MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by malwrar | 2026-01-11 16:06:43+00:00
Gentoo is the best! Once you get the hang of creating a bootable system and feel comfortable painting outside the lines, it feels like Linux from Scratch just without needing to manually build everything. I automated building system images with just podman (to build the rootfs) and qemu (test boot & write the rootfs, foreign arch emulation) and basically just build new system images once a week w/ CI for all my hardware + rsync to update. Probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever built, at this point I’m effectively building my own Linux distro from source and it’s all defined in Containerfiles! I have such affection for the Gentoo team for enabling this project, shocking to discover how little they operate on I’m definitely setting up a recurring donation.
by ordu | 2026-01-11 16:07:06+00:00
> A "compiler" is software that translates computer code from one programming language into another language.

Yes, of course.

> Literally all it can express is linear functions.

And why a language to express linear functions can't be a programming language?

> My fixed-function calculator is more powerful than that!

But it isn't compiling, it is interpreting, is it? So your fixed-function calculator is not a compiler, it is an interpreter. It is irrelevant how powerful it is. There are much even more powerful interpreters and less powerful compilers.

The example we see gets computer code in one language and translates it into machine instructions. Talking about 'understatement' you are adding to this definition more constraints and these are very fuzzy constraints on what counts as a programming language.
by FpUser | 2026-01-11 16:07:11+00:00
C++ is a universal tool with long history. So yes it makes it very complex for various reasons. However it does not preclude one from being productive. I do not come anywhere close to being expert in C++. Still write software that blows the shit out of competition. I have general understanding how the things work and when I need some particular feature I just look up the efficient way of doing it in whatever language. Not just for C++. I actively use many languages. My goal is to deliver good software and get paid by happy client, not to know every little detail of the tools I use, it is just impossible and serves no useful purpose.
by zahlman | 2026-01-11 16:07:14+00:00
I don't know what book you're talking about, but it seems that you intend to compare the switch to an AI-based workflow to using a higher-level language. I don't think that's valid at all. Nobody using Python for any ordinary purpose feels compelled to examine the resulting bytecode, for example, but a responsible programmer needs to keep tabs on what Claude comes up with, configure a dev environment that organizes the changes into a separate branch (as if Claude were a separate human member of a team) etc. Communication in natural language is fundamentally different from writing code; if it weren't, we'd be in a world with far more abundant documentation. (After all, that should be easier to write than a prompt, since you already have seen the system that the text will describe.)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-11 16:07:26+00:00
Perhaps some fish hope for easy to catch prey attached to a hook

Perhaps other fish ignore prey attached to a hook for whatever reason, e.g., they are suuccessful at catching prey that is not attached to a hook

Perhaps there is a debate amongst fish about the difficulty, e.g., time and effort required, of catching prey that isn't attached to a hook versus the "value" of prey attached to a hook
by echelon | 2026-01-11 16:07:58+00:00
I want to make films that look like Denis Villeneuve's Dune. (Just to cite one example, not that I'm interested in replicating his style.) How am I supposed to do that?

You know what my sci-fi films look like? This is one of my productions, and it cost over $10,000 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-24s-AmqR5k (I don't even have a real link to the finished film, apparently. I don't typically do sci-fi because it's so inaccessible to do the things we want to do.)

We actually did a bunch of rotoscoping and VFX work for this. It was not bad for our budget, but I'm so tired of this. I have always dreamed of having my films look exactly like what I see in my mind's eye.

Why should I have constraints, and why should my audience dictate my constraints? It's my life, and I have a desire for my own creative output. My number one judge is myself, not you or anyone else. I make things to satisfy me.

I'm especially disheartened (?) angered (?) by non-artists stepping in to tell me this. People who haven't spent ten thousand hours on it.
by bitmasher9 | 2026-01-11 16:08:15+00:00
Windows has problems all the time. There is widespread knowledge on how to troubleshoot and fix these problems.

