MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Theoleff | 2026-01-01 10:38:05+00:00
Happy New Year everyone. 2025 was a big year for me.

I spent a lot of time writing and sharing technical content, mostly about modern CSS. I didn’t expect much from it at first, but it slowly compounded.

Over the past year:

- On LinkedIn[0], my posts reached ~10M impressions and ~15k people decided to follow along.

- 1,800+ joined my newsletter.

- My blog[1] went from ~1–2 Google clicks/day to ~40/day.

- I published a book[2] about building UI with less JavaScript (185 copies sold so far).

What surprised me most wasn’t the numbers, but how much people care about clear, practical explanations and simple tools.

May 2026 be even better :)

[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theosoti/
[1]: https://theosoti.com/
[2]: https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/
by scrollaway | 2026-01-01 10:38:12+00:00
It's using the <switch> tag for this

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...

However, like with many of these obscure features, I am not so sure it works well in practice. I have the Windows 11 laptop I'm viewing that SVG from set with support enabled for english, french and russian, and I'm getting, among most of the English tags, a few stray "Psychique" and "Привидение" types in the svg. I have no idea how it chooses which one to show, there.
by clawedcod | 2026-01-01 10:38:55+00:00
These people love generated content (like, they'll actually read generated blog post word-for-word and not even be angry; they'll skip a personal email for its machine summary) and they can generate all the content they'd ever want. If they want to take over HN this isn't a battle we're going to win except with aggressive moderation, and we know who feeds the mods.

HN isn't a place for thinking people any more (a long time coming, but you could squint and pretend until recently). Happy new year and adios, thanks for the 100s of accounts dang. Double pinky swear I won't make another.
by a_e_k | 2026-01-01 10:38:57+00:00
And once you get beyond the books the sibling comments here have mentioned (I'd suggest starting with the Ray Tracing In One Weekend minibook series first before Physically Based Rendering), there's the Ray Tracing Gems series (https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/) which is open access online with print editions for purchase.

(Disclosure: I contributed a chapter.)
by anon_cow1111 | 2026-01-01 10:40:51+00:00
I was there, 3000 years ago when Walmart didn't even sell groceries, I still remember mom commenting "It feels weird buying food at Walmart now and not even going to [regional grocery chain]".

And now, decades later everything is full circle. I avoid Walmart and Amazon like the plague and try to only shop at smaller outlets, whether brick-and-mortar or online. It might be slightly more expensive but I assume that's just the tax you pay to avoid a corporate monopoly hellscape.
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2026-01-01 10:41:48+00:00
I had a very similar idea with a few differences:

1. You can go to the mayor's house to get the token. No need to associate tobacco/alcohol to it.

2. It's free.

3. It's culturally enforced to exchange tokens with other people. This way users themselves help make sure it's truly impossible to trace their activity.

4. It's illegal to publish your or someone else's token. It's like a paper ID, with a QR code.

5. Can be reused. Expires after 5 years .

This way if you want 5 pornhub accounts you don't have to buy 5 stamps. You are also extra sure that the tokens cannot be linked to you because you can exchange it with anyone.
by rgoulter | 2026-01-01 10:42:04+00:00
Many comments discussing LLMs involve emotions, sure. :) Including, obviously, comments in favour of LLMs.

But most discussion I see is vague and without specificity and without nuance.

Recognising the shortcomings of LLMs makes comments praising LLMs that much more believable; and recognising the benefits of LLMs makes comments criticising LLMs more believable.

I'd completely believe anyone who says they've found the LLM very helpful at greenfield frontend tasks, and I'd believe someone who found the LLM unable to carry out subtle refactors on an old codebase in a language that's not Python or JavaScript.
by WJW | 2026-01-01 10:42:35+00:00
I think what Cantrill is getting at here is that a running program necessarily consists of both code and hardware. If the software is missing, the hardware will be idling. If the hardware is not present, then the software will be just bytes on a storage device. It's only the combination of hardware and software that makes a working system.

