MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sizzzzlerz | 2026-01-11 15:00:18+00:00
In 1978, I was at my first engineering job after getting my BSEE. The company had set up a small lab that had variety of small computers, including a KIM-1. It also had an Apple II, a CROMEMCO computer, and a Pet, plus one or two others. At that time, I was only familiar with big iron, like an IBM 370, that I could only submit jobs to. As a result, I was in heaven. Here were computers that I could interact with directly, write programs (in Basic) for, and play games. I was in there every day at lunch or after work, sometimes staying until 2 or 3 in the morning. I messed around with the KIM a bit but found it unrefined and clunky to use as compared to the Apple or even the Pet.
by mentalgear | 2026-01-11 15:00:40+00:00
I reviewed the mini-blog post and initially thought: "Okay, this doesn't seem unreasonable". Then I clicked over to the "About" section, only to find out the author is the CTO of Meta (and proudly at Facebook for two decades).

Then took a closer look at the latest post, "Love what you do." Really? If "loving what you do" means contributing to Facebook/Meta’s legacy of facilitating genocides, exploiting users, running unethical social experiments, and overall polarizing societies to the brink of destruction just for profit - then your "life advice" is just hollow, superficial nonsense. Screw you, "Boz" - we don’t need that kind of hypocrisy at HN.
by simonw | 2026-01-11 15:00:48+00:00
> The accepted practice is to not add lazy-loading to images above the fold, especially the LCP image.

I didn't know that. Apparently (at least according to Claude) you shouldn't use loading="lazy" on images that you expect to always display because doing so causes them to not be loaded until the browser has determined they are definitely in the viewport, which is a minor performance regression.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-11 15:01:10+00:00
The long run has already spoken. Go look at the reports out of Microsoft and Android. It’s screamingly clear that the philosophy of Rust that most code can be written in safe with small bits in unsafe is inherently safer. The defect rate plummets by one or two orders of magnitude if I recall correctly. C is an absolute failure (since it’s the baseline) and Zig has no similar adoption studies. It’s probably ok if you always compile releasesafe, but then performance will be worse than C. Oh and of course rust is inherently slightly faster because no reference aliasing is allowed and automatically annotated everywhere which allows for significant aggressive compiler optimizations that neither C nor Zig can do.
by lsaferite | 2026-01-11 15:02:16+00:00
Re point 5, the simplest argument in favor of sub-agent workflows it that it allows the main agent context to remain free of a large amount of task-specific working context. This lets the main context survive longer before you need compaction. Compaction in CC is a major loss of context IME. Context compaction is generally the point where I reset the conversation as the compacted conversation is practically as bad as a new one but has a bunch of wasted space already.
by oamaok | 2026-01-11 15:02:33+00:00
> VSTs are really your biggest hurdle.

And that is unfortunately the place where I spent my big bucks.

I do however use Linux for my work, and have for more than a decade. If all the plugins (plus FL Studio, I've tried Reaper but it might be not for me) worked, I'd switch my personal desktop in a heartbeat. It's honestly the only thing locking me to Win10. Maybe I'll try a Mac through work (we get to keep the machines).

And yes, I've tried running FL using Wine, and it works surprisingly well! Just not _well enough_, and some plugins do not work at all. Most do, and that's great, but not enough for me at least.
by kikkia | 2026-01-11 15:02:44+00:00
Do take that article with a grain of salt as it is South China morning post. While in this article they do call out that recently the CCP was ridiculing Elon for taking up too much space, in space. So I can give them some credit on that.

As for the state of these networks, G60/Qianfan had a plan of ~650 sattelites by the end of 2025, but currently sits at 108. They hope for ~1200 by the end of '27

Just before the end of the year the GuoWang constellation hit 136 of their planned 13,000.

For reference starlink has launched over 10k satellites to date with ~9,400 in active service.

Im sure the constellations will grow, but they have been experiencing the pains of scaling, especially with 1 use rockets. SCMP loves to pump up these crazy plans and massive numbers as a national pride win, even when they are not feasible or still really far off.
by MarsIronPI | 2026-01-11 15:04:15+00:00
> Red hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people.

