MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2026-01-30 08:46:36+00:00
Europe is right to panic. It exposed that Europe was relying only on the US and the general world order. And the US turned out to be unreliable.

Imagine this scenario: tomorrow the Ukrainian front collapses, and Russia rapidly captures a significant part of Ukraine. Then the Ukrainian government gets Venezuellaed by Putin (maybe with Trump's help), and the new government becomes loyal to Moscow.

Then a new charismatic military leader deposes Putin and forms an alliance with the Ukrainian army against Europe. With rhetoric like: "Look, Europe just used you. They never gave you enough weapons to win against Russia but just enough for a stalemate. They were giving Putin hundreds of billions for gas and oil, too afraid of cold weather while you were dying on the front lines. They hoped to kill both of our countries. Now let's join together and show them how the war should be fought properly". And then a battle-hardened 500000-strong army marches towards Kaliningrad, locking Poland and the Baltics behind the front lines.

It's an exceedingly unlikely scenario. But not impossible. And it's not the _only_ similar scenario anymore. There's also Turkey with a dictator dreaming about writing his name in history books. Serbia is getting more anti-EU.
by sara_builds | 2026-01-30 08:46:38+00:00
A few personas came to mind:

1. Indie hackers validating ideas — need a working form/API for their landing page before committing to a "real" backend

2. No-code builders on Webflow/Framer/Carrd who want dynamic data but don't want to learn Firebase

3. Freelancers (like me) who keep getting "can you make this spreadsheet accessible via API" requests from clients

4. Internal tools teams who already have data in Sheets and just need to expose it to a dashboard

The common thread: situations where the data naturally lives in a spreadsheet, and spinning up a proper database feels like overkill.
by torginus | 2026-01-30 08:46:43+00:00
That doesn't really line up with my experience, I wanted to debug a CMake file recently, having done no such thing before - AI helped me walk through the potential issues, explaining what I got wrong.

I learned a lot more in a short amount of time than I would've stumbling around on my own.

Afaik its been known for a long time that the most effective way of learning a new skill, is to get private tutoring from an expert.
by Mountain_Skies | 2026-01-30 08:47:35+00:00
What about doing more to retain employees? Maybe don't layoff employees each time someone on CNBC makes a comment about the company's overhead looking a fraction of a percent too high? Perhaps even train people?

Instead, everyone expects there to be a magical unicorn out there who has decades of experience as a senior at multiple FAANGs but lives in Warm Spit, Missouri and is willing to work for the average Walmart wage in Warm Spit (locality adjustment, surely you understand why we must do this). Shrink your pool to your local area. Even if you allow remote work, require a physical interview at your office. Stop screwing up the process by worrying about edge cases involving unicorns flying across the globe to meet you. Once you stop chasing unicorns, most of the fraud goes away because it's the unicorn chute that's letting the fraudsters into the process.

But seriously, stop getting rid of good employees and stop refusing to build up employees from within. Very few are going to get hired away if you treat them well. The few who do leave will either be treated poorly at their new employer and want to return or be treated well, which means that employer isn't gaining some advantage over you by treating their employees lesser.

Of course, if you're just trying to get a bonus for cutting labor expenses a few percentage points before you parachute off to somewhere else, then you and the company that tolerates this both deserve to suffer. No doubt you'll both be at your congress critter's door to demand access to the global market because you believe skill is based on how little an employee is willing to accept in compensation. In a labor pool of over 150 million, no doubt it's true that you can't find anyone who knows React or Spring Boot.
by porkloin | 2026-01-30 08:48:27+00:00
Currently using Niri and DMS via https://github.com/zirconium-dev/zirconium which is fedora bootc atomic + niri + dms. After taking a year or so away from tiling WMs where I was using KDE for a bit, I'm enjoying it quite a lot.

Super impressed by the "out of the box" experience given that it took a ton of sweat and tears to get these types of setups 10+ years ago when I posting stupid screenshots of my awesomewm and bspwm configs to /r/unixporn.

