MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sjw987 | 2026-01-21 09:43:48+00:00
Sad news. I've been using Nova for years now, across multiple devices.

Thankfully my build is super minimalistic and another launcher was able to replicate it pretty quickly. Black wallpaper, white icon pack, list app drawer with a few folders, 4 scrollable home screens with large white icons for the most frequent apps (browser, Gemini, personal lifestyle logging app, Signal conversation with wife).

The idea that there might be ads (albeit on the free tier) is ridiculous, but then again that is the final frontier for adtech companies. I've often thought the Google stock launcher will likely soon have ads, just like Microsoft started trying to slip them in with Windows 10.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-21 09:43:56+00:00
Archive all the other channels that are not the main and go back to the main first few.

Change the theming as in if you are using emojis in channel name, swap to another batch.

Bring something different. Old chat is boring, the new users can't relate, old users shiver at their cringe. Don't delete, archive, make a category called Museum and shove them there.

You've got to offer something, a Minecraft server, free money and please get rid of any of those stupid "level up bots".
by KarlVoit | 2026-01-21 09:44:20+00:00
I beg to differ.

MD did not "win". That would imply that no alternative situation would be possible any more. It's just the most popular Lightweight Markup Language (LML) at the moment. And I do think that it's worth challenging for very good reasons I tried to summarize in my article. (You may want to re-read the section where I mention that most LML users are not even born yet.)

Your argument "it's HTML in a short form and HTML" is not specific to MD. This is true for all LMLs. Therefore, it can't be the reason for MD. Most people making statements like that have never ever used other LMLs and think that MD is the only LML out there. I agree, that LMLs are a very good idea. However, that doesn't imply that workflows need to stick with one of the worst LMLs you can use.

"Worse is Better" is IMHO not a good argument either: "where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability" (cited from the Wikipedia page). The main reason I wrote my article was that "in terms of practicality and usability", Markdown fails badly in many workflows because of the chaotic nature of Markdown not being Markdown. So actually, for the sake of "worse is better", you actually would need to migrate away from Markdown!

I would generally urge you to re-read my article as I think that I referred to all of your mentioned arguments and explained why I think it's still a very good approach to question Markdown dominance for the sake of "practicality and usability" of many, many people and workflows.

Tech savvy people should never settle for mediocre or really bad solutions just because it's difficult to switch. In the long run, you're losing.

We can and we should do better than that.
by aidenn0 | 2026-01-21 09:44:46+00:00
Llama seems to make illegal moves which confuses the game engine; it tries to play to non-existant piles which causes the chips to disappear (not end up in the Dead box). This then confuses other AIs which are counting chips in the dead box and on the board.

Even were that fixed, that doesn't solve the problem that the AI makes really bad moves. I can win just by doing the following:

1. If there is a pile that I can capture with at least one chip not of my color, do it

2. Otherwise play on the largest pile
by pavlov | 2026-01-21 09:45:06+00:00
It's important to distinguish between traditional post vfx and in-camera vfx, which has come into fashion in recent years.

In-camera vfx means that the final CGI is already present in the scene when it's shot. This is usually accomplished with giant LED screens. Typically the engine that runs these screens is Unreal.

One major advantage is that the cinematographer's main job, lighting design, gets easier compared to green screen workflows. The LED screens themselves are meaningful light sources (unlike traditional rear projection), so they contribute correct light rather than green spill which would have to be cleaned up in post.

The downside of course is that the CGI is nailed down and is mostly very hard to fix in post. I suppose that's what Gore Verbinski is criticizing — for a filmmaker, the dreaded "Unreal look" is when your LED screen set has cheesy realtime CGI backgrounds and you can't do anything about it because those assets are already produced and you must shoot with them.
by ignoramous | 2026-01-21 09:45:44+00:00
> EE to debug react state management ... easily pick up most of it after a week long crash course while training a performance engineer ... would take months

Isn't that mostly because as you go up the abstraction layer, tools and docs to teach yourself the tricks of trade fast are in abundance (let alone a popular layer like React)? Which inturn is likely a function of incentives and opportunities.
by marhee | 2026-01-21 09:45:45+00:00
> Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past

Just a single retina screen buffer, assuming something like 2500 by 2500 pixels, 4 byte per pixel is already 25MB for a single buffer. Then you want double buffering, but also a per-window buffer since you don't want to force rewrites 60x per second and we want to drag windows around while showing contents not a wireframe. As you can see just that adds up quickly. And that's just the draw buffers. Not mentioning all the different fonts that are simultaneously used, images that are shown, etc.