Similar problems will have very different solutions for Linux. The knowledge of how to resolve them is much less widespread. I’ve had very good success in asking ChatGPT how to resolve Linux issues, probably better success then I would on Windows because the error messages on Linux are much more detailed.
by jFriedensreich | 2026-01-11 16:08:17+00:00
seems not to justify submitting to a proprietary single vendor solution where users are locked into opaque checkpoints they forgot how to migrate away from. this is not something made for users lets be clear. there are tens or hundreds of vm layers for defense in depth for docker so thats a non argument, no one says docker has to provide security its for tooling and common practices that allow vendor independence and moving to self hosted stacks as needed!
by jmyeet | 2026-01-11 16:08:37+00:00
You read things like this and, first, you're reminded of Sideshow Bob [1] and it puts Rust concepts in context, namely:

1. Move semantics are to handle ownership. Ownership is a first-class concept in Rust. This is why;

2. C++ smart pointers (eg std::unique_ptr<>) are likewise to handle ownership and incur a runtime cost where in Rust they are handled by the compiler with no runtime cost. Yes you can "cheat" (eg std::unique_ptr::get) and people do (they have to) but this is a worse (IMHO) version than the much-maligned Rust unsafe blocks;

3. Not only do all features have a complexity cost but that curve is exponential because of the complexity of interactions, in this case move semantics and exceptions. At this point C++'s feature set combined with legacy code support is not just an albatross around its neck, it's an elephant seal; and

4. There's a 278 page book on C++ initialization [2].

My point here is that there are so many footguns here combined with the features of modern processors that writing correct code remains a Herculean (even Sisyphean) task.

But here's the worst part: IME all of this complexity tends to attract a certain kind of engineer who falls in love with their own cleverness who creates code using obscure features that nobody else can understand all the true implications (and likely they don't either).

Rust is complex because what you're doing is complex. Rust isn't a panacea. It solves a certain class of problems well and that class is really important (ie memory safety). We will be dealing with C++ buffer overflow CVEs until the heat death of the Universe. But one thing I appreciate about languages like Go is how simple they are.

I honestly think C++ is unsalvageable given its legacy.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WZLJpMOxS4

[2]: https://leanpub.com/cppinitbook
by rvz | 2026-01-11 16:08:55+00:00
No one is arguing that it isn't useful. The problem is this:

> I’m saying it doesn’t matter it’s probabilistic, everything is,

Maybe it doesn't matter for you, but it generally does matter.

The risk level of a technology failing is far higher if it is more random and unexplainable than if it is expected, verified and explainable. The former eliminates many serious use-cases.

This is why your CPU, or GPU works.

LLMs are neither deterministic, no formal verification exists and are fundamentally black-boxes.

That is why many vibe-coders reported many "AI deleted their entire home folder" issues even when they told it to move a file / folder to another location.

If it did not matter, why do you need sandboxes for the agents in the first place?
by gordian-mind | 2026-01-11 16:08:58+00:00
My experience with ChatGPT is that it rarely dares to make short, generalizing, opinionated statements without an excruciating amount of hedging.

Doctors pay subscriptions for specialized software that relies on LLMs enriched with medical context. But like other professionals, they also use ChatGPT as a search engine and verify what it tells them by virtue of being, well, doctors.
by amanaplanacanal | 2026-01-11 16:09:02+00:00
Occasionally I want to see what I paid for something, or when it happened, or who the vendor was. So if I can't migrate the data somehow, I'd still have to keep a copy of quicken around to access that old data even if I was using some other software for current data.

I might be willing to give all that up if I could find something that worked for new transactions, but I haven't found it yet.
by dangus | 2026-01-11 16:09:06+00:00
Based on your assessment you’d have almost no issue at all.

I’m almost certain you’d have no trouble running Quicken or Ableton. Ableton even has a Bottles configuration available, which is a one-click GUI install:

https://usebottles.com/app/#abletonlive

Isn’t Quicken also primarily a web/cloud app now?

Of course, if Wine-based solutions really don’t work, you also have the option to run a VM or dual boot for those one-off needs.

Your comment on plex server seems odd. It seems like most people run it via Docker, I can’t imagine what kind of Linux-specific issue you had. Docker/podman on Linux is quite superior to the experience on Mac and Windows.