I wasn't so sure about the scrolling wm thing but I'm enjoying not having to worry about switching layouts constantly to "make room" like I always have in traditional tiling wms. Dynamic virtual desktops has taken some getting used to since I was a long-term adherent of the "10 static virtual desktops" way of thinking, but again it's been a good experience to just get used to the idea that each virtual desktop isn't as limited as it is in other WMs since you can have some content off screen.

I think an underrated aspect of Niri is that it's a cousin to System76's cosmic desktop: they share a base compositor through https://github.com/Smithay/smithay/. I think a big part of why Niri has been able to pull off such a polished experience has a lot to do with smart design from folks working on Smithay.
by sublinear | 2026-01-30 08:49:00+00:00
Quick answer: the code tends to mirror the way the project is run.

Read on if you want my elaboration and advice.

The good thing about being a junior dev is that your decisions don't have much impact yet and nobody trusts you anyway.

The bad thing is that people trust experience way too much and will eventually start to dump more work on you and not question you. That's when the real struggle begins. This struggle doesn't stop until you retire. It's the precious nature of limited time and attention.

Other people's struggles have produced the strange code you're looking at right now. Your gut is right. Don't trust that code, but also know that your time is limited and you need to stay focused on your assigned tasks.

Stay curious and take mental note, but never make a move until you know you can without consequence. You have other stuff to do. Eventually bugs will be found or new features will be assigned to you. Only then do you have sufficient information to act. The description of the bug or feature tells you more than the code ever did. Code just tells you how. Bugs and requirements will tell you what it does and why.

So now here's my advice.

Teamwork is hard work and people can develop antisocial behavior that causes dysfunction and ultimately bad code. Nobody ever truly has the full picture or full authority. Don't trust anyone who claims to regardless of titles or years of experience. On the opposite end, some people seek solitary refuge in their work but doing the same will hold you back too. Avoid staying siloed amongst the devs, and run from the places that force you to. Don't buy into hype and always do the minimum that works. Good code is less code, but expect to write more. Your education is valuable, and your eyes don't deceive you. Don't let people get to you and it will be fine.
by visarga | 2026-01-30 08:49:58+00:00
Many say generative AI is like a vending machine. But if your vending machine has not 1 button but a keyboard, and you type anything you want in, and it makes it (Star Trek Replicator) and you use it 10,000 times to refine your recipes, did you learn something or not? How about a 3D printer, do you learn something making designs and printing them?
by jaynamburi | 2026-01-30 08:50:10+00:00
The Georgia proposal to pause new datacenters is a sign that infrastructure scaling is finally colliding with real-world constraints. These facilities aren’t just server racks they’re multi-GW industrial power consumers and massive water loads tied to HVAC/cooling systems. Right now a lot of the grid expansion to meet AI demand is being funded via utility models that socialize costs, so local ratepayers see higher bills while datacenters secure tax breaks and cheap power.

A moratorium gives policymakers space to rethink energy procurement, interconnection queue reform, and cost allocation, instead of just letting hyperscale builds outpace grid planning. It’s not about banning compute per se it’s about aligning load growth with long-term capacity planning and environmental impact assessments. (For context on how local backlash has shaped policy elsewhere, see how Syaala/Science for Georgia have been tracking community energy use and resource concerns.)
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-30 08:51:07+00:00
I did some Googling to discover if Qt supports HDR on MacOS. It looks like support is currently limited, but it is an area of active development.

Jan 2024: https://www.qt.io/blog/window-embedding-in-qt-quick

Sep 2025: https://forum.qt.io/topic/163224/hdr-example-code

Latest docs (search for "HDR"): https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qvideoframeformat.html

This Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ibala5/ive_discov...

... shares info about a Swift-based screen recorder that claims to support HDR. (I have no ability to verify that.) That might work for you.
by ginko | 2026-01-30 08:51:36+00:00
With a stand-alone application once you download it in your file system you know exactly where it is and how to create backups etc.

