MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandrake | 2026-01-23 22:45:35+00:00
> Aren't you worried that they'll work fine for 3 weeks then delete all your data when you hold them slightly different?

It might. It probably won't though. I don't see any code in it that deletes files. And, unlike BloatedShittyCommercialApp (and its cousin, BloatedDoEverythingOpenSourceApp), the code is going to be relatively small and if I do have doubts I can easily check to see what it's doing. I can build it quickly. I can patch it quickly. I don't have to file a bug to someone and beg him to look at it. I don't have to worry that the next release is going to break stuff I want and add stuff I don't want.

I recently moved my home theater PC from Kodi to a tiny bespoke vibed video player app, that basically just wraps libVLC with a minimal Android GUI. It's like 3000 lines of code total. I can practically keep the entire app in my head. If I need to fix something, it's 5 minutes in my dev terminal and then adb install. Ever tried to find and fix a bug in Kodi? The goddamn thing takes forever to even build, let alone debug. And that's even open source. I don't even have a remote chance of getting a bug fixed in professionally-built proprietary software.
by xp84 | 2026-01-23 22:46:01+00:00
I have to agree. Of all the per-seat subs that my employer has, the thing Docker Desktop provides is of so much easily provable value. I tend to agree that making Docker Desktop a commercial product way back then would have probably been good. The only hurdle would be figuring out enough of a 'free tier' to get developers to get into it and get addicted and demand a license, but not so much that everyone just uses the "free tier" or "personal" edition indefinitely - which I suspect many, many companies' developers do to this day with Docker Desktop, with their employers' tacit consent.

This "free to start using" move is best exemplified by Slack, which ended up taking over many companies guerrilla-style. They did a pretty good job of pivoting companies to paying, too.
by ifh-hn | 2026-01-23 22:46:58+00:00
I use it in an academic sense. I use it browser plugin to one click capture a source. Zotero mostly automatically identifies the source type, author, and other metadata. It can retrieve metadata directly from files like pdfs too. Further it has ability to retrieve metadata from ISBN, doi, and other identifiers. It can export these sources to really any citation style and also integrates with other software for this purpose. It has a plugin system for extras too.

I have nothing against text files on the disk but zotero is simply much better as a knowledge/source manager.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-23 22:47:01+00:00
> In low-level systems software, which is a primary use case for C++

I can assure you: Most C++ SW is not written for low-level.

> exceptions can introduce nasty edge cases that are difficult to detect and reason about.

That's true, except for languages that ensure you can't simply forget that something deep down the stack can throw an exception.

BTW, I'm not saying C++'s exceptions are in any way good. My point is that exceptions are bad in C++, and not necessarily bad in general.
by angry_octet | 2026-01-23 22:47:07+00:00
Zotero is the best. However, if your brain is highly tuned to use Mendeley Desktop, note that they backed down on killing it, they just won't add new features (where that leaves security updates I'm not sure).

https://blog.mendeley.com/2025/07/09/mendeley-is-not-going-a...
by tadfisher | 2026-01-23 22:48:06+00:00
This is needlessly divisive. JetBrains does not owe two-way interop to the Java ecosystem.

There are many Kotlin features that do not have clean interop with Java; Compose, coroutines, and value classes come to mind. And it turns out that this mostly benefits Java, because these features are not built with the kind of engineering rigor that Java language features enjoy, and some of these features would behave way better with support in the VM anyway.

Where it makes sense, they are already moving closer to Java/JVM-native feature implementations; for example, data classes already have two-way support via records, and value classes are almost there (waiting on Valhalla GA).

Besides, wouldn't you want this stuff represented in the Java type system anyway? Otherwise you get the Lombok problem, where you have this build dependency that refuses to go away and becomes a de facto part of the language. Result<T, E> is not quite the same as rich errors which explicitly are not representable by user types.
by leetbulb | 2026-01-23 22:48:21+00:00
Yeah. They, too, likely hired someone to reverse engineer it to make their own modifications. Let's add another to the chain. Surely the firmware could only become more "safe" with Lego block hacks. That's the point, right, OP?