What software developers produce is not a machine by itself. It's at most a blueprint for a machine that can be actualized by combining it with specific hardware. But this is getting a bit too philosophical and off track: LLMs can help produce source code for a specific program faster, but they are not very good at determining whether a specific program should be built at all.
by pentaphobe | 2026-01-01 10:45:06+00:00
Was offline and had no tech people or resources around, but got access to an unused 286 which booted into a mysterious "C:\" prompt

Slowly worked out how navigate the system, then tried running the various built in things I found

One of these was QBASIC.
Started reading through and messing with the example games which were part of the built-in QBASIC in MS-DOS

Reverse engineering how they worked gave a lot of the core concepts (variables, loops, procedures)

After writing a few (very) naff text adventures I stumbled across the intriguingly named "DEBUG" tool

Used debug to step through some of the other built in MSDOS utilities and try to work out what the mysterious symbols were doing (how I learnt assembler and machine code)

Later when I finally found BBSs I started debugging/disassembling some of the BBS mini-demos which were ubiquitous those days, which introduced me to manipulating graphical memory etc..
The smaller size of these, and fact that they were generally coded in assembler was much more useful than reading through compiled code

I do not recommend writing assembler in DEBUG, but wouldn't trade in the learning I got from exploring a total black box with no references or learning resources (beyond time and curiosity)

Felt like doing alchemy
by kakonako | 2026-01-01 10:45:19+00:00
I've settled over the years on using syncthing to keep copies on my machine and phone. After testing quite a few android players I settled on Oto Music. I'm currently back in the Mac world and use Cog. I still like to use cmus in the terminal.

For acquiring music, the bulk I get from bandcamp. I usually try hard to get my music legally, but sometimes it isn't possible, ripping from YouTube, searching torrent sites, using russian search sites which still seem to index the blogs that stored downloadable links to music like we had about 10 years ago...
by vouwfietsman | 2026-01-01 10:45:34+00:00
> poor is more about being rigid

Oh no please broaden your mindset. This is not a healthy way to look at wealth inequality in 2025. Being poor can happen for arbitrary reasons, and the impact can vary greatly across countries and continents. E.g if you get and recover from cancer in Europe you will be OK financially, while being ruined in America.

This is an extreme example, but the point is not to weigh individual examples but rather to recognize that you as an individual don't understand the circumstances that create or alleviate poverty, because entire government branches are dedicated to doing this and haven't figured it out.

Bottom line poverty is bad news for everyone, there's money to be made solving poverty. It's not a trivial problem to solve.
by bookofjoe | 2026-01-01 10:45:39+00:00
>and still seems heavy.

In fact v2 IS heavier than v1:

>The first-gen spatial computing headset weighs 21.2 to 22.9 ounces, while the latest headset weighs 26.4 to 28.2 ounces.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vr-ar/m5-apple-vision-pr...
by samiv | 2026-01-01 10:46:58+00:00
Early on in my career I couldn't understand why it was always the worst and most incompetent people who got promoted.

Then I realized that it's not their incompetence that gets them promoted per se, it's that if they're employed while being utterly useless and incompetent they have SOMETHING else going on that keeps them employed.

And it's that something else (whether that is politics, brown nosing, nepotism, bullying) that also gets them promoted.
by matwood | 2026-01-01 10:48:00+00:00
> Consider that this paper looked specifically at hypertrophy (size), not strength.

I'm not sure where this idea came from that people do one or the other. Except for the advanced lifter, both will happen from either program. Show me a person who is really big and they are likely pretty strong as well (see Ronnie Coleman). Same with the other direction.
by lazystar | 2026-01-01 10:48:15+00:00
i think the infamous "I'll call now" air conditioner commercial in the '90s was a canary/sign of the mismanagement that was occurring. This commercial played during every commercial break on cartoon network, nickelodean, and the disney channel. Ive long wondered... how many kids bought AC units from sears?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4rqZZgVxnCk&pp=ygUMaWxsIGNhbGw...
by rocqua | 2026-01-01 10:48:37+00:00
Are you perhaps reading a personal advice in a paper, disliking the advice, and then finding that due to the experimental design, it doesn't work on you. And then, rather than concluding the paper didn't intend to inform your personal routine, instead conclude that the paper was badly designed?
Or to put it differently. Have you considered how many people live in a way you would never consider close to acceptable?