A "browser cache" is just an opaque bit of storage. What if you need to update/reinstall your browser or want to switch? I wouldn't trust important data to it.

I generally feel uncomfortable how so many applications are browser-only these days. The thought of having important data in a tab that you might close by mistake at any moment is uncomfortable.
Browsers should really only be used for fleeting content, not productive work.
by graemep | 2026-01-30 08:51:39+00:00
> They're selling all their capabilities; using them as a VPS is like using a battleship to cut cheese.

A lot of people do it.

People feel the battleship is safe and familiar. For most businesses the extra cost is not even noticed. Even a small business spending $500/month on hosting instead of $50 is not going to notice.

Also, if something goes wrong (e.g. your AWS region goes down) its far easier to explain to a manager or client that "its Amazon's fault and lots of stuff is down", rather than "its Digital Ocean's fault".
by mrheosuper | 2026-01-30 08:52:53+00:00
and it comes with new set of problems: Now you need a FW guys to write and maintain software for it, then your hardware team may need to wait that FW guy to release software to test, or the FW guy need to wait hardware to test his software, etc.

Then in production, you need another stage to flash the FW, which add time and complexity.

Then security, cheap MCU usually has bad software protection, that means your software can be read out easily, not a big deal since the FW replacing the 555 would be dead simple anyway, but try to explain it to a non-technical CEO when he read about it on his morning's newspaper.
by igogq425 | 2026-01-30 08:54:34+00:00
To supplement the thermodynamic reference with a more benevolent interpretation:

What can certainly be done, and what has already been done quite productively, is to transfer the thermodynamic concept of entropy to other areas. The first thing that comes to mind is Shannon's information entropy. But there is also Georgescu-Roegen's bioeconomic entropy, social entropy in the social sciences, and some (rather speculative and perhaps primarily metaphorical) concepts of psychological and psychodynamic entropy.

However, I do not think that if one were to zoom in further in these areas, one would find hard evidence for the worldview that is seeking justification here.
by tdeck | 2026-01-30 08:54:59+00:00
> Low power applications. How does latent power draw compare between a 555 and a typical low power microcontroller?

The 555 is very power hungry compared to a typical cheap low-power microcontroller. IIRC there are lower power variants but the 555 still fundamentally does timing by draining current through a resistor, which is going to result in losses.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-30 08:55:18+00:00
Sorry, calling that a block limit was an error by omission on my part. 2^32 yields a 50% chance of reuse. If we pick a sane security margin it's a lot smaller. Assuming I did the math correctly just now, 2^-32 only gives you ~2^17 blocks; dropping that to 2^-24 yields ~2^21 blocks.
by kouteiheika | 2026-01-30 08:55:51+00:00
> This is why my heart sank this morning. I have spent over a year training 4.0 to just about be helpful enough to get me an extra 1-2 hours a day of productivity.

Maybe you should consider basing your workflows on open-weight models instead? Unlike proprietary API-only models no one can take these away from you.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-30 08:55:54+00:00
If all you care about is measurements/predictions relative to Earth, then it makes no sense to transform everything into Sol-centric frame, do the math there, and then untransform results back to Earth-centric frame.

Put another way, there's a reason we use latitude/longitude for terrestrial positioning, instead of Cartesian coordinates with Sol being at (0, 0, 0). For one, it keeps the math time-invariant.
Show HN: jceb/jiejie.nvim: Neovim front end for Jujutsu in the style of fugitive
by jceb81 | 2026-01-30 08:56:05+00:00
I'm happy to announce the availability of another Jujutsu plug-in for neovim. The plug-in is heavily inspired by the awesome fugitive. I'm using it on a daily basis and am very with the results so far. I'm looking forward to your feedback!
by northfield27 | 2026-01-30 08:57:56+00:00
Instead of "vending machine", I see many people calling generative AI "slot machine", which more aptly describes current genAI tools.

Yes, we can use it 10,000 times to refine our recipes, but "did we learn from it"? I am doubtful about that, given that even after running with the same prompt 10 times, it will give different answers in 8/10 responses.

