)

Back in the 90s, my dad told me a quote from someone big in oil:

"Oil is too valuable to burn"

(Shah of Iran? Trouble with searching for quotes on the internet, they get misattributed a lot).

Oil as a fuel will, hopefully, be over soon. 2028 is… I think that's too soon, though it would be good if it was. But oil is useful for a lot more than just fuel, and engineered bacteria synthesising more is probably more like a 2030s thing than a 2028 thing.
by vivekbhadra | 2026-01-04 11:52:15+00:00
In this post I have examined the performance trade-offs between std::mutex and std::shared_mutex in read-heavy C++ workloads. For benchmarking I have used Google Benchmark framework. Based on a reader writer access pattern, it measures execution time per operation as reader concurrency increases. The results show lower overhead for std::mutex at low thread counts, followed by a clear crossover point where std::shared_mutex scales more effectively under increasing read contention.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-04 11:53:18+00:00
> AI coding allows me to build tools that solve real world problems for me much faster.

But it can't actually generate working code.

I gave it a go over the Christmas holidays, using Copilot to try to write a simple program, and after four very frustrating hours I had six lines of code that didn't work.

The problem was very very simple - write a bit of code to listen for MIDI messages and convert sysex data to control changes, and it simply couldn't even get started.
by 8fingerlouie | 2026-01-04 11:53:25+00:00
> You do not need S3 in your house. Just use the filesystem.

For your home, no, you don’t need it. But if setting up a remote backup, ie at your parents / in-laws / children / summerhouse / whatever, S3 can help cut down on network traffic by offloading checksum calculations to the remote server. It won’t help (much) with backups, but verification of backups will be much faster as you don’t have to transfer everything back home to verify it like with SMB.
by dataviz1000 | 2026-01-04 11:53:35+00:00
In 2014, one benefit of Stack Overflow / Exchange is a user searching for work can include that they are a top 10% contributor. It actually had real world value. The equivalent today is users with extensive examples of completed projects on Github that can be cloned and run. OP's solution if contained in Github repositories will eventually get included in a training model. Moreover, the solution will definitely be used for training because it now exists on Hacker News.
Show HN: Bitmask.h a 300-byte C99 library for embedded bit operations
by DenisDolya | 2026-01-04 11:54:30+00:00
After years of wrestling with verbose bit-twiddling code in embedded projects, I created bitmask.h to solve a simple problem: most bit manipulation libraries are either too heavy (STL-style), too platform-specific (compiler intrinsics), or require writing the same error-prone bit operations repeatedly. This single-header C99 library packs all essential operations—bit set/clear/check, range operations, popcount, iteration—into ~300 bytes of machine code with zero allocations. It's what I needed for microcontroller work where every byte counts, using only C99 and manual optimizations to remain completely portable.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/Bitmask
by businessmate | 2026-01-04 11:55:04+00:00
On January 2, 2026, The Guardian reported multiple cases in which Google’s AI Overviews delivered misleading or potentially harmful health information to users. The examples were unexceptional: dietary guidance presented to pancreatic cancer patients, interpretations of liver test results, and descriptions of routine screening procedures. These were not adversarial prompts or edge cases. They were ordinary health queries posed through a mass distribution interface.
by leourbina | 2026-01-04 11:55:17+00:00
What we’ve been living through in the last 28 years is Chavismo and yet Chavez is not around. When Chavez died in 2013 we celebrated that he was gone, and what we got after was much, _much_ worse. Now Maduro is gone, and we can celebrate it too. That said, Trump has signaled that he’s not interested in removing Chavismo: he’s keeping Delcy, Diosdado, et al, as they continue to be the brokers of power as long as he gets access to oil. This is just Chavismo aligned to American interests. Time will tell whether this is better or worse.