All things considered, it sounds like the "gyro board" module is probably something that is OTS and already certified for use in a healthcare product. Wonder what the legality is of modifying such a thing in such a way?

As others have suggested, make your own or use a more ubiquitous module from the open source community. Integration wise, Claude can probably get you 80% of the way there.
by spankalee | 2026-01-23 22:48:23+00:00
That Midori article looks great, I'll give that a closer read. I actually used to work with Bob, and am familiar with the (wonderful!) function color article.

I think my biggest question might be addressed in the Midori article: with things like bounds checks and checked casts you already have exceptions (or panics), so should you have a way to capture them anywhere on the stack? Are they recoverable in some programs? So should you have try/catch even if you try to make most errors return values?

Another set of questions I have is around reified stacks. Once you have features like generators and async functions, and can switch stacks around, you're most of the way to resumable exceptions. I don't yet fully grok how code as the resume site is supposed to deal with a resume, but maybe resumable exceptions are a reason to keep them.
by nuc1e0n | 2026-01-23 22:48:30+00:00
By whose judgement is the css you speak of 'broken'? Just making random code changes without a corresponding ticket is a recipe for troubles down the line. If you must do unprioritised work at the bare minimum create a issue tracker ticket to provide more information than can fit in a commit message. Something like selenium is good to automate acceptance testing (with screenshotting) cross browser as well.
by jhallenworld | 2026-01-23 22:49:24+00:00
I have been using Walter Bright's libc code from Zortech-C for microcontrollers, where I care about code size more than anything else:

https://github.com/nklabs/libnklabs/blob/main/src/nkprintf_f...
https://github.com/nklabs/libnklabs/blob/main/src/nkstrtod.c
https://github.com/nklabs/libnklabs/blob/main/src/nkdectab.c

nkprintf_fp.c+nkdectab.c: 2494 bytes

schubfach.cc: 10K bytes.. the code is small, but there is a giant table of numbers. Also this is just dtoa, not a full printf formatter.

OTOH, the old code is not round-trip accurate.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-23 22:49:36+00:00
EU Hacker News isn't infeasible my argument is rather that it's largely pointless. The EU should avoid key US dependencies, but that means things like we shouldn't design a system that needs Microsoft's stupid "Co-pilot 365" or whatever they are now calling Word and Excel, rather than it's important never to visit a web site hosted in the US.

"The new government policy shouldn't require iPhones" is a long way from "Nobody can read The Onion", and even in its hardcore "Sign up for YCombinator" mode Hacker News really isn't anywhere close to the former.

Although because idiots I am no longer in the EU I'm in Europe too.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-23 22:49:36+00:00
> so that it can detect if mods depend on a newer version of it and notify the user that it needs to be updated.

The dynamic linker will literally tell you this, if you ask it.

> the metadata of the library existed as part of the metadata that the filesystem itself tracked rather than something in the contents of the file itself.

So does this metadata has anything to do with the file at all, or could I also attach it to e.g. an MP4 file? If that is the case than the difference is that the distributor for MS Windows did add the attribute and the distributor for GNU/Linux did not, it doesn't have anything to do with the platform.
by hobbified | 2026-01-23 22:49:47+00:00
I know this wasn't an entirely honest question, but yes, absolutely. You probably see Vimeo videos every day without realizing it, because most of the viewing isn't done on vimeo.com. It's videos on other sites, and the customers can pay to have their branding, not Vimeo's, so if you're buying something online and it has a product video... might be Vimeo. Or one of those websites that have big header splashes with full-video backgrounds. Or a subscription "channel" like Martha Stewart TV with mobile and smart-TV apps. Or a million other things.

