MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aucisson_masque | 2026-01-04 22:34:11+00:00
> The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger

I’m afraid people will just start getting used to ai written book and go on with it. Just like what happen on YouTube.

It’s only going to decrease writer possibilities because their earning will decrease.
by SirensOfTitan | 2026-01-04 22:34:11+00:00
Before I get into it: what careers do you think are most compelling? Especially if you think all white collar work is going to be undermined by this technology.

I wrote this up a bit ago in my essay fragments collection. It's rough and was just a thought I wanted to get down, I'm unsure of it, but it's at least somewhat relevant to the discussion here:

LLM or LLM-adjacent technology will never take over the execution of work in a way that approaches human where humans continue to guide (like PMs or C-suite just "managing" LLMs).

The reason is that spoken language is a poor medium by which to describe technical processes, and a well-enumerated specification in natural language describing the process is at-least synonymous with doing the work in skilled applications.

For example, if someone says to an LLM: Build a social media app that is like Tinder but women can only initiate.

... this is truly easily replicatable and therefore with little real business value as a product. Anything that can be described tersely that is novel and therefore valuable unfortunately has very little value practically because the seed of the short descriptor is sort of a private key of an idea itself: it will seed the idea into reality by labor of LLMs, but all that is needed for that seed's maturation is the original phrase. These would be like trade secrets, but also by virtue of something existing out there, its replication becomes trivial since that product's patterns are visible and copyable.

In this way, the only real outcome here is that LLMs entirely replace human labor including decision making or are tools to real human operators but not replacements.
by lproven | 2026-01-04 22:34:14+00:00
> I am absolutely blown away to have the author of AppImage (Probono) partnering with me

:-)

> which eventually brought me to making FuryBSD for a short time.

Ahaaaa. I did not realise that. Perhaps you should mention that in a FAQ or something? I think tying the different projects together like that would make it clear there is a quite considerable bit of history in here.

> I am very much looking forward to seeing the cool things we can do together in 2026!

Kudos for the positivity.

I left the GNUstep community a year or so back, after the admins got angry with me for daring to have opinions about the project that differ from theirs.

I think that as well as (1) a set of development libraries, it's also (2) a quite impressive set of apps, (3) an app packaging format, and perhaps most importantly (4) a quite complete desktop environment. They only seem to care about #1 and regard points 2-4 as annoying distractions.

For what it's worth, I know of two other active, current GNUstep-based desktop environments, which have slightly different focuses.

1. Ondrej Florian's GSDE: https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html

I've written a bit about this:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_deskto...

I had great difficulty getting it to build on Debian 13, but I should try again at some point.

2. Sergii Stoian's NEXTSPACE: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

Slightly more mature but Stoian's been distracted recently by Russia invading his country, so it's not seen much work of late.
by mananaysiempre | 2026-01-04 22:34:17+00:00
Also on the same topic: “The rise and fall of the English sentence” by Julie Sedivy in Nautilus[1,2,3].

[1] https://nautil.us/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-english-sentence-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720892 (2017, 84 points, 39 comments)

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695580 (2025, 100 points, 52 comments)
by optimalquiet | 2026-01-04 22:34:50+00:00
My interpretation of what happened here is that a legislator who opposed the bill inserted the names of the lobbyists as a joke against the bill, which has now paid off. The article says that the original list did not include the names, they were added during the legislative amendment process by a legislator.

While corporate authorship of bills is a concern, I don’t think this particular mishap is a direct result of that and in fact seems to have been an attempt to subtly criticize it.
by bogtap82 | 2026-01-04 22:35:25+00:00
I've been running a variation of this for the past 3 weeks. I swapped out the default pi agent back to Claude Code because I didn't like the smaller feature set. Bought a phone line and communicate with my agent via iMessage on a clamshelled mac. A Tailscale network connect the head agent to all the computers on my network including my laptop, a few raspberry pi's, steam deck, and all the IoT devices in my house. As I discover new uses, I ask it to make skills and it is remarkable what it's been able to handle all through the single chat interface because it has 24/7 access to all my computers' file systems and my home network. It's been really fun to see how far I can take it, and the skills framework built into CC/Codex now make it feel infinitely extensible.
by marcellus23 | 2026-01-04 22:36:17+00:00
There are simply so many counterexamples out there of people who have developed projects in a small fraction of the time it would take manually. Whether or not AI is having a positive effect on productivity on average in the industry is a valid question, but it's a statistical one. It's ridiculous to argue that AI has a negative effect on productivity in every single individual case.
by justamaze | 2026-01-04 22:36:26+00:00
Touch grass.

The snark over reimplementing things from the younger crowd that reimplemented databases (mongo is webscale!), operating systems (nice browser), and UI toolkits (make your css that looks like win32!) as if there is a "one true way" to capture syntactically the state of a machine is sad.