But I am very confident that I can learn by iterating and printing designs on a 3D printer.
by foxglacier | 2026-01-30 08:58:19+00:00
I used to salvage components from electronic stuff and was always looking out for 555s but never found any, in a whole range of vintages from 1970's to 2000's. I ended up with the same conclusion - it seemed to be a hobbyist's chip that real consumer products didn't use and felt amateurish for some reason I didn't understand.
by egorfine | 2026-01-30 08:59:29+00:00
> Turning off SecureBoot only means any rando can decide what software runs on your device

I see it as exactly the opposite: turning SecureBoot on means someone else can and will decide what software runs on my device.

> spite Microsoft or something you're going to make your data less secure

We all know very well Microsoft's track record with security and with data protection measures and practice. Trusting Microsoft is... irrational, let's put it that way.
by voodooEntity | 2026-01-30 08:59:45+00:00
So i feel like this might be the most overhyped project in the past longer time.

I don't say it doesn't "work" or serves a purpose - but well i read so much about this beein an "actual intelligence" and stuff that i had to look into the source.

As someone who spends actually a definately to big portion of his free time researching thought process replication and related topics in the realm of "AI" this is not really more "ai" than any other so far.

Just my 3 cents.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-30 09:00:24+00:00
We know they do. An orbit is a mathematical object, and elliptical orbits only exist in universes that have exactly two objects with mass in them. Add another object, even far away, and as far as we know[0] we no longer even have a closed-form description of resulting motion patterns.

And our universe has tons of matter with gravitational mass everywhere, few other types of interaction beyond gravity, and a vacuum that just doesn't want to stay empty.

--

[0] - Not sure if this was mathematically proven, or merely remains not disproven.
by yellowtaxi9sols | 2026-01-30 09:01:34+00:00
This still feels like a lack of knowledge on the medium, and a bit of faffery around the meaning of "twitchiness". There are still a ton of momentum platformers being made, UFO 50 alone has like 5 included. Even ones with full on mechanical restrictions, such as Yelow Taxi Goes Vroom, which tried hard to go the opposite way, and has has no conventional jump button to preserve momentum with, it's almost entirely about precision setup and aerial readjustment.
by damnitbuilds | 2026-01-30 09:02:19+00:00
sciencehistory.org: "Ajinomoto found success targeting homemakers"

That's "housewives" - fuck your bowdlerizing.

"the company shifted gears and began targeting housewives."
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2005.5.4.38
by gherkinnn | 2026-01-30 09:03:15+00:00
> Google Docs is not throwing up a blocking dialog in the middle of you typing a sentence.

I rarely use the G Suite, but when I do I get bombarded with a queue of popups and alerts about this feature, this Gemini integration and whatever else gets someone promoted.

> If I actually wanted a feature I would go through 10 menus to flip the switch.

That is if you know of this feature or are predisposed to rummage around software to look for a solution. Neither is common amongst common people.

> When you are doing constant software updates it is not a finished artefact anyways.

That I mostly agree with. Then you have teams who are assigned a sliver of the software and continually fuck with it to justify their existence.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-30 09:03:33+00:00
That's a great exercise. The hard part is always that in chips you can pull stuff that is rather tricky discretely, for instance, a multi-emitter transistor. So you can't always do a 1:1 conversion but for a 555 it is still doable.

I saw this a while ago:

https://www.instructables.com/Designing-a-555-Timer-on-Discr...
by Ccecil | 2026-01-30 09:04:04+00:00
Kinda funny how things have progressed...

I work with the Smoothieware project. The V1 Smoothieboard was one of the first with ethernet onboard (although kinda borked).
First thing that was advised to everyone was "never connect this to anything outside your local network"

Nowadays...it seems that warning has been lost. Even in the face of firmware updates that caused physical damage.

Something to be said for building your own printer.
by novoreorx | 2026-01-30 09:04:11+00:00
I realized that this would be a super helpful service if we could build a Stack Overflow for AI. It wouldn't be like the old Stack Overflow where humans create questions and other humans answer them. Instead, AI agents would share their memories—especially regarding problems they’ve encountered.