(Of course, screen bufferes are typically stored in VRAM once drawn. But you need to drawn first, which is at least in part on the CPU)
by grumbel | 2026-01-21 09:46:10+00:00
This feels like the wrong end to optimize. Zip is plenty of fast, especially when it comes to a few hundred pages of a comic. Meanwhile the image decoding can take a while when you want to have a quick thumbnail overview showing all those hundred pages at once. No comic/ebook software I have ever touched as managed to match the responsiveness of an actual book where you can flip through those hundreds of pages in a second with zero loading time, despite it being somewhat trivial to implement when you generate the necessary thumbnail/image-pyramid data first.

A multi-resolution image format would make more sense than optimizing the archive format. There would also be room for additional features like multi-language support, searchable text, … that the current "jpg in a zip" doesn't handle (though one might end up reinventing DJVU here).
by sebastiennight | 2026-01-21 09:46:11+00:00
I don't think this thread is the best place for the everlasting debate on whether day trading is "investing", but for the purposes of my definition above, day trading, like other kinds of trading like buying commodities for resale, or having a booth at the flea market, would fit my definition of "work" (you purchased something that you expect to generate profit from by putting in your time and effort) rather than investment, since the poker hand is not doing anything by itself to generate value/money/returns for you.
Real programming vs. interviews: A dyslexic perspective
by gcv | 2026-01-21 09:49:04+00:00
I'm a programmer with almost 20 years of experience, and I'm dyslexic.

I can do the job well, but interviews are often the hardest part. They're stressful, expect quick answers, and demand heavy use of working memory.

That's not how programming actually works. In real work, we use notes, tools, documentation, and time to process, digest, and reason about them

I'd like to connect with other dyslexic programmers to talk about interview environments and how they could better work for us.

If you're dyslexic, or involved in hiring, I'd love to hear your experiences.
by lproven | 2026-01-21 09:49:07+00:00
Discourse is less of a PITA than Discord, but only marginally. It's still a fugly web forum.

For productive low-noise discussions, I favour mailing lists. Anyone who can't suss out how to participate on mailing lists probably has little interesting to say.

For a FOSS chatroom, that is, live and realtime, Matrix works fairly well these days. Thunderbird has a built-in Matrix client; no extensions needed.
by bodge5000 | 2026-01-21 09:49:09+00:00
I tried a few alternatives last night but ended up going with Lawnchair. I miss some of the deeper customisation of Nova, but its otherwise nice and stable and, most importantly, not spyware.

I'm not sure if this would actually affect me in the short term as a Nova Prime user (unsure if the extra trackers were added there too), but in the long term it certainly would
by KK7NIL | 2026-01-21 09:49:10+00:00
We're talking past each other because we're using different definitions.

If you actually read the article you'll see that the type of arrays and functions they're talking about are not necessarily the types you'll find in your typical programming language (with some exceptions, as others noted) but more in the area of pure math.

The insights one can gain from this pure math definition are still very much useful for real world programming tough (e.g. memoization), you just have to be careful about the slightly different definitions/implementations.
by carschno | 2026-01-21 09:49:29+00:00
On the one hand, this exercise probably reflects a realistic task. Daily engineering work comprises a lot of reverse engineering and debugging of messy code.
On the other hand, this does not seem very suitable as an isolated assignment. The lack of code base-specific context has a lot of potential for frustration. I wonder what they really tested on the candidates, and whether this was what they wanted to filter for.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-21 09:49:37+00:00
It took me about 10 minutes to generate that writeup the old fashioned 100% organic way, because one of the things that's unspecified is whether you're allowed to use AI to help solve it! So I assumed as it's a job interview question you're not allowed, but now I see other comments saying it was allowed. That would let you get much further.

I think I'd be able to make some progress optimizing this program in two hours but probably not much. I'm not a performance engineer but have designed exotic emulated CPU architectures before, so that helps a lot.
by matt3D | 2026-01-21 09:49:58+00:00
Your metric for “getting it to work” is wrong. Developing software is a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself.

The simplest metric you should be tracking is; has it generated income.

In this sense my use of agentic coding has performed very well. People asking for evidence and repos are a little naive to how capitalism works in the real world. If I’m making money on something I’m not going to let you copy it, and I’m sure as hell not going to devalue it by publicising that it was built by AI.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-21 09:50:26+00:00
I'm not failing to read tone, I'm just trying to genuinely engage in spite of your trolling.

The criticism pointed at me just seems absurd in a world where it's not unusual for heads of state to announce their intention to cut off the balls of a opposition leader if they can find him, https://x.com/mkainerugaba/status/2013331792506298533

This is the rhetoric being wielded, and it's being wielded by people who do mean what they say. This is the nature of politics being discussed, it seems bizarre to stick your head in the sand and ignore that. The world will not magically become a better place if HN users suddenly decide to pretend that violence does not exist and does not play a significant role in politics.

This is simply what conversations involving armed conflict look like. On HN, we should hopefully still be able to discuss these things from a more intellectually curious point of view.
by consp | 2026-01-21 09:50:48+00:00
> We do not sell personal data.