You still use cobol and fortran and c or reimplementation of old ideas in the form of ruby and typescript?

Yes yes; we've seen others stand on a soap box and broadcast how the syntax must not be shuffled around. Thanks for reminding us about the giant foots wrath.

New generation of Eric S Raymonds. Don't go down the dark path!
by jmye | 2026-01-04 22:36:37+00:00
> Put another way, is anyone saying it was purely about oil?

I think “popular” opinion is that this is just Iraq, again. So even if no one credible is saying it, I think a lot of people are saying it (I don’t have a link, but check any of the major Reddit threads, as a form of sentiment analysis).

And being clear, I’m not saying that does or doesn’t matter, or that social media sentiment matters. But a lot of (naive) people are buying the sold narrative.
by pea | 2026-01-04 22:36:40+00:00
maybe productive isn’t the right word - more like satisfying and constructive. Right now I might play blitz chess or end up checking the news or X. But when I’m in the middle of a good book or some long form content, I’ll use that time to read and it’s much more fulfilling.

And I think breathing meditation is an excellent idea! I didn’t only mean phone-specific activities at all! Thank you
by d0gbread | 2026-01-04 22:36:41+00:00
I know Apple has a reputation for good UX but I think it's carry over from a different era and it's trending down.

I bought my kid an iPad for Christmas and set up parental controls, then could not disable it without another iPad (which I don't have).

There are many forum threads concluding you just have to factory reset.

I couldn't believe how many little unintuitive things I bumped into setting it up.
by layer8 | 2026-01-04 22:37:03+00:00
The question was whether jobs are being lost due to AI, not whether translations are fully automated. If translations would support the same amount of jobs in translation review as previously for human translation themselves, companies wouldn’t save money by using AI for translation. But that’s not what’s happened: pricing has fallen dramatically for human translation, because AI makes it cheaper, and the fallen prices mean that many translators couldn’t make a living from it anymore.
by rhdunn | 2026-01-04 22:37:17+00:00
I have a pragmatic approach to TDD, i.e. it doesn't practically matter if you write the code or tests first as long as the relevant code has tests:

1. write the test code first (possibly with a skeleton implementation) if you want to get an idea/feel for how the class/code is intended to be used;

2. write the code first if you need to;

3. ensure that you have at least one test at the point where the code is mimimally functional.

More generally:

1. don't aim for 100% code coverage (around 80-90% should be sufficient);

2. test a representative example and appropriate boundary conditions;

3. don't mock classes/code you control... the tests should be as close to the real thing as possible, otherwise when the mocked code changes your tests will break and/or not pick up the changes to the logic -- Note: if wiring up service classes, try and use the actual implementations where possible;

4. use a fan in/out approach where relevant... i.e. once you have tests for various states/cases in class A (e.g. lexing a number, e.g. '1000', '1e6', '1E6') you only need to test the cases that are relevant to class B (e.g. token types, not lexical variants, e.g. integer/decimal/double);

5. test against publically accessible APIs, etc... i.e. wherever possible, don't test/access internal state; look for/test publically visible behaviour (e.g. don't check that the start and end pointers are equal, check that is_empty() is true and length() is 0) -- Note: testing against internals is subject to implementation changes whereas public API changes should be documented/properly versioned.
by wcarss | 2026-01-04 22:37:17+00:00
That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? Branding, contracts, quality, pricing -- just through running a business. No guarantee it's gonna work.

Vibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a "working product", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time.

Will everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money.
by jiehong | 2026-01-04 22:37:46+00:00
I suppose Java exceptions have the same issues, albeit with automatic stack traces, obviously:

- the ? keyword is replaced either by runtime exceptions and so each function do it transpires you don’t catch it, or by simply stating the raised exception in the signature

- message can be overloaded for humans

- the exception type itself is the structured data, but in practice it seldom contains structured data and most logic depends on the exception type.

Make of this what you will, but I didn’t say it’s great.
by bogtap82 | 2026-01-04 22:39:03+00:00
I should note, a lot of the functionality I built into my agent was custom after-the-fact because (at least three weeks ago) the clawdis repo was in a state that I found very broken and with tons of false information. Luckily it's easy work for Claude to get things working for you, but really the key unlock was the phone line through iMessage and the unrestricted access to all my systems. It really does feel like I'm able to work with any of my files anywhere now, while hardly requiring much of my attention at all. I would recommend something like this at the bare minimum if you intend to implement a system like this: https://github.com/kenryu42/claude-code-safety-net
by Veserv | 2026-01-04 22:39:19+00:00
And they addressed exactly none of the relevant points, instead supporting their arguments by waving in the general direction of outcompeted designs and speculative designs.