As far as games, I have trouble finding games that don’t work. Steam and other launchers for other stores have pretty much eliminated this issue. There are even some online games with anti-cheat software that work in Linux.

Hundreds of hours? No, not really. Not these days. I know it’s hard to believe me but I went through this same thing switching from macOS to Linux last year. I was shocked, I almost thought my experiment would fail and I’d go back. But no, it’s so solid and a bunch of stuff I expected to not work just…worked. (I chose Bazzite as my distribution on a Framework 13).
by HerschSterling | 2026-01-11 16:09:22+00:00
The premise for Easytopia!, and The Arc of the Bard, is that the phenomenon of original thought is fascinating and mysterious. Storytelling is a facility of that phenomenon. Artificial intelligence compiles data and calculates previously existing information. But what is the origin of human thought? Where do stories come from?

In the fdirst interview we hear from Annika La Vina. We discuss the phenomenon of storytelling, and she reads the first Chapter of her Fantasy Trilogy called Stripes, which is about the upbringing of Lilith, the mythological first partner with Adam.
by luqtas | 2026-01-11 16:09:40+00:00
most interesting part is to guess how many here complaining about a poor ecosystem on Linux audio, actually work professionally on the field

Surge-XT, Vitalium and/or PlugData or Cardinal can get you so far on the synthesis world that maybe not even a full dedicated lifetime can explore everything you can do with it... Ardour isn't a shinning pot for MIDI editor generational features but if you actually know music-theory, it works pretty solid for writing. the in-line editor makes very much sense, just like sheet music can hold an orchestra info. on a sigle page
by habinero | 2026-01-11 16:09:46+00:00
Yeah, there's a big difference between edutainment like Brilliant and Duolingo and actually studying a topic.

I'm not trying to be snobbish here, it's completely fine to enjoy those sorts of products (I consume a lot of pop science, which I put in the same category) but you gotta actually get your hands dirty and do the work.

It's also fine to not want to do that -- I love to doodle and have a reasonable eye for drawing, but to get really good at it, I'd have to practice a lot and develop better technique and skills and make a lot of shitty art and ehhhh. I don't want it badly enough.
by rdm_blackhole | 2026-01-11 16:09:54+00:00
> The EU can just kick out the US bases and forbid Mastercard and Visa working here. ASML? Good luck for Intel; I'm sure AMD would have its asses already covered and found some alternative in Asia.

The EU uses Mastercard and Visa. If youblock them in the EU, you just cripple the EU economy instantly.

> On GAFAM, there are alternatives, and libre software it's libre for the whole world, not just the US.

How many people do you know that would be willing to switch to an alternative OS tomorrow or give up their Iphones?

> If the US army steps on Greenland

The US army is already on Greenland. They have a military base there.

I agree with you in spirit but in reality any countermeasures would inflict a lot of pain the EU as well. I don't think anyone has a crystal ball but whatever happens won't be good for anyone.
by jsheard | 2026-01-11 16:10:26+00:00
> Sakurai, director of the game, is bullish on AI for game development [2]

Your source is based on machine translation, and professional translators pushed back on the interpretation that he is enthusiastic about genAI. Apparently it came across more as resignation that AAA developers may be forced to resort to genAI in order to sustain the endless scope creep and content bloat endemic in the AAA industry, which has led to the current absurdity of it taking an entire decade to make a new GTA game.

https://kotaku.com/ai-translation-of-smash-bros-directors-co...
by Kerrick | 2026-01-11 16:10:51+00:00
I've had a lot of good luck with AI Agents also being able to read and meaningfully interprete .txt and .ansi dumps from RatatuiRuby's TestHelper module and its `assert_snapshots` [0].

For example, it was able to read the ANSI and figure out that a snapshot had changed because an upstream bug properly rendered bold and underline when it hadn't before.

[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/trunk/item/lib/...
by zeroonetwothree | 2026-01-11 16:11:12+00:00
You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going.