Once at Vimeo, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I was working on putting out the fires of an extremely weird operational issue where a bug in a cloud provider's software-defined networking stack led to corrupted HTTP responses, which got stored in CDN caches, causing persistent playback issues for users (playback not starting, or locking up in the middle). The cloud provider had reported it as a "packet loss" issue, because for the most part the misdirected packets would get rejected by the receiving TCP stack for having the wrong sequence number or whatever, but one time in a billion they would get through and wreak havoc... and we were moving enough traffic that those one-in-a-billion flukes were happening constantly.

I was musing in the shared chat with one of our CDN partners that, with no real way to tell what files were affected, the only way to fix the playback issues for everyone (short of waiting a month for all the cached objects to age out) would be to simply purge the whole cache. I immediately got a bold all caps DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT in response. If we flushed the whole cache, the origin traffic to refill it would have saturated some internet links to the point of DoSing other customers and probably getting on CNN that evening. And that was then. Traffic levels got significantly higher later on.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-23 22:50:06+00:00
Java has FOSS implementations. Oracle is very much NOT free: https://oraclejavalicensing.com/who-needs-an-oracle-java-lic...

To the extent that my employer blocks Oracle dot com at the outbound firewall to stop anyone accidentally incurring license costs. You don't want to deal with Oracle license enforcement.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-23 22:50:07+00:00
The problem with that is that disaffected people vote and politicians can win by being emotionally satisfying when the alternatives aren't.

The common denominator on the left and the right is a completely garbled and fragmentary concept of the Constitution. Until recently you would have thought right wingers only cared about the second amendment although in the last ten years they've discovered the first but in the garbled sense that Facebook owes you a megaphone (for "free as in beer") and Twitter is doing a crime if they don't give your posts maximum visiblity with all the other spam and scams.
by 0003 | 2026-01-23 22:50:29+00:00
Turning a builder into a formidable founder, which via the PG quote is someone who seems they will always get what they want is in its self a death. A builder... a truth-seeking creator dies. Devoured by someone who gets what they want, a superego. There should be a black bar at the top.

/s

Shout out to the risk takers.
by kortex | 2026-01-23 22:50:43+00:00
I think we are closer than most folks would like to admit.

in my wild guess opinion:

- 2027: 10%

- 2030s: 50%

- 2040: >90%

- 3000: 100%

Assuming we don't see an existential event before then, i think it's inevitable, and soon.

I think we are gonna be arguing about the definition of "general intelligence" long after these system are already running laps around humans at a wide variety of tasks.
by freedomben | 2026-01-23 22:50:57+00:00
> When I go buy a beer at the gas station, all I do is show my ID to the cashier. They look at it to verify DOB and then that's it. No information is stored permanently in some database that's going to get hacked and leaked.

That's how it should be, but it's not how it is. Many places now scan your ID into their computer (the computer which, btw, tracks everything you buy). It may not go to a government database (yet) but it's most certainly being stored.
by nailer | 2026-01-23 22:51:07+00:00
Were OpenAI in a batch though? If not, I think maybe OpenAI deserves a mention but after companies that were actually in a batch.

Typography looks great though, animations are smooth, /formidable founder' is original and it's nice seeing Jared Friedman - he was super friendly and acted as a company champion when I applied in 2016.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-23 22:51:20+00:00
> emotionally satisfying

I think this is the basic issue: politics is about satisfying objective needs, in terms of allocating public goods and coordinating independent actors; it's not about satisfying emotional needs.

The latter is better done by oneself, or at worst through one's kith or karass, and certainly not at the granfalloon levels at which politics operates.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-23 22:51:35+00:00
Knowing exactly what you want to build is pretty rare and is pretty much limited to "rewriting existing system" or some pretty narrow set of projects

In general, delaying infrastructure decisions as much as possible in process usually yields better infrastructure because the farther you are the more knowledge you have about the problem.

...that being said I do dislike how agile gets used as excuse for not doing any planning where you really should and have enough information to at least pick direction.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-23 22:51:47+00:00
This is strange to me, because Waymo is the most cautious and the safest driver aside from those public transit operators.