CHERI is neat, but, as far as I am aware, still suffers from serious unsolved problems with respect to temporal safety and reclamation. Last I looked (which was probably after 2022 when this post was made), the proposed solutions were hardware garbage collectors which are almost a non-starter. Could that be solved or performant enough? Maybe. Is a memory allocation strategy that can not free objects a currently viable solution for general computing to the degree you argue people not adopting it are whiners? No.

I see no reason to accept a fallacious argument from authority in lieu of actual arguments. And for that matter, I literally do kernel development on a commercial operating system and have personally authored the entirety of memory management and hardware MMU code for multiple architectures. I am a actual authority on this topic.
by d-lisp | 2026-01-04 22:39:24+00:00
Businesses do business; but there are endavours to make tests be reliability indicators and in some (critical) domains you do write them to perform such a thing. write tests the way test-theory intended; as formal verification.

There is software for which writing code is a design act, and there is software for which you write specs before anything. I don't know if a) they are the same, b) they are different, c) one is better than the other.
by lazide | 2026-01-04 22:39:24+00:00
Ukraine literally used to rule the land now known as Russia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27]. Kyiv used to be the capital. I think you have your history confused, and your 'what is propaganda or not' reversed.

They are basically two brothers with a long history, with Russia having recently been on top - after previously being on the bottom - but then going bankrupt - and now trying to bully it's way back to being on top again.

Either way, they aren't France, Germany, England, Spain, etc. and have wildly different history. Ukraine isn't part of the EU or NATO (and in fact, the possibility they might eventually be is a big driver of what Russia is now doing).

Got to get that bullying in before it's too late, after all.
by lproven | 2026-01-04 22:39:48+00:00
Elementary OS does look superficially Apple-like, but on closer inspection, there's no menu bar, which is a core element of the macOS UI. So actually it's more like iPadOS on the desktop: apps generally only have hamburger menus, which personally I do not like at all, and it's limited by its insistence on Flatpak apps for everything. You can of course open a console and use `apt` to install whatever you want, but then the desktop quickly becomes less coherent and harmonious.

It's a good distro and I like it. It's easy, it has good accessibility, and as you say, it looks great. But I tried daily-driving it for a short time and found it too limiting for me. Once I'd manually installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, VLC, LibreOffice, Ferdium, Panwriter, VirtualBox and my other everyday tools, I wasn't using a lot of the distro's own tools any more, and suddenly the ones I was (settings, file manager, app launcher) became limiting.
Show HN: VectorVid – Convert Videos to RAG-Ready Chunks (No UI, No DB)
by soroucsh | 2026-01-04 22:39:59+00:00
Hi HN, I built VectorVid after repeatedly seeing teams hack together Whisper + vector DB to search inside webinars and demos.

The problem: You have 100+ hours of videos. You want to index them for RAG. But the pipeline is messy—transcription, frame sampling, OCR, chunking, embeddings, then plugging into your own vector DB.

VectorVid does one thing: video → RAG-ready JSON.

Input: Video URL (webinar, lecture, demo)
Output: { chunks: [{ start_sec, end_sec, text, scene_description, ocr_text, embedding }] }

How it works:

Transcript + speaker diarization (Whisper/Deepgram)

Frame sampling (1/5s) + OCR (EasyOCR/Claude)

Scene descriptions for visual context

Embeddings included (OpenAI)

The MVP is a live demo—you can search inside the 2007 iPhone keynote and see the exact JSON API output.

Tech: Next.js frontend, async processing, Supabase pgvector, deployed on Vercel.

Use cases I'm seeing:

SaaS teams: "Search our help videos" → power internal search/chat

EdTech: "Students find specific slides" → jump straight to diagrams

Sales: "Did the pricing slide appear?" → automated demo auditing

Early feedback wanted. Try the demo and let me know what you'd build on top of this.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-04 22:40:00+00:00
> The whole premise of opengitops is heavily reliant on kubernetes.

There's indeed a fair degree of short-sightedness in some GitOps proponents, who conflate their own personal implementation with the one true GitOps.

Back in the real world, the bulk of cloud infrastructure covers resources that go well beyond applying changes to pre-baked Kubernetes cluster. Any service running on the likes of AWS/Google Cloud/Azure/etc require configuring plenty of cloud resources with whatever IaC platform they use, and Kubernetes operators neither cover those nor are a reasonable approach to the problem domain.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-04 22:40:27+00:00
>Now when you do such things like a running club you are joining a group of very self-selecting people

I'd disagree with this pretty strongly. I do workshops at a makerspace in Berlin, which is in itself a pretty nerdy place but we've got everything from pensioners to middle aged moms to obviously a lot of people from the university or tech work.