PS: As an aside, since I was a child growing up in 90’s Venezuela, the overall political mentality of people was that things were so bad that they couldn’t get any worse - and yet they continued to worsen. A lesson that I’ve learned is that in politics things need to be intentionally built - there is no “rock bottom”, the fact that things have been horrible doesn’t mean that they can’t get even worse. Thus my hesitation with what’s going on. There are no guarantees that this isn’t going to be a deal with the devil that leaves us in an even worse state…
by murzynalbinos | 2026-01-04 11:55:47+00:00
Currently, the highlighter uses a simple keyword heuristic (line.includes('error')). It produces false positives (e.g., "no error found"). I plan to add regex-based custom highlighting to fix this.
I treat the file like a video stream. Since the browser doesn't know the total line count of a 10GB file without reading it all (which defeats the purpose), a traditional scrollbar is hard to implement perfectly. The slider acts as a "seek bar". I'll consider adding Prev/Next Chunk buttons for finer control. The "~20MB" claim refers to the file buffer/chunk size held in memory by the FileReader, not the entire browser process footprint (React + DOM + V8 overhead). You are right that the baseline for a React app is higher (60MB+), but the key value proposition is that opening a 10GB file won't spike usage to 10GB—it stays flat relative to the baseline.

I appreciate you testing it out!
by chiefalchemist | 2026-01-04 11:56:26+00:00
> If this were purely about oil,

Is anyone that naive at this point? The majority of us have learned to realize that these things are not as simple as they are presented (either by conspiracy theorist, the media, a/o politicians.) Put another way, is anyone saying it was purely about oil?

We do know Trump likes playing offense. His favorite strategy? Put the defender on its heels and keep them there. That said, was the drugs issue a cover? Could be. But does any other drug exporting country want to take that chance?
by linguae | 2026-01-04 11:57:36+00:00
I wholeheartedly and sadly agree with you. Seems like the idea of native apps on both macOS and Windows has been losing ground in favor of Electron apps. I understand the challenge of writing applications tailored to each platform and why Electron is so appealing to many companies, but I’d feel better about Electron if it were more conformant to platform HIGs and if it were less resource-intensive, especially now with RAM prices skyrocketing.

I hate how mainstream desktop computing has gone to crap in recent years. Thank goodness for free, open-source software.
by jbreckmckye | 2026-01-04 11:57:45+00:00
Sometimes I want to use comments because I'm doing something vaguely algorithmic, and I know some readers won't follow the code.

I'm trying to think of a good example, maybe something like a pointer window based function:

func DedupeStrings(ss []string) []string {
if len(ss) < 2 {
return ss
}

slices.Sort(ss)
u := 1 // index of end of "uniques" set
for i := 1; i < len(ss); i++ {
// Consume until new value
if ss[i] == ss[i-1] {
continue
}
// Put new value in 'uniques' set
ss[u] = ss[i]
u++
}
// Final state: all unique items are positioned
// left of 'u' index
return ss[:u]
}

People will quibble. But I'm not convinced you could change the variable names without harming clarity. Nor do I want to use function calls for documentation.
by Flow | 2026-01-04 11:58:06+00:00
StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me.

Actually I think it never did.

It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account.

And then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile.

I hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities.
by jph | 2026-01-04 11:58:39+00:00
These examples could both be much better IMHO with a top comment block that describes the purpose of the functionality and shows good usage examples. Something like this...

Replace symbol placeholders in the input string with translated values.

Scan the string for symbol placeholders that use the format "$foo". The format uses a dollar sign, then optional ASCII letter, then optional word characters.

Each recognized symbol is replaced with its corresponding value.

Symbols are only replaced if the symbol exists i.e. getSymbol(String) returns non-null, and the symbol has not already been replaced in this invocation.

Example:

- input = "Hello $name, welcome to $city!"

- output -> "Hello Alice, welcome to Boston!"

Return the string with all symbol placeholders replaced.
by ethagnawl | 2026-01-04 11:59:17+00:00
It's not zero but it's very low. You can glance at the site now for confirmation.

I was using the site recently (middle of a US workday) and the "live stats" widget showed 10s of questions asked per hour and ~15K current users. I have not done the work to compare these values to historical ones but they're _low_.
by DaSHacka | 2026-01-04 11:59:18+00:00
> I guess this is what Germany feels like with holocaust deniers. Too bad our constitution makes it hard to prosecute this kind of denial.

bahaha, what absolute zingers back-to-nack.

You know, I know many people that would agree with your second sentence.

Though, I suspect you would not like them very much, as they oftentimes fall into a camp adjacent to the first sentence :)