Red Hat also has a nasty habit of pushing their decisions onto the other distributions; e.g.

- systemd

- pulseaudio (this one was more Fedora IIRC)

- Wayland

- Pipewire (which, to be fair, wasn't terrible by the time I tried it)
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-11 15:04:22+00:00
It can be interprted that way, but its a bit stilted. No worries though. English is famously confusing.

It reminds me of: "I used to do drugs... I still do, but also I used to." - Mitch Hedberg

Its funny because nobody expects you to use the language that way, but logically its still valid.
by etempleton | 2026-01-11 15:05:28+00:00
I have been dismissed for saying this and using self driving cars as the example. Getting from 95 percent there to 100 percent with AI is going to be nearly impossible. Not impossible, but the time and resource allocation to get one use case, such as self driving cars to a point of usability is going to cost trillions and take decades. Anything that we might want to automate with AI the question needs to be asked is if automating this task worth billions if not trillions of dollars and decades of time.

AI makes a really big first impression. And it looks good at first glance, especially if you aren’t good at/ knowledgeable at what you are asking it to do, but as soon as you know anything about what you are asking it for / to do you realize it is wrong or bad and sometimes incredibly so.

I don’t want this to be dismissive of the technology. It is already having an impact and will continue to do so, but expectations and investment need to be tempered.
by plqbfbv | 2026-01-11 15:05:54+00:00
> Since you've been on the ride since '04, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. How do you feel the maintenance burden compares today versus the GCC 3.x era? With the modern binhost fallback and the improvements in portage, I feel like we now spend less time fighting rebuild loops than back then? But I wonder if long time users feel the same.

I'm another one on it since the same era :)

In general stable has become _really_ stable, and unstable is still mostly usable without major hiccups. My maintenance burden is limited nowadays compared to 10y ago - pretty much running `emerge -uDN @world --quiet --keep-going` and fixing issues if any, maybe once a month I get package failures but I run a llvm+libcxx system and also package tests, so likely I get more issues than the average user on GCC.

For me these days it's not about the speed anymore of course, but really the customization options and the ability to build pretty much anything I need locally. I also really like the fact that ebuilds are basically bash scripts, and if I need to further customize or reproduce something I can literally copy-paste commands from the package manager in my local folder.

The project has successfully implemented a lot of by-default optimizations and best practices, and in general I feel the codebases for system packages have matured to the point where it's odd to run in internal compiler errors, weird dependency issues, whole-world rebuilds etc. From my point of view it also helped a lot that many compilers begun enforcing more modern and stricter C/C++ standards over time, and at the same time we got Github, CI workflows, better testing tools etc.

I run `emerge -e1 @world` maybe once a year just to shake out stuff lurking in the shadows (like stuff compiled with clang 19 vs clang 21), but it's really normally not needed anymore. The configuration stays pretty much untouched unless I want to enable a new USE for a new package I'm installing.
by IgorPartola | 2026-01-11 15:06:26+00:00
And if a large truck can’t get to where you need the stuff delivered due to terrain? Or it won’t deliver on a schedule convenient to you?

Look you are trying to convince me that there are no upsides to using a picking where I live based on how things work where you live. I am telling you from personal experience that there is tangible utility to it and you are telling me from no experience that there cannot possibly be utility to it since where you live things are done differently, discounting any notion of specifics of either place. Do you see why this is absurd?
by treetalker | 2026-01-11 15:06:30+00:00
Great news, a new coffee shop in southern Florida would cost less than $35K to operate over the first six months! :)

It's a cool concept. I expected the mindmap to zoom but it doesn't, making even medium-sized diagrams impossible to read (at least on mobile). I was also hoping "interactive" meant that I could drag and rearrange the branches and leaves of the mindmap, but no such luck.
by yndoendo | 2026-01-11 15:07:08+00:00
I have not directly used Gentoo in years. It was chosen so I could learn, maximize system performance, and have proper AMD64 support before the other distros supported the new CPU specs. Gentoo also had the best documentation in those years.