Companies usually treat "anonymized" data as non personal. So in their eyes they aren't selling your personal data but their "non-personal" data. The fact it isn't does not matter because profit.

The fact they added Facebook and google trackers and not listed a why is obvious enough. Fortunately for me it did not update yet and is now gone.
by tmountain | 2026-01-21 09:52:28+00:00
I used to do it the way you were doing it. A friend went to a hackathon and everyone was using Cursor and insisted that I try it. It lets you set project level "rules" that are basically prompts for how you want things done. It has access to your entire repo. You tell the agent what you want to do, and it does it, and allows you to review it. It's that simple; although, you can take it much further if you want or need to. For me, this is a massive leap forward on its own. I'm still getting up to speed with reproducible prompt patterns like TFA mentions, but it's okay to work incrementally towards better results.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-21 09:54:11+00:00
The term I know / used for this is "trivial inconveniences", via an old article of Scott Alexander[0].

The quote from example from early in the article stuck with me for years:

Think about this for a second. The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website.

(Now this is more poetic, but I suppose the much more insightful example that also stuck with me is given later - companies enticing you to buy by offering free money, knowing well that most customers can't be arsed to fill out a form to actually get that money.)

--

[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...
by pjerem | 2026-01-21 09:54:23+00:00
> Users might say they want “delete”, but then also “undo”, and suddenly we’re talking about soft delete semantics.

I've worked for a company where some users managed very personal informations on behalf of other users, like, sometimes, very intimate data and I always fought product on soft deletion.

Users are adults, and when part of their job is being careful with the data _they_ manage and _they_ are legally responsible for, I don't feel like the software owes them anything else than a clear information about what is going to happen when they click to "CONFIRM DELETION".

"Archive" is a good pattern for those use cases. It's what have been used for decades for OS "Recycle Bin". Why not call it Delete if you really want to but in this case, bring a user facing "Recycle Bin" interface and be clear than anything x days old will be permanently deleted.
by actionfromafar | 2026-01-21 09:54:42+00:00
Windows 95 on a 386 CPU with enough RAM was alright. Not fast but very useable.

https://youtu.be/Pw2610paPYM?t=72

But most 386 didn't have 8+ megabytes, and some 386 had a 286 like data bus, making it even slower. (386SX)
by riedel | 2026-01-21 09:54:46+00:00
I remember buying a bulky external 2MB RAM extension (I think I bought another 2MB) before that for my Amiga 500 running a full desktop OS already on 512k 'Chipmemory' using it mostly to actually as a TempFS to accelerate loading. That was beginning to mid 90s, I guess. But running netbsd on the Amiga meant that you would already at that time need 16MB of RAM and a CPU with an MMU as well as an HDD (my friend across the street did that with his A1200 I think I remember). You would only do it if you wanted more networking beyond BBS I guess.
by entuno | 2026-01-21 09:54:49+00:00
A problem with this approach is that one of the key functions of a bug bounty program is to encourage people to report vulnerabilities to the developers, rather than selling them elsewhere.

If I have to pay money to submit a vulnerability to the developers with on guarantee that I'll even get refunded for a high quality and good faith report, let alone any actual payout, there's much less incentive for me to do so compared to selling them to someone else who won't charge me money for the privilege.
by xsh6942 | 2026-01-21 09:55:11+00:00
It really depends by what you mean by "it works". A retrospective of the last 6months.

I've had great success coding infra (terraform). It at least 10x the generation of easily verifiable and tedious to write code. Results were audited to death as the client was highly regulated.

Professional feature dev is hit and miss for sure, although getting better and better. We're nowhere near full agentic coding. However, by reinvesting the speed gains from not writing boilerplate into devex and tests/security, I bring to life much better quality software, maintainable and a boy to work with.

I suddenly have the homelab of my dreams, all the ideas previously in the "too long to execute" category now get vibe coded while watching TV or doing other stuff.

As an old jaded engineer, everything code was getting a bit boring and repetitive (so many rest APIs). I guess you get the most value out of it when you know exactly what you want.

Most importantly though, and I've heard this from a few other seniors: I've found joy in making cool fun things with tech again. I like that new way of creating stuff at the speed of thought, and I guess for me that counts as "it works"
by jbstack | 2026-01-21 09:55:20+00:00
I feel like HN should have a policy of discouraging comments which accuse articles and other comments of being written by AI. We all know this happens, we all know it's a possibility, and often such comments may even be correct. But seeing this type of comment dozens of times a day on all sorts of different content is tedious. It almost feels like nobody can write anything anymore without someone immediately jumping up and saying "You used AI to write that!".
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-21 09:55:53+00:00
As an unfortunate reply to myself, I'd like to ask a question to nobody in particular: Do y'all not use shortcuts? I think that they are pretty neat, and we've had them on Android since around version 7.1.