Because your points make sense but it feels like you are arguing against a bit of a strawman, or arguing for a mostly ideal situation rather than current reality?

For overweight and understrength people, is it not very valuable to know that they don't need the extra steps of resistance training to see real improvement in strength and fitness?
by mrbungie | 2026-01-01 10:48:50+00:00
Sam wants so bad for OpenAI to be a proper big tech company, probably one that's more culturally similar to Apple-y than Google/MSFT-y so I guess they are cargo-culting some parts of Apple. That website reminds me of a very low quality version of Apple's myth-making ala Think Different. Ive is obviously also a big part of the cargo cult.
by Leherenn | 2026-01-01 10:48:59+00:00
Anecdotally, my gym had a "challenge" some times back where the goal was to achieve the max total volume in one set without pause.

I tried various combos of weight* reps, and in the end the optimum was somewhere in the middle because no matter how light the weight there was a limit for me at about ~150 reps.

In my case, the curve would be: total volume increases quickly initially at you go from max weight/1 rep to something like 20/30 reps, then something of a plateau as things equalise, then it goes down again as you reach the max reps threshold.
by stevekemp | 2026-01-01 10:50:03+00:00
A tattoo of a balloon! Unless you meant what the meaning of the design was, and in that case different people have different associations and meanings.

One of my forearms is covered in things my son used to be obsessed by when he was young, which is why I have a lego figure, a pikachu, and a red balloon as depicted in the book "Goodnight Moon" which I read to him every night for 3+ years.
Show HN: Awesome Symbian
by catstor | 2026-01-01 10:50:07+00:00
An Awesome List about everything related to Symbian OS. Documentation, academic papers, tutorials, communities, IDEs, SDKs, emulators, apps, video games. Symbian is a discontinued mobile OS for ARM popular in early 2000s. It had two major UIs: S60(Nokia), and UIQ(Sony Ericsson). It supports `.jar`, `.jad`, `.sis`, `.sisx` formats. The main development environment since S60 is C++/QT, but J2ME, Python, C, Flash Lite, C# are supported as well.
by matwood | 2026-01-01 10:50:14+00:00
> People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.

IDK. When I powerlifted the goal was to move the weight. I've almost passed out from heavy deadlifts, but was rarely out of breath. I also almost never chat in the gym because it's my meditative place, not because I couldn't chat :)
by machomaster | 2026-01-01 10:50:21+00:00
> If they asked a person or looked on the fourms they'd have got what they wanted in a few mins.

Not minutes. In best case scenario it is hours, in worst it is years to infinity.

You are also not taking into account the survivorship bias. You only see people who couldn't fix their system with AI and need further help. But you are not seeing a huge number of beginners (recently a big influx of those), who were successful in fixing problems using AI the vast majority of time.

Nowadays, there is no good reason to use a simple Search engine to find solutions by manually browsing all the possible links. Just ask Phind/Perplexity/others to explain the problem, give the solution and provide verifiable links one can check to validate.
by lazystar | 2026-01-01 10:50:47+00:00
> I feel like a big part of the downfall was the huge lumbering corporate culture unable to cope with JIT supply lines and race to the bottom economies of consumer goods.

i think its simpler than that. they got so big that they didnt pay any attention to all the waste, e.g. all the ad time that they spent on the old "I'll call today" A/C commercial.
by shit_game | 2026-01-01 10:50:56+00:00
pets.com also failed to make it through the "carcinization" of online retail, but wasnt nearly as notable a failure because it was attempting to start an online retail business from the ground up, versus Sears' failure to adopt online retail to their already-successful B&M model. I think the Sears mode of failure is much more spectacular because it had previously thrived on a business model that's almost analgous to Amazon's, threw it away, and failed to recognize it could be effective again.
Show HN: Mailcow/Rspamd kept missing obvious spam so I built my own email filter
by rodoni | 2026-01-01 10:51:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I run a managed MailCow instance that keeps letting embarrassingly obvious spam land in my inbox. Even after spending several sessions trying to figure out what was wrong, I couldn't fix it (maybe our team is just too small to train the filter properly).