Id Software provided a Doom 3 Linux client when the game was first released. I found Doom 3 ran better on a custom built Gentoo Linux system compared to Windows XP.

Are you look at Gentoo to maximize performance with compiling everything with custom build parameters and kernel configuration versus pre-built binaries and a generic kernel loaded with modules?

Custom Gentoo just adds more time with having to wait to install software upgrades. It is like having all your Arch packages only being provided by AUR. There is also a chance the build will fail and the parameters might need to be changed. Majority of the time everything compiles without issue once the build parameters are figured out. It was rare when something did not.
by dzonga | 2026-01-11 15:08:28+00:00
antirez gave us reddit - but somehow I think the part him and other smart folks who talk about A.I so much is they forget about agency | self-sufficiency.

If A.I writes everything for you - cool, you can produce faster ? but is it really true ? if you're renting capacity ? what if costs go up, now you can't rent anymore - but you can't code anymore, the documentation is no longer there - coz mcp etc assumption that everything will be done by agents then what ?

what about the people that work on messy 'Information Systems' - things like redis - impressive but it's closed loop software just like compilers -

some smart guy back in the 80s - wrote it's always a people problem -
by simonw | 2026-01-11 15:08:32+00:00
They can still make mistakes.

For example, what if your code (that the LLM hasn't reviewed yet) has a dumb feature in where it dumps environment variables to log output, and the LLM runs "./server --log debug-issue-144.log" and commits that log file as part of a larger piece of work you ask it to perform.

If you don't want a bad thing to happen, adding a deterministic check that prevents the bad thing to happen is a better strategy than prompting models or hoping that they'll get "smarter" in the future.
by a-dub | 2026-01-11 15:08:37+00:00
> Until I was asked, the 'seams' between my original logic and the AI’s linguistic polish were invisible.

no they were not. to me it was obvious and that is why i "asked." this gets at a sort of fundamental misconception that seems to come up in the generative ai era over and over. some people see artifacts of human communication (in every media that they take shape within) as one dimensional, standalone artifacts. others see them as a window into the mind of the author. for the former, the ai is seamless. for the latter, it's completely obvious.

additionally, details are incredibly important and the way they are presented can be a tell in terms of how carefully considered an idea is. ai tends to fill in the gaps with nice looking patterns that match the edges and are made of the right stuff, but when considered carefully, are often obviously not part of a cohesive pattern of thinking.
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 15:08:52+00:00
'The Church of UML' does have a certain ring to it. But that’s exactly the trap I’m trying to avoid.

The reason JTP focuses on the 'Ghost'—the traces of what the model rejected or what was lost in translation—is to prevent exactly that kind of cult-like devotion to the output. A cult forms when you forget the model is just a map.

I’m not interested in worshipping the map; I’m interested in ensuring that when the machine draws it, we can still see the ink on our own hands. If we can't see the delegation, we can't see the deceit. That’s the 'sovereignty' part of Cognitive Sovereignty.
by jammcq | 2026-01-11 15:08:59+00:00
Data centers are sprouting up every where. Do we really need more of them?
In this episode, Jim and Wolf talk about what data centers are, how prevalent they are and what it takes to build them.
We talk about the sizes and energy uses and all sorts of other things related to data centers.
It was a fun episode to research and very eye-opening.
by pelagicAustral | 2026-01-11 15:09:08+00:00
Yeah, but I guess part of the point is that MS themselves have been moving their desktop stack to the cloud making it even better for Linux users to maintain some degree of interoperability between the two OSs. I never particularly liked the Libre alternatives to Office, but now with 365 I can keep up with my colleges stack without having to switch to a VM or some other artifact just to collaborate on a document.

