MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nottorp | 2026-01-14 07:26:37+00:00
You're thinking disposable vapes, but this will apply to quality of life appliances like washing machines as well, right?

Do you want to live in a world where only the rich can afford washing machines?

Incidentally, I don't know what you do, but once in a while I throw (carefully, li-ion batteries) my broken electronics in the trunk and bring them to the local collection center.
Ask HN: How do you apply for jobs in the age of AI?
by surrTurr | 2026-01-14 07:26:44+00:00
With AI being used by applicants to spam-apply to any open positions, and recruiters using AI as a filter, it feels like there's a lot of noise and few humans in the system right now.

I thought about simply doing the same (building some n8n automation, or using one of the countless find-a-job-and-apply AI tools on GitHub), but I think there's a better way to do all of this - maybe even by getting around all of this AI shitshow?!

Things I was thinking about:

- don't optimize the CV/motivational letter with AI so that it sounds authentic

- do unsolicited applications at companies i find interesting (since no job posting is open, no AI will suggest this company - and probably the recruiter will read the application)

- do more networking (i hate that shit but IK its the most effective)
by piyushpr134 | 2026-01-14 07:27:37+00:00
paper straws do not make any sense any way you look at it. Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?

Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable

Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
by stevoski | 2026-01-14 07:27:54+00:00
“Damn”, this is good.

It takes me right back to 1998, making my first few web pages - with a hand-rolled index page. I probably used NotePad.

And how easy it was - I went from reading a “how to HTML” guide to having a page about whatever hobby I was into at the time in a single session. Can’t have been much more than an hour.

I guess I deployed via FTP, into the space my ISP provided.
by k310 | 2026-01-14 07:28:08+00:00
I have to think about this. Back in the days when rapid prototyping meant checking things out with (SHUDDER) Basic, or Tcl, or later, Hypercard, I actually learned something along the way that came in very handy later in a different context.

So, a dumb problem came up --- Really dumb --- how to make the world's simplest online calendar so that someone could just enter event dates (there are less than 10 a month) and not wait until the very last one came in, for an email to go out. Key dates are known and it's the 13th and no January calendar yet.

So, it's like convert date formats, which Numbers refused to do, and then pair that column with days of the week. Before I went back to the days of "Unix Text Processing" and the insanely useful "paste" command. That came from the days when I studied that book and put a ton of it into practice. It was a guide top shell and built-ins via example.

Doing this, I thought that perl would solve it all, and despite not having used it in countless years (I retired long ago) it started coming back to me.

But the shell stuff worked better than a spreadsheet (software from hell) and perl, which can have some incredibly poetic solutions. I promised myself to re-read what I found. Because it's "neat".

I learned a lot before even usenet and Google, and that has stuck for the most part, because "I had nobody to lean on".
by seanhunter | 2026-01-14 07:28:24+00:00
I can think of maybe two musicians who might be said to fit in that tight intersection.

Brian May (guitarist from Queen) who has an astrophysics PhD from Imperial College London

Professor Brian Cox who teaches Physics at Manchester University and is a public face of science of tv here in the UK was keyboardist for one-hit-wonder band d-reem who had a hit in the 90s with “Things can only get better”.

Brian May is really the only one who is a superstar musician but Brian Cox is a more significant scientist.
by fithisux | 2026-01-14 07:28:32+00:00
What I get in these article is that the original intent on C language stands true.

Use C as a common platform denominator without crazy optimizations (like tcc). If you need performance, specialize, C gives you the tools to call assembly (or use compiler some intrinsic or even inline assembly).

Complex compiler doing crazy optimizations, in my opinion, is not worth it.
by bonesss | 2026-01-14 07:29:58+00:00
LLMs do the jobs of developers, thereby eating up countless jobs.

LLMs do the jobs of developers without telling semi-technical arrogant MBA holders “no, you’re dumb”, thereby creating all the same jobs as before but also a butt-ton more juggling expensive cleanup mixed with ego-massaging.

We’re talking a 2-10x improvement in ‘how hard could it be?’ iterations. Consultant candy.
by akendo | 2026-01-14 07:30:43+00:00
I'm surprised to see that very little is known about the Linux kernel keyring. With keyctl[0] you can put secrets scoped to process and ensure that they stay there only for a limited period of time. The tool isn't intuitive, but it's the way I put my 2FA and secrets in shell without bothering about leaking anything.

[0]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/keyctl.1.html
by wqaatwt | 2026-01-14 07:31:58+00:00
> In Europe

Isn’t a monolithic place. I don’t think there is a non micro-state country in Europe where the absolute majority of people don’t commute by car.