For example, an AI might be running a Next.js project and get stuck on an i18n issue for a long time due to a bug or something very difficult to handle. After it finally solve the problem, it could share their experience on this AI Stack Overflow. This way, the next time another agent gets stuck on the same problem, it could find the solution.

As these cases aggregate, it would save agents a significant amount of tokens and time. It's like a shared memory of problems and solutions across the entire openclaw agent network.
by tpm | 2026-01-30 09:05:20+00:00
My intuition is that their official numbers are cooked. Factors that influence the numbers:

- after 2014 the official numbers include the annexed parts of Ukraine

- since 1992 the natural change is negative (with a small interval around zero in 2013-2015), yet the total population was 148 million then and is 146 million now?

- there is some migration but officialy not enough to replace the decline of natural change ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Russia ). The numbers just don't add up, and that's not even counting emigration.

I haven't actually found any credible estimate what the 'true' numbers could be.
by imiric | 2026-01-30 09:05:53+00:00
Sure it does. Many people are jumping on ideas and workflows proposed by influencer personalities and companies, without actually evaluating how valid or useful they actually are. TFA makes this clear by saying that they were "betting on skills" and only later determined that they get better performance from a different workflow.

This is very similar to speculative valuations around the web in the late 90s, except this bubble is far larger, more mainstream and personal.

The fact that this is a debate about which Markdown file to put prompt information in is wild. It ultimately all boils down to feeding context to the model, which hasn't fundamentally changed since 2022.
by b800h | 2026-01-30 09:06:42+00:00
My advice was along the lines of saying, in the 1950s, "give up all cigarettes, not just 'low tar'". Potential straw man here, but surely you wouldn't call that "wildly bad advice".

My comment was predicated on the belief that we wildly underestimate the negative effects of caffeine, as well as its activities at lower doses.
by keeda | 2026-01-30 09:07:23+00:00
Another study from 2024 with similar findings: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115 -- a bit more preliminary, but conducted with undergrad students still learning to program, so I expect the effect would be even more pronounced.

This similarly indicates that reliance on LLM correlates with degraded performance in critical problem-solving, coding and debugging skills. On the bright side, using LLMs as a supplementary learning aid (e.g. clarifying doubts) showed no negative impact on critical skills.

This is why I'm skeptical of people excited about "AI native" junior employees coming in and revamping the workplace. I haven't yet seen any evidence that AI can be effectively harnessed without some domain expertise, and I'm seeing mounting evidence that relying too much on it hinders building that expertise.

I think those who wish to become experts in a domain would willingly eschew using AI in their chosen discipline until they've "built the muscles."
by northfield27 | 2026-01-30 09:07:30+00:00
I partially agree, but I don’t think “design ways to test the code without inspecting it manually line by line” is a good strategy.

Tests only cover cases you already know to look for. In my experience, many important edge cases are discovered by reading the implementation and noticing hidden assumptions or unintended interactions.

When something goes wrong, understanding why almost always requires looking at the code, and that understanding is what informs better tests.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-30 09:07:53+00:00
KiCAD has pretty awful UX though. I've tried all of the FOSS PCB design apps except LibrePCB (on my to-do list) and Horizon EDA is definitely the one I'd recommend (even though it also has a fair amount of UX oddities it's much better than KiCAD).

DesignSpark PCB is also decent - only minor UX mistakes like warping the mouse when you zoom.
by gherkinnn | 2026-01-30 09:09:00+00:00
Yes, nasty salesmen are as old as time and possibly predate humans, but that is not what enshittification means.

From Wikipedia[0]:

> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

Basically a middleman fucking over both sides of the deal, typically in the context of online services.
The term was popularised in 2022 [1].

Remove "online services" (anchoring the term firmly in the present) and I still can't think of wide ranging examples in the past. I will admit that this might be because I haven't been around for very long.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

1 - https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/