So, I decided to build a simple tool that runs an LLM prompt over each email to filter it into the correct category. Over the Christmas holidays, I finally found the time to polish it up for a release.

The main differentiator compared to other email organizers is that you can write your own prompts for each category and connect your own custom LLM endpoint. I would love your feedback on the website and the overall concept.

I'm also a bit inspired by @rozenmd and his uptime monitor (OnlineOrNot), which proved that an idea doesn't have to be super complicated if you stick with it.

What do you think about the idea and the website? Do you see any potential pitfalls or missing features? Does someone have a clever idea how I could handle the management of the email passwords?

Wishing you a great start to the new year!

The tool is: https://email-filter.ai
by smurda | 2026-01-01 10:51:34+00:00
Bpifrance, France's public sector investment bank, invested €5.9 billion (2013–2023) into 180 VC funds. A geographic investment requirement with Bpifrance is usually 2:1 - for every Euro Bpifrance invests into your VC fund, you must invest 2 Euros into French startups. Therefore, you get a lot (too much) of capital investing into one (too small) ecosystem and there will be (1) adverse selection, and (2) overfunded startups without good economics. The skeptic view is that the French tech ecosystem is a house of cards propped up by government funding.

Too much money chasing too few good companies, and what is seemingly a good government policy is too much of a good thing.

https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2025/05/23/bpifrance...
by da_grift_shift | 2026-01-01 10:52:50+00:00
>I wanted to see if I could get 100% mathematical accuracy using local LLMs

So did you?

>[Your GitHub Link] I also wrote a deeper dive on the "Writer vs. Editor" shift here: [Link to Medium Article V2]

Generated comments are against the guidelines. In any case———I suggest you give them and your expense filings a manual review before submitting! :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654
by b112 | 2026-01-01 10:53:02+00:00
My house, built in the 60s, is actually 4 Sears cabin kits. The guy bought them, and assembled them end to end, making a long house.

Same guy dug the original ditch by driving back and forth with his jeep for an hour during spring rain. This gives a perspective on his can do attitude.

But really, I'm living in the house still, so it can't be that bad.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-01 10:53:24+00:00
> focus exclusively on what the models that we have right now can do

I'm just a casual user, but I've been doing the same and have noticed the sharp improvements of the models we have now vs a year ago. I have OpenAI Business subscription through work, I signed up for Gemini at home after Gemini 3, and I run local models on my GPU.

I just ask them various questions where I know the answer well, or I can easily verify. Rewrite some code, factual stuff etc. I compare and contrast by asking the same question to different models.

AGI? Hell no. Very useful for some things? Hell yes.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-01 10:54:10+00:00
There has never been a period where most humans would die at ~30.

While life expectancy at birth was ~30 for the whole history of humanity up until the mid 20th century, this doesn't in any way mean that average people died in their 30s. Instead, life expectancy was highly bi-modal: most people died as children (most before age 1, but still a large number before age ~15), and most of those that didn't die as children lived into their mid to late 50s.
by close04 | 2026-01-01 10:54:41+00:00
For the longest time industrial and domestic livestock raising used to involve feed that included literally anything the animal would it. Free range birds today regularly eat worms and insects. Pigs were used as a sort of waste disposal system for anything they could digest, leading to a lot of health issues. Still nobody really cared beyond “I’ll cook it until it doesn’t kill me”, not the producers, not the consumers.
by k_g_b_ | 2026-01-01 10:54:54+00:00
When you want to distinguish `MyObj??` then you'll have to distinguish the optionality of one piece of code (wherever your `MyObj?` in the list came from) with some other (list find) before "mixing" them. E.g. by first mapping `MyObj?` to `MyObj | NotFoundInMyMap` (or similar polymorphic variant/anonymous sum types) and then putting it in a list. This could be easily optimized away or be a safe no-op cast.