Living outside of dense urban areas without a car is still generally tricky. In quite a few cities there are no large supermarkets in the densest parts and you have to drive further from the center to find one. So not having a car might be tricky
by alephnerd | 2026-01-14 07:32:39+00:00
Most people who get into Vandy (such as me and my peers years ago) also got into Columbia [1], UChicago [2], Northwestern [3], and other similar programs.

Yet Vanderbilt's yield rate of 45% [0] compared to 53-63% of its peers highlights this rising discrepancy, with students choosing to attend alternative peer programs.

The only thing that differentiates Vanderbilt from (eg.) Rice was prestige as a supposed T15, yet Vanderbilt's ranking and prestige has been dropping significantly over the past decade [4], and this leaves a university like Vandy in a tough position.

The overwhelming majority of students who get into a Vanderbilt tier university lean liberal to progressive and/or are a racial minority, and for these candidates Vandy is not as attractive. Conversely, Vandy and Nashville is viewed as too "woke" by conservative leaning students so are less interested in matriculating (and anyhow, the overwhelming majority of bachelor degree holders end up leaning liberal).

As such, if Vanderbilt wishes to retain it's value proposition, it has no choice but to branch out from it's historical geography becuase it otherwise faces the prospect of being relegated into the same bin as Wake Forest - a prestigious but geographically limited university.

For high achieving students (and their parents) and academic faculty, such a prospect is not very attractive.

[0] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1624-Vanderbilt-...

[1] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-319-Columbia-Uni...

[2] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1416-University-...

[3] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-945-Northwestern...

[4] - https://vanderbilthustler.com/2023/09/19/vanderbilt-drops-to...
by jaeckel | 2026-01-14 07:33:12+00:00
> you can always try the plastic bag + vacuum cleaner trick - take a thin flexible rope, tie it to a small plastic bag, stuff the small plastic bag into the conduit, use a vacuum cleaner at the other end to suck the plastic bag & rope through.

That's absolutely great! Worked like a charm two days ago and everybody cheered and laughed who saw it :-D
by kundan_s__r | 2026-01-14 07:34:12+00:00
This matches our experience too. The biggest reduction in hallucinations usually comes from shrinking the action space, not improving the prompt. When inputs, tools, and outputs are explicitly constrained, the model stops “being creative” in places where creativity is actually risk.

It’s less about smarter models and more about making the system boring and deterministic at each step.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-14 07:34:14+00:00
The commercial options would fall further in price probably than consumer prices. If you buy in bulk, you do research to find the most cost effective options. That's a common pattern with many things. I don't see why batteries would be any different. If anything, I'd expect consumer batteries to have higher margins. Tesla batteries are a good example probably. At those prices, a Tesla car would be unobtanium. Obviously they charge a lot less for batteries that go in a car.

The reality is that many battery factories might be operating at 40-50% capacity only. Exact figures are hard to come by but there are lots of warnings about over production, surpluses, etc.. That spells a lot of trouble for some of the newer battery producers promising more efficient batteries. Because unless they price match, they price themselves out of the market almost immediately.
by likium | 2026-01-14 07:35:16+00:00
If someone painstakingly hand sculpted an exact replica of "David", does it make it art, or a forgery? Is hand written code to produce generative art not art?

It's difficult to pin down the line. Ultimately it's up to the individual to define them. "The relationship to art, and this kind of painting, to their work, varied with the person entirely."[1]

[1]: https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/31/berkeley-voices-transfo...
by bicepjai | 2026-01-14 07:35:55+00:00
I think the author slips into the same pattern he’s criticizing. He says LLM fans shouldn’t label skeptics as “afraid” then he turns around and labels the fans as “insecure” or “not very good at programming.”
It’s the same move; guessing what’s going on in someone’s head instead of sticking to what actually happened and what the tools can or can’t do.
The simpler truth is LLMs are great in some cases and painful in others. They shine on boilerplate and tests. They struggle when the domain is unusual, requirements are fuzzy; mistakes are made, you pay a big babysitting tax.