I've personally logged 2,096 miles on Waymo in the Phoenix market.

One day, Waymo was accelerating out of a driveway and onto a 7-lane stroad with 35mph limit. Suddenly, it pulled over and stopped completely on the shoulder. As other cars sped by us obliviously, I looked around to figure out why Waymo had acted out.

There was a school bus on the opposite side of the street, with its red flashers on and children nearby. The Waymo was the only one to obey or even acknowledge it.
by hypeatei | 2026-01-23 22:52:14+00:00
> That's been going on for many presidents in a row

You were attributing your "knowledge worker 401(k)" growth to Trump though?

> Is this some new virtue signal on BlueSky?

No, I'm not on BlueSky or any social media. Is this a poor attempt at some Trumper "own"?

> USD is still trading in its channel at above historic averages.

Look at the chart after "liberation day" in April. It's been down since then and stayed there. Not a very good sign for his policies.

> Three consecutive years of solid double digit market growth that has outpaced inflation and dollar valuation

I agree, Biden did well with covid recovery. Not sure how electing Trump did much for us other than cause a market crash in April (and subsequent dip buying) and weaken the USD?

> Tell me you know nothing about financial markets

Oh, I know plenty and I'm actually bullish on stocks because there is so much free money going around. It would be stupid not to have your money in assets with such high inflation on the horizon. I just find it funny that you're touting bad policy as a win when his whole campaign was about "Biden's inflation" causing high prices and Republicans are supposedly for being fiscally responsible yet the OBBB goes against that.
by anonym29 | 2026-01-23 22:52:16+00:00
1. Do people necessarily need to agree on the justification for a standard to agree on the standard itself? Does everyone agree on the reasoning / justification for every single point of every NIST standard?

2. What separates a standard from a case study? Why can't "don't shoot babies in the head" / "shooting babies in the head is wrong" be a standard?
by conductr | 2026-01-23 22:52:27+00:00
I’ve not been on the business end of this industry but I rent skid steers and mini excavators a handful of times a year. I feel like all you said is true, I’m tough on the equipment and I don’t many many choices with the longevity of the machine in mind. However, I’ve considered buying the machines and so have realized the sticker price on a new machine is worth about 30-50 days of daily rent on most the machines I’ve used (assume that relationship exists on bigger things too). Now if they employ maintenance people then they already have a fixed cost and can do preventative maintenance and frequent monitoring. It shouldn’t be too big of a deal and should be priced into the rental rates.

So, it takes a market will pay the rates needed. It takes the business owner to be firm on those rates, under charging may drive revenue but will end up losing as repair expenses go up. And, it requires some volume. I’m guessing what you’re witnessing is businesses with one of those problems. It’s not that people are hard on them and the need a lot of maintenance. These machines need a lot of maintenance even when they’re parked 90% of the time. That’s why I’ve never bought one. I don’t want to deal with the headaches even though the financial part is probably sound for me, the hassle factor is high.
by ricardo81 | 2026-01-23 22:52:37+00:00
I wouldn't hard recommend based on lack of solid experience of using them over time, but Gandi showed a lot of promise for me.

Context: I used to run a domain-related service that used registrar api's and gandi's seemed the most well thought out by a considerable way. The drawback was they're quite expensive for registrations/renewals unless you're doing it at volume.

I had reservations about them being a French company wrt support but their API was so good I never needed to contact them on anything.

Definitely worth a look.
by beeflet | 2026-01-23 22:53:08+00:00
The median user would be better off in a society where computers are not needed for daily life. The median user doesn't understand computers. In their life, computers only manfiest as a tool of control imposed by the people who understand computers over those that don't.

This is one such example.