Probably other people feel differently.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-11 16:11:23+00:00
My PM SME validated my workflows and I found Jesus in them then my MBA TL PhD…bla bla bla.

A human being who avoided corporate brainrot just writes “I worked with John and he was indispensable because (insert reasons you wrote here)”

I’m 37 and never heard of this acronym. That’s the entry-level version of my point. Not that other people hurt me or people knowing things is actually bad.
by gruez | 2026-01-11 16:11:25+00:00
>Congrats to the latest buyer: you bought pure schwag. Whatever value was in that list got milked long before it ended up public.

Nobody is buying your account specifically, they're buying it bulk. At that scale the fact that a percentage of accounts are fake/burner/bots is baked whatever the buyer is expecting. If anything, the bigger issue is bot accounts, not random privacy-oriented people's burner accounts.
by MrGilbert | 2026-01-11 16:11:28+00:00
Even if I get the DTC codes out of the OBD - and then? Without the manufacturers service manual, I'm lost at interpreting the codes. For older cars, these manuals are somehow "obtainable" through "sources", but do not expect the manufacturer to help you out if, in fact, you are interested in fixing your own car.

So yes - it’s the industry that got us screwed.
by p_ing | 2026-01-11 16:13:39+00:00
Darktable is another piece of software that really shows warts in UX.

For example, you can right click empty space to "remove" or "update path to file..." in the left hand rail. There shouldn't be a right click option in empty space.

Everything lower case makes it very difficult to quickly parse, especially the settings menu.

Inkscape is also full of these sins. For that matter, so is KDE.
by falloutx | 2026-01-11 16:13:54+00:00
This is literally true, we have been automating other people out of their jobs without empathy for ages, so it makes sense at some point the knife would fall on us. Because of low solidarity we have shown with others and even our fellow programmers, I guess we deserve it. My real worry at this point is that the most destructive ones will continue and only the destructive programmers will be safe.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-11 16:14:25+00:00
Legal justification and moral justification are two different things.

If you had time to draw and fire a gun, you presumably had time to take one step to the side? Does US law not contain anything about force being reasonable and proportionate?

And whilst the article says a law enforcement officer has powers to stop people in the US, do they not need probable cause to do so? Not a lawyer, just seen a few cop shows, so this is a genuine question not a statement.
by gruez | 2026-01-11 16:14:58+00:00
>Source posted on 9-jan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46571968

Yeah the source is terrible. I'd expect at least some sort of explanation on how they arrived at that conclusion, eg. "someone on breachforums claims to have it for sale" or "some whistleblower at instagram reported". If it's the former, it's possible that instagram themselves aren't at fault, eg. they got it via phishing or credential stuffing.
by tapoxi | 2026-01-11 16:15:27+00:00
Nvidia? Which distribution?

My experience is on Bazzite with a Radeon 7800 XT and 9070 XT. I've had two amdgpu hangs playing The Finals which were a Mesa bug, this crashed kwin but kwin wasn't responsible in the stack trace. It's been fixed since.

That's really it since May 2024.
by Tiberium | 2026-01-11 16:15:52+00:00
Can anyone point to an actual reputable source that has any details about what specifically got leaked, and how? Instagram has way more users, so it's very odd that only 17.5M get "leaked". Just honestly feels like this is overblown and it's again just scraped data or something.

The original Malwarebytes tweet is incredibly generic.
by vardump | 2026-01-11 16:16:06+00:00
At 8 MHz, a 68k can execute at most 2M instructions per second. So the answer is going to be yes, if this manages to execute one 68k instruction per ~200 cycles.

I think executing an instruction is going to be closer to 20-50 cycles than 200, so it should be much faster than a real 68k CPU.

I think performance is likely to be in the ballpark of a 68040 @20 MHz, but that's just a guess. This would leave 20 cycles for each emulated instruction. With JIT you could reach 200 MHz+ comparable speeds.
by lightedman | 2026-01-11 16:16:24+00:00
NO PERSON SHALL BE DEPRIVED OF LIFE, LIBERTY, OR PROPERTY WITHOUT DUE PROCESS OF LAW.