Instead of psychoanalyzing each other, people should share concrete examples
by criticalfault | 2026-01-14 07:36:48+00:00
opera had a different business model. I don't think they had millions upon miliona that Mozilla gets from Google for antitrust reasons.

opera had to earn their money.

this aside, Mozilla just now implemented tab grouping. does that mean they are going to, because of the added features, follow opera's path?

my point was that someone said how they increased development speed. and I'm saying they are breaking record in how slow it is. it's not 1y, it's since the feature appeared anywhere and it's 20y ago. what the f was Mozilla doing since then? obviously they didn't work on the features. but also they didn't work on the other list of things I mentioned since only one is fully delivered (look and feel on all platforms) and those are non-features like fore mentioned tab groupings, but core capabilities for a browser.

in everything else they are so much behind it's really a wonder they still have market share as much as they do.
by alexjplant | 2026-01-14 07:37:54+00:00
I was fortunate enough to get LEGO Mindstorms (the OG one) for Christmas as a kid. By that time I'd already learned a bit of QBasic and so had programming experience. While I found the visual programming paradigm limiting I also wasn't creative enough to come up with robots that needed more than what one could build with the software so I had no complaints. I had a great time learning about gear ratios and how flaky the light sensor was depending upon room brightness.

Is there anything similar and as well-supported from Lego or otherwise these days? An ESP32 is great fun but some assembly is required.
by dewey | 2026-01-14 07:38:20+00:00
Indeed, that was one of the posts I stumbled upon when I started building this. There's also another one which I found interesting (https://hawksley.org/2025/02/20/my-ubiquiti-unifi-protect-bi...) as it documented the way to mod a G5 camera to set the focal length as someone on Reddit also documented before.
by robot-wrangler | 2026-01-14 07:41:41+00:00
> anyone can at any time create a card that says "I win the game" but that is no fun [..] The metagame of 1kbwc allows the deck to become its own story

Yep exploring this question collaboratively is of course the real activity. Depending on your perspective it's barely recognizable as a game, or it's the ultimate / only game. Also kinda related here is Carse on finite and infinite games and Wittgenstein on language games[1,2]. It is "only" philosophy, but also feels ripe for more rigorous treatment

Presumably a good theoretical treatment would try to look at how games and their meta's are related: how the number and stability of rules changes the richness of interaction, enjoyment, flexibility in strategy, average duration and tolerable length of game-play, etc

[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22379733M/Finite_and_infinit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)
by safety1st | 2026-01-14 07:41:44+00:00
I think cancel culture is a pretty serious and meaningful concept. 20 years ago I got drummed out of an organization I was a part of for saying I thought people should be allowed to argue that this organization didn't need race quotas.

Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important.

I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus).

Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life.

Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life.

If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized.

We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.
by sublinear | 2026-01-14 07:42:06+00:00
All this AI discussion has done is reveal how naive some people are.

You're not losing your job unless you work on trivial codebases. There's a very clear pattern what those are: startups, greenfield, games, junk apps, mindless busywork that probably has an existing better tool on github, etc. Basically anything that doesn't have any concrete business requirements or legal liability.

This isn't to say those codebases will always be trivial, but good luck cleaning that up or facing the reality of having to rewrite it properly. At least you have AI to help with boilerplate. Maybe you'll learn to read docs along the way.

The people claiming to be significantly more productive are either novice programmers or optimistic for unexplained reasons they're still trying to figure out. When they want to let us know, most people still won't care because it's not even the good kind of unreasonable that brings innovation.

The only real value in modern LLMs is that natural language processing is a lot better than it used to be.

Are we done now?
by seec | 2026-01-14 07:42:52+00:00
Macs have largely been the same.
It is just a matter of buzy compute and letting all the accumulated tasks complete.

When you buy powerfull computers, this problem basically doesn't exist, both on Windows or macOS.
Since Macs have historically been more expensive and premium, even the cheaper model was powerfull enough to finish the boot sequence fast enough that the desktop would feel snappy almost instantly.
On the other hand, cheap PCs struggle to accomplish every task in a timely manner.

I am amazed about how stupid and ignorant is the average Mac fanboy. I have been a Mac user first and foremost, but you guys are just full of shit.
by miroljub | 2026-01-14 07:43:30+00:00
> Hardly relevant. If you control guns better, you get fewer illegal weapons as well. Most of the murders in Europe are committed by illegal weapons as well.

Since you bring up Europe, I can give you a counterexample of Switzerland, which is armed to the teeth and still has a significantly lower homicide rate than the USA. The same applies to Canada. Even some countries with prevalent illegal guns are not even close to the USA. Heck, there's a war in Ukraine, guns are everywhere, and still, there's a very low homicide rate.

> Oh. You're one of those.

One of which? Say it or shut up. Or are you one of these? ;)

> It's a peculiarly American thing to try first to look to race to try to understand something, when there are more salient correlations.