Drawing, yeah, true... design as well... closest the Linux world ever was to get something decent in the design department was the Serif/Affinity products, but they never made the port.
by IgorPartola | 2026-01-11 15:09:23+00:00
OK but I do not live in Europe (though I am originally from there). You are trying to convince me that there is no possible utility that a pickup truck can have where I live, despite you having no experience with it. I am telling you from personal experience that it does have utility while also having had experience with using cars, vans, trailers, and delivery services. What makes you so convinced that your lack of experience makes you correct and my years of experience makes me incorrect?
by SirensOfTitan | 2026-01-11 15:09:26+00:00
Right, but Linus also has an extremely refined mental model of the project he maintains, and has built up a lot of skills reading code.

Most engineers in my experience are much less skillful at reading code than writing code. What I’ve seen so far with use of LLM tools is a bunch of minimally edited LLM produced content that was not properly critiqued.
by amypetrik214 | 2026-01-11 15:09:37+00:00
I know of green card cases where it's (1) bring in wife from foreign country (2) she also has 3 kids over there that need to get cleared for the kiddos to come to the US and live here - all legal and above board, nothing undocumented.

In order to keep it legal and above board, the US state assumes they are not her kids until proven otherwise. So yes, a DNA test is required. The other stipulation is a state department person needs to be in the room with the kids blood is drawn. A lot of red tape!

On the one hand the whole thing seems aggressive and strict. On the other - you can imagine that these rules went in place from bad experiences i.e. the DNA test existed because people were scamming the "bring children over", and then a state department person needed to be present because people were scamming the blood draw. It's another example of a few bad apples ruining it for everyone.
Show HN: Fun things to do with your VM/370 machine
by rbanffy | 2026-01-11 15:10:16+00:00
Hi All.

I made this as an fun intro to help people who have zero IBM mainframe experience and no access to a modern IBM mainframe (at least, not access to do whatever you want with it). I appreciate tips, suggestions and anything that might improve the experience for someone who has no idea of how those machines operate(d).
by shevy-java | 2026-01-11 15:10:41+00:00
It is indeed a huge problem. The whole operating system now behaves and
feels like the US government spying on everyone. Now, Microsoft has done
that before, but with Win11 it really now seems almost shameless AND
desperate in abusing users, while also alienating many of them via
"features" they don't want, in particular all the AI garbage slop.

It does not really affect me that much, as I switched to Linux in 2005
or so, give or take, but some people around me, in particular elderly,
depend on Windows still. So that's a dilemma. Do I want to install Win11
for them? Or Win10? And help maintain either? Replacing those computers
with Linux is not so trivial. You would need virtually kind of 100%
"what works on Windows must work on Linux too". Any complexity is a real
total showstopper for many elderly people who have very little experience
with computer systems.
by samiv | 2026-01-11 15:10:52+00:00
As a long time Linux user I started with Red Hat 7.2. Then moved on to Slackware from there to Ububtu and finally to ArchLinux.

While Linux and the user space ecosystem has come a long way there are still plenty of sharp edges and anyone planning to use Linux long term must be able to figure some issues that will inevitably happen sooner or later when some update/system upgrade happens.

Even though I consider myself fairly proficient Linux user I also gave up on Linux on laptops..life is just too short to tinker to make it work. (Power saving, suspend/resume, graphics with Optimus etc. Are still pain points)
by jt2190 | 2026-01-11 15:11:00+00:00
> … not all programmers program for the same reason, for some of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things even more fun. For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Hence we get this constant back and forth of "Can't believe others can work like this!" vs "I can't believe others aren't working like this!", but both sides seems to completely miss the other side.

Unfortunately the job market does not demand both types of programmer equally: Those who drive LLMs to deliver more/better/faster/cheaper are in far greater demand right now. (My observation is that a decade of ZIRP-driven easy hiring paused the natural business cycle of trying to do more with fewer employees, and we’ve been seeing an outsized correction for the past few years, accelerated by LLM uptake.)
by tmerc | 2026-01-11 15:11:06+00:00
Calling bs.

It takes more effort to implement proprietary protocols and codes in addition to the globally mandated obd2 protocol. You can extend obd2 with additional codes that could be read by a simple device. It costs money to run servers that check your license to read those proprietary codes. It's not laziness.