Period. 5th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

When you sign up to be law enforcement, you are EXPECTED to lay your life down for the public good. Fearing for your life is not an excuse at all.
by dathinab | 2026-01-11 16:16:40+00:00
my take looking at languages beyond C++ is a very different one

you want a well working general solution which works well (most of the time for most of the "generic code" (i.e. good defaults for the default use-case).

and then add escape hatches for micro-optimizations, micro-control etc.

C++ on the other hand was deeply rooted designed with micro optimizations and micro control first.

"Generic solutions" where then tried to be added on top, but not by changing a badly working abstraction/design but by adding more abstraction layers and complexity on top. And with a high requirements for back/forward compatibility, not just with the language but ton of different tooling. That this isn't playing out well is kinda not really surprising IMHO. I mean adding more abstraction layers instead of fixing existing abstraction layers rarely plays out well (1) especially if the things you add are pretty leaky abstractions.

-----

(1): In context of them archiving overall the same goal with just different details and no clear boundaries. Layering very different kind of layers is normal and does make sense in a lot of situations. Just what C++ does is like layering "a generic system programming language" (modern C++) on top of "a generic system programming language" (old C++) without clear boundaries.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-11 16:17:08+00:00
In C++17 and later, return std::move(local_variable) as opposed to return local_variable is only breaking NRVO (which avoids even having to move, by essentially replacing local_variable with a reference to the variable the caller is assigning the function result to).

In C++17 if you do return std::move(local_variable) it will do exactly what you asked for and move the local variable to the return value, which with copy elision means directly to the caller's variable.

So, return std::move(local_variable) is only preventing NRVO, it's not preventing a move (even though you shouldn't be asking for a move, because move is not the most efficient way).
by psychoslave | 2026-01-11 16:17:15+00:00
Precisely, it's an added burden to remember and what might be skipped. The less many exception, the better.

Though if a linter is formatting the whole codebase on its own in an homogeneous way, and someone else will deal with the added parsing complexity, that might feel okayish also to me.

Generally speaking, the less clutter the better. A bit like with a js codebase which is semicolon free where possible.

For pleasant experience of read and write, html in a simple text editor is very low quality. Pug for example is bringing far less clutter, though mandatory space indentation could be avoided with some alternative syntactic choices.
by NicolasBre | 2026-01-11 16:17:21+00:00
I'm not a scientist, but while designing a governance system I found
this pattern everywhere: Σ(Excitatory) - Σ(Inhibitory) ≥ Threshold → Activation

I have validated it across four domains:
- Mimosa pudica
- Neurons: -55mV threshold
- Honeybee swarms
- Wolf packs

As the system gets more complex the prediction quality falls. Where does this break?
by BurningFrog | 2026-01-11 16:17:30+00:00
I had an AI explain this. Usual AI caveats apply.

Aside from your location, GPS also provides a very precise timestamp. Starlink terminals use that to compute where the satellite they're talking to is this nanosecond, and aim the antenna there.

This is the main way GPS jamming breaks Starlink.

The terminals also use it to know their own location. Maybe it can ignore "movements" when jammed, IDK.

The receiver does have a fallback mode when jammed. It blindly searches the sky for any satellite to talk to. Once found, it's can limp along at much lower bandwidth.
by throwaway17_17 | 2026-01-11 16:17:39+00:00
I certainly appreciate the shout-out to the artists and designers from the era, These techniques were bent, twisted, and pulled in every way a development team could to produce artistic results that in some case genuine “moments” worth remembering while playing a game.

I remember being at a friends house while working on my masters thesis and him telling me to take a break and try out Halo. I had not had a console since the Nintendo 64 came out. I booted Halo and was literally mesmerized when I came out of a tunnel onto the Halo and saw the sky and the landmass. I can still remember that afternoon 20+ years later. Bought an Xbox the next morning.

Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot of time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing new tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the limitations of the older hardware force a more artistic stance on everyone, even down to technical artists, to embrace an art style and art direction and work to achieve attractiveness vs realism. Or I could just be seeing my early 20’s through rose-tinted glasses.