I'm not even an American. But given the above counterexamples, it's clear that the availability of legal guns is not the only, and probably not the biggest deciding factor for high homicide rates.

Want to understand the cause? Open a Wikipedia page, look at the stats, and identify the fact that most of the homicides in the USA can be tracked down to some specific population. That's not racist, since facts can't be racist. You won't reduce the homicide rate by ignoring the facts.

> Presumably since Black Americans are overrepresented as victims of gun violence, you'd like to see a significantly higher proportion carrying guns?

Can you explain that logic? First, if you look at the stats again, most of the Black Americans are killed by the members of their race, probably due to higher exposure to threats.

So yes, Black Americans need legal guns to protect themselves even more than White Americans, since they are more endangered.
by wtcactus | 2026-01-14 07:44:24+00:00
:) I see your confusion. But the F is caused by gravity there. The special case you are refering to (I think you are thinking about the Weight = g * mass of body) comes from a more universal expression.

If you look at the proper expression that calculates it's force, it becomes clear:

F = G * m1 * m2/ r^2 (so, gravity is the force between masses).

P.S. G is the universal constant of Gravity here, not the gravity itself.
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-01-14 07:45:02+00:00
Agreed, but thermodynamics (calorie in/out) still holds. If you actually eat healthy (say 2500 calories), you will lose weight if you're obese and need >3000 to maintain weight, period.

Sustaining that healthy diet is harder insulin resistance, agreed!

But you said you ate healthy for a decade. To me that's not eating obesity-maintenance level amounts of otherwise healthy foods, but rather eating healthy foods at a normal (say 2500 kcal daily) amount.

In other words, under your statement the behavioral impact of insulin resistance was already overcome, you were eating properly, and still didn't lose weight. And that's just not conform the science, which states that you lose weight even with high insulin resistance, as long as you're eating healthy (i.e. in a caloric deficit vis-a-vis obesity level maintenance).
by internetter | 2026-01-14 07:45:35+00:00
You cannot say "better" in this context without an almost endless degree of quantification that could fill textbooks. By what metric? Public health? Cost effectiveness? Environmental impact? How do we measure these things? I assume you're arguing a health perspective (which, at this point all we can say is probably better), but in the context of TFA "better" is more likely to be interpreted in an environmental context, of which I haven't really been convinced either way.
by plastic041 | 2026-01-14 07:46:17+00:00
You can render only single characters. First you need to change the HTML "max" attribute of <input> to 1.1 in the "Glyph Thresholds". And set 0.0 for the desired characters and the characters above. Set 1.1 for the remaining characters.

For example, if you only want the dash, set the dot and dash to 0.0. Then set 1.1 for the plus, ring, and cross characters.
by momo138 | 2026-01-14 07:46:18+00:00
Getting a prototype ready in 2 hours is a great start. My advice for the 'next steps' would be to focus on user validation before worrying too much about scaling. Since you used an AI chatbot for the frontend, try to see if you can wire it up to a simple backend like Supabase or even a serverless setup. It keeps costs low while you're still in the 'regular job' phase you mentioned. Don't worry too much about the IP yet; execution and a solid user base are what YC and investors look for most.
by solatic | 2026-01-14 07:47:10+00:00
I'll agree with you that the author tried to put in a sound bite and it failed to clarify the author's point.

The author is trying to argue for hiring early engineers who have exhibited ownership values and who want to take ownership for their work. These are the people for whom you establish "extreme transparency" (see: late in the post), a Google Doc for them to help align with others on high-level plans, a kitchen for people to informally talk in, and then get out of their way. That kind of environment is indeed in and of itself quite motivating for a certain kind of engineer.

Of course, it doesn't scale to BigCorp-size. Eventually you have too many cooks in the kitchen. The truth is that the vast majority of engineers really do want someone to tell them exactly what to do, so that they can come in to a highly structured 9-5 job and earn a paycheck that pays their mortgage and feeds their family. Author's prescriptions do not apply to large companies or to most engineers, and Author makes it clear as such.
by tombert | 2026-01-14 07:48:48+00:00
With all due respect, you really do not understand these protocols if you think “just use TCP and ECC” addresses my complaints.

Again, it’s not that I have an issue with static types “not protecting you”, I am saying that you have to encode for this uncertainty regardless of the language you use. The way you typically encode for that uncertainty is to use an algebraic data type like Maybe or Optional. Checking against a Maybe for every field ends up being the same checks you would be doing with a dynamic language.

I don’t really feel the need to list out my full resume, but I do think it is very likely that I understand type systems better than you do.