Common sum types allow you to get around this, because they always do this "mapping" intrinsically by their structure/constructors when you use `Either/Maybe/Option` instead of `|`. However, it still doesn't always allow you to distinguish after "mixing" various optionalities - if find for Maps, Lists, etc all return `Option<MyObj>` and you have a bunch of them, you also don't know which of those it came from. This is often what one wants, but if you don't, you will still have to map to another sum type like above.
In addition, when you don't care about null/not found, you'll have the dual problem and you will need to flatten nested sum types as the List find would return `Option<Option<MyObj>>` - `flatten`/`flat_map`/similar need to be used regularly and aren't necessary with anonymous sum types that do this implicitly.

Both communicate similar but slightly different intent in the types of an API. Anonymous sum types are great for errors for example to avoid global definitions of all error cases, precisely specify which can happen for a function and accumulate multiple cases without wrapping/mapping/reordering.
Sadly, most programming languages do not support both.
by Someone | 2026-01-01 10:55:30+00:00
Tangentially related, there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoke_enema:

“The tobacco smoke enema, an insufflation of tobacco smoke into the rectum by enema, was a medical treatment employed by European physicians for a range of ailments.

[…]

In the 1780s the Royal Humane Society installed resuscitation kits, including smoke enemas, at various points along the River Thames. By the turn of the 19th century, tobacco smoke enemas had become an established practice in Western medicine, considered by Humane Societies to be as important as artificial respiration.”
by spectralista | 2026-01-01 10:56:26+00:00
The best example is that even ATM machines didn't reduce bank teller jobs.

Why? Because even the bank teller is doing more than taking and depositing money.

IMO there is an ontological bias that pervades our modern society that confuses the map for the territory and has a highly distorted view of human existence through the lens of engineering.

We don't see anything in this time series, because this time series itself is meaningless nonsense that reflects exactly this special kind of ontological stupidity:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006092

As if the sum of human interaction in an economy is some kind of machine that we just need to engineer better parts for and then sum the outputs.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-01 10:56:47+00:00
Over half of HN still thinks it’s a stochastic parrot and that it’s just a glorified google search.

The change hit us so fast a huge number of people don’t understand how capable it is yet.

Also it certainly doesn’t help that it still hallucinates. One mistake and it’s enough to set someone against LLMs. You really need to push through that hallucinations are just the weak part of the process to see the value.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-01 10:57:29+00:00
Yeah, agreed. It was options I always thought of as a "nice bonus", but RSUs I always thought of like cash.

The tax situation around options also makes for many more variables in the risk calculation (i.e. do I exercise as soon as I vest to reduce potential AMT, but then I may need to find sizable cash to execute), while RSUs are just much simpler
by mentalgear | 2026-01-01 10:58:07+00:00
I have been reading the comment by Jim Grey on the bottom of the article, and I was thinking, is that mostly what we are - and why people like novelty (especially in tech) so much - because it makes us feel young ? Or maybe not young, but teaches us something new, learning something active - worth remembering.

> We also think that novelty rivets our attention and makes time seem to slow down. Childhood is full of novel experiences that, as they repeat, become less so. True novelty becomes unusual when you’re pushing 60 as I am now. The brain says, “Oh, that again,” and glosses past it.
by ksec | 2026-01-01 10:58:37+00:00
I thought it would make much more sense to go after LPDDR5, and LPDDR6. Perfecting quality and yield. Instead they went after HBM?

This to me suggest they wont be able to challenge Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix any time soon.

Interesting YMTC is also moving towards DRAM and they have a better track record in terms of NAND production.
by smokel | 2026-01-01 10:59:51+00:00
> This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.

Could anyone who is extremely fortunate and never had to work for money share their experience on this?

I find that the years that I spent on art (playing around, learning new things, not taking other peoples' orders) lasted longer than the ones I spent doing software development for money. Both were fun, but the remaining memories differ by intensity.

I personally don't find the logarithmic experience theory convincing. Why are the first three or so years excluded from this? It seems more likely that new experiences make more impact, or that repeated memories make them more intense. Or dozens of other theories.