The black market on stolen parts isn't affected by this. Catalytic converter are stolen and resold all the time and swapping one doesn't require anything more complex than a socket set and a new gasket (assuming the thief didn't use a cutting tool, but then you just weld). Cats also get sold for scrap, so not sure what the software lock is gonna do for that.

Hellcat engines get swapped all the time. ECUs get flashed by the black market regardless of the software locks.

But what we see this proprietary software get used for is blocking the ability to swap brake pads and block heated seats.

So it's not crime, but I'll agree on greed.
by devnavigator | 2026-01-11 15:11:19+00:00
Inventory Optimization has quietly become one of the most effective ways organizations turn artificial intelligence into measurable business value. Unlike experimental AI initiatives, Inventory Optimization is grounded in mature data, proven methods, and clear operational outcomes. This article explains why Inventory Optimization consistently ranks as a high-feasibility, high-impact AI use case, how it works in practice, and why leaders increasingly prioritize it as a foundation for supply chain transformation.
by jamesponddotco | 2026-01-11 15:11:21+00:00
Right now the meeting happens on the fly and then is cached. In the future I imagine the finished merge will be saved as JSON to the database, depending on which is more expensive, the merging or a database call.

Merging on the fly kinda works for the future too, for when data change or for when the merging process changes.

No idea what the future will hold. The idea is to pre-warm the database after the schema has been refactored, and once we have thousands of books from that, I’ll know for sure what to do next.

TLDR, there is a lot of “think and learn” as I go here, haha.
by lenova | 2026-01-11 15:11:54+00:00
> Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it.

I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4` optimized repos gave a significant bump on my Geekbench results:

(Note: these results are from almost a year ago though)

Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen4 AMD

- Windows 11: 2366 Single-Core Score, 10717 Multi-Core Score

- Kubuntu: 2496 Single-Core Score, 9878 Multi-Core Score

- CachyOS: 2569 Single-Core Score, 11563 Multi-Core Score

Repeat tests were essentially the same (Win11 23xx/107xx, Kubuntu 24xx/98xx, Cachy 25xx/115xx)
by monero-xmr | 2026-01-11 15:12:01+00:00
The problem is not the opioids themselves as a chemical. They are tolerated well and have minimal side effects. The main issue is that street opioids are of uncertain purity, and cut with toxic chemicals. This causes overdoses when a batch is too strong, and various health issues from the harsh toxins.

A properly managed opioid addiction can be permanent. For a decade millions of Americans were addicted to opioids (OxyContin, Vicodin, etc.) prescribed by doctors. When the state cracked down they were forced to go on the street to get their medicine, which is when the opioid crisis exploded
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-11 15:12:02+00:00
A few Dispo characters:

Atro (aristocrat physicist, high [Urras])
Oiie (capitalist physicist, mid [Urras])
Shevek (anarchist physicist, mid [Anarres])
yes, the anarchists are equal,
...but some are more equal than others

and a few quotes, from when Shevek travels from Anarres to visit the anarchists' enemies: the propertarians on Urras:

> [The battle for Shevek's theory] had been the high point of Atro’s life. He would not have fought for less than the truth, but it was the fighting he had loved, better than the truth.

> Atro could trace his genealogy back for eleven hundred years, through generals, princes, great landowners. The family still owned an estate of ... the most rural region of A-Io. He had ... archaisms to which he clung with pride. Wealth impressed him not at all, and he referred to the entire government of his country as “demagogues ...” His respect was not to be bought. Yet he gave it, freely, to any fool with what he called “the right name.” In some ways he was totally incomprehensible to Shevek—an enigma: the aristocrat. And yet his genuine contempt for both money and power made Shevek feel closer to him than to anyone else he had met on Urras.

> Oiie was a changed man at home. The secretive look left his face, and
he did not drawl when he spoke. ... He behaved to [his wife] and to his children very much as an Anarresti might. In fact, at home, he suddenly appeared as a simple, brotherly kind of man, a free man.