And the reason I ask this is because when I Google up different combinations of nouns, verbs and word usements for my problem of Android shortcuts and Octipi Launcher, I fairly-consistently find my own recent comments on HN (above, in these threads; within the bounds of this posting) in the top 5 results.

And that tells me that I am not only preaching to the choir, but the choir only exists of one member. And that member is me.

So I guess I am thus preaching to myself.

Awesome!

And thus, perhaps I am much more of an outlier than I ever imagined.

So the question stands: Am I really looking in from the outside with my quest for Android shortcuts that we've had for almost a decade? Is this lack of functionality really a thing that others just simply don't notice in a modern Android ecosphere? Is it a forgotten relic of the past?

(Whatever the case, it presently doesn't work with Octopi Launcher -- and I'm going to keep using it anyway.)
by canhdien_15 | 2026-01-21 09:57:42+00:00
Have you ever paused to ask who or what you are doing all of this for? Give yourself the right to choose, and slow down to observe the world’s hustle without being swept away by it.
Find a purpose, even the simplest one, and embrace experiences as they come. Don't resent those around you—they are merely playing their roles in the system. Stop searching for external answers; the clarity you seek is already within you. Just move forward, and you will see it.
by kawsper | 2026-01-21 09:58:16+00:00
When I was about 12 I was working on a PHP3 application, I had some issues with a MySQL query, and I pasted my code to pastebin (or whatever we used back then) and shared the link on IRC, the code included my database credentials.

Back then our ISP gave every computer a public IP.

The next thing that happened was that someone changed my MySQL password, and me being 12, I didn’t know how to change it back.

They made me beg for the password, to much amusement to the whole channel, and then they helped me secure it and taught me how to reset the password.

NAT would have saved me, but I wouldn’t have received a free, though a bit embarrassing, security lesson.
by comboy | 2026-01-21 09:58:46+00:00
Here's a pattern I noticed - you notice some pattern that is working (let's say planning or TODO management) - if the pattern is indeed solid then it gets integrated into the black box and your agent starts doing that internally. At which point your abstraction on top becomes defective because agents get confused about planning the planning.

So with the top performers I think what's most effective is just stating clearly what the end result you want to be (with maybe some hints for verification of results which is just clarifying the intent more)
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 09:58:57+00:00
It's a good demonstration of when agents still don't get everything right when you place things into Markdown documentation. You have to be really valiant and verify everything from top to bottom, if you want to control how things are implemented to that degree, otherwise the agent will still take shortcuts where they can.

In https://github.com/lowrescoder/BlueHeart/blob/68ab2387a0c44e... for example, it doesn't actually do SSE at all, instead it queues up a complete HTTP response each time, returns once and then closes the stream, so basically a normal HTTP endpoint, "labeled" as a SSE one. SSE is mentioned a bunch of times in the docs, and the files/types/functions are labeled as such, but that doesn't seem to be what's going on internally, from what I could understand. Happy to stand corrected though!
by Havoc | 2026-01-21 09:59:42+00:00
Tried various routes. Currently using bash scripts straight against the proxmox host. So lots of this

pct exec $CTID -- sh -c "mkdir test"

I've got a script that makes an arch lxc and turns it into a template.

And then bash scripts that deploys it with whatever custom stuff is needed (volume mounts, podman, files pushed into container etc).

Also a pacoloco server (arch/pacman cache) so that all the building and updating for everything is fast & not hitting the upstreams unnecessarily.

Terraform or Ansible also works for this but decided bash is ultimately less moving parts
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-21 09:59:51+00:00
>Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself.

I didn't mean it to be absolutist. But then riddle me this, if the EU regulations are the problem holding us back, why not get rid of some of them to boosts domestic production, and instead kneecap our agriculture industry and make ourselves dependent on imports from potential adversaries?

>EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law.

Yeah but enforcement is still local. A lot of countries choose to be very lax with enforcing some EU laws if the laws are stupid and nobody's getting hurt. So ultimately it's still the fault of the local nation for being overly pedantic with enforcement.

Blaming EU laws for local issues, is the ultimate cope the UK also tried, and once they left the EU, their problems persisted, because guess what, their issues were all domestically inflicted by local politics and not coming from the EU as they claimed.
by detectivestory | 2026-01-21 10:00:56+00:00
I tried to share a project Show HN (twice!), and I didn't get a single user interaction. I don't think my title was that bad, its more just that there are so many new projects using AI that people are fatigued from it. Its kind of a shame because I'm sure there are lots of really good ideas that are being completely overlooked because of this.
by chrisldgk | 2026-01-21 10:01:00+00:00
That and losing the ability to connect displays via USB-C is what’s keeping me from switching sadly.

I love what the Asahi team is doing and I’m confident they’ll get it figured out. I wish I could do something to help, but this type of programming is far beyond my skill level is there’s not much I can do other than donate here and there.