This sort of utilitarian nitpicking over the convenience of a "median" user is like maximizing the happiness of a cow on a factory farm. The cow would be better off if it did not exist at all. It is a matter of freedom and dignity.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-23 22:53:25+00:00
"... every year we don't make Constitutional amendments" is kinda proof of the opposite, that the system is broken and no longer able to make constitutional amendments.

The Constitution is legitimate in terms of itself, but if you want ask the question of why people don't take threats to our institution seriously the answer is that people don't actually believe in it.

The people who run our institutions reject the idea that output legitimacy matters and they will lose our republic on account of that. ("how could we be held accountable for the results we get, we can't control that" is a Hillary Clinton line that she'll borrow trouble with, Trump will only use that line after it has all fallen apart)
by LTL_FTC | 2026-01-23 22:53:32+00:00
I linked results where the user ran Kimi k2 across his 8-node cluster. Inference results are listed for 1,10,100 concurrent requests.

Edit to add:

Yeah, those stations with the GB300 look more along the lines of what I would want as well but I agree, they’re probably way beyond my reach.
by daotoad | 2026-01-23 22:53:51+00:00
US states are, in some ways, less independent than UK countries.

Wales can no more disavow the PM than California can disavow POTUS. So this separate status is limited.

The big counter to this is the idea that US states have their own militaries. States may have militias, but they can be subsumed by the federal government pretty easily, as we saw in California in 2025. They are not truly independent armed forces.

OTOH, states are not allowed to leave the US, we had a war about this a while ago. Meanwhile Scotland had a referendum on leaving the UK a few years ago.

Love it or hate it, we are Americans first before we are New Yorkers or Mississipians and so forth. This is especially true when it comes to international relations; that's handled on a federal level and most people in the world couldn't tell a Nebraskan from an Alaskan.
by mactavish88 | 2026-01-23 22:53:56+00:00
In my experience, it really depends on what you're building _and_ how you prompt the LLM.

For some things, LLMs are great. For others, they're absolute dog shit.

It's still early days. Anyone who claims to know what they're talking about either doesn't or what they're saying will be out of date in a month's time (including me).
by kenhwang | 2026-01-23 22:54:40+00:00
The endless amount of Chinese Android-based single purpose mp3 player devices that are obviously iPod Nano/Classic clones basically cost ~$30 and have 50hr+ of battery life. You don't have to think about what player app to use, they ship with the only one that runs. The rest of the Androidness is stripped out.

Then yes, there's obviously the other end of the extreme where the mp3 player is very obviously a phone without a radio with a price tag to match. And everything in-between.

I'd say there's actually too many choices cause the silicon and battery cost required to simply play music has gotten so cheap that it doesn't make sense to optimize the OS further than Android. I'm sure the economics of scale means the actual hardware wouldn't be cheaper by any noticeable amount either.
by epistasis | 2026-01-23 22:54:51+00:00
There's room for a yes-and approach, it's not either-or.

Some people can make the change, and since social media is social, that small vanguard causes others to switch as well.

One can blame the system for keeping them poor, while also doing as much as possible to change their own position within the current system, those are not in opposition to each other! In fact, discouraging people from getting educated because of the system is its own form of oppression.

Highlighting people's own agency to make changes for themselves also highlights how the engineered manipulation of social media is not inevitable. These are complimentary things to do.
Show HN: Null Future – A survival guide for the AI economy (Free)
by LSENNN | 2026-01-23 22:55:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the author of NULL FUTURE.

While most discussions focus on the 'replacement' aspect of AI (layoffs), I wanted to explore the 'deprecation' phase that comes first. My thesis is that we are entering an era of 'Invisible Replacement' where white-collar workers keep their titles but lose their utility, effectively becoming 'Null Workers'—paid to exist but functionally obsolete.

The book explores strategies to pivot from 'Efficiency' (which AI wins) to 'Liability/Accountability' (which remains human).

It's free on Amazon for the next few days. I wrote it as a survival manual rather than a business book.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the 'Liability Sponge' concept if you give it a read.

(Direct Amazon link is in the post)"