In much smaller cities not just here you'll find chess clubs, poetry slam groups, church choirs what have you. None of it hyper-scheduled or commercialized. I can't speak to what this was like 40 years ago I wasn't alive then but there's no shortage. I think the biggest difference is, people don't move. In the Western world mobility is at an all time low. If you were young and lived in a place where these opportunities didn't exist people literally just packed their bags and relocated. In the words of Morgan Freeman: https://youtu.be/oZcSivXEGys
by mmooss | 2026-01-04 22:41:29+00:00
The deterimination to start a war is really dumb and yet common historically. You seem to want to insist there is no other option rather than think about the options. Obviously it's false that warfare is the only option, as is calling Putin's actions against NATO 'warfare'.

It doesn't matter if Putin uses warfare Ukraine, etc. We make our own choices in our own interests.
by alimoeeny | 2026-01-04 22:41:36+00:00
Yeah, me too. The only thing that shows up is poke.com which has something to do with mobile notifications (and seems like at some point they offered some api, but maybe it was discontinued? or something, there are some medium posts talking about their api https://jpcaparas.medium.com/get-sms-or-imessage-alerts-from...
by agentultra | 2026-01-04 22:42:06+00:00
I’m not sure that the distinction between “element-wise” and “group-wise” mindsets are mutually exclusive in the design space for a language.

The set of programs that can express problems as transformations on arrays is quite large.

But I think there’s a large overlap with programs that also need to manage resource lifetimes as well where a resource could be a region of foreign-allocated allocated memory, a database connection, etc; a process-scoped object that can only be acquired (or not) at runtime.

Even in Odin you’re going to need to think in terms of arrays and how individual element lifetimes at some point depending on how you classify and structure data. The trade off seems to be that how you specify and maintain contracts for the lifetime of objects like sockets and handles are up to you and Odin won’t help you with that. In return you get array oriented initialisation?

Or am I misunderstanding the mental model?
by gerdesj | 2026-01-04 22:42:32+00:00
I remember when "Warty 40" was invented and largely supplanted Warhammer itself. I remember Citadel Miniatures and (A)D&D 1st editions, not to mention Traveler, Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Car Wars and many more. I was pretty decent at painting (quickly and accurately) and several kiddies used to pay me to get their latest regiment of space marines into action with the right colours. I went to a posh school and some of the kids had a lot more disposable income than me. I also had a lot more free time than I do now.

Nowadays I own a 3D printer (Prusa 4S+ with nobs on upgraded from a 3) and an IT company.

16 year old me would have committed ... a minor crime ... for the printer but given that IT was a Commodore 64, I'm not sure how I would have driven the thing.

However a 16 y/o me today with a 3D printer probably would be printing armies out of filament. I used to make plastic models too and saved up for several months to buy a double action air brush. My printer can churn out a small scale tank that rivals a Tamiya effort from back in the day. Some finishing is required but not much.

I might have a go at some Warhammer models and see how it goes, just for old time's sake ...
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-04 22:42:40+00:00
I agree on the first paragraph. But the second is out of touch with how people think about Hinduism in India, it's a mistake many people in the west seem to make with regards to it. It is not like Abrahmic religions where there are mandated precepts with regards to sins, it's closer to eastern religions in a way. That is all to say, most people do not think of Hinduism, and its being open to various truths, on a day to day basis that then informs how they traverse the world. It's all cultural, a backdrop. There is no "Catholic guilt" type phenomenon from people growing up being told certain things are bad and then feeling bad when they do them.

Hinduism is really not thought of for the vast majority of people beyond festivals and it does not inform their corruption. That corruption exists due primarily to economic conditions, to get ahead of others due to the population. You see the same phenomenon in China which decidedly does not have Hinduism.
by lovich | 2026-01-04 22:43:36+00:00
His description of resin printing, especially the meth lab comparison and

> At one point, he said the phrase "you really don't want to get this on your skin" with the casual tone of someone who had definitely gotten it on his skin.

There are currently 10 3d printers in my household and there have been maybe 30 unique ones in total over the past 2 years but after the first 3-4 months of resin printing that was given to a friend and never revisited.

I felt like it couldn’t be done casually and even moderately safe at home but needed some sort of lab with good ventilation. We Jerry rigged a hood using a portable enclosure meant to grow weed in while routing the smell out of your dorm through a window and wore proper PPE the whole time but I still felt sketched out
by asim | 2026-01-04 22:43:41+00:00
This is good. I worked at google and lasted less than 2 years. Many other things happening in that time - came in via acquisition, worked on backend for that, dad died, transitioned teams, etc. But I was 27-28 and couldn't really navigate that world after my first job at a startup. In some ways, I wish I'd found a way, but in other ways, I know it wasn't meant to be. It's a good list, if you want to do 10 years at Google or elsewhere, internalise that list and it's lessons.