MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FrankWilhoit | 2026-01-07 13:31:44+00:00
"...takes five years to learn..." -- and the requirement for participation in the cost (which is merely abusive) is an ever greater obstacle. If the CEO of Ford wants to prioritize the recruitment of more mechanics, then he needs to order his designers to implement designs that require less training. (The other remedy -- persuading the accountants to allow the dealerships to capitalize training -- seems to be off the table. Much of the perversity of business decision-making is down to the fact that training is classified as an operating expense.)
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-07 13:32:03+00:00
Meh, I love my Olympus cameras, but I wouldn't call the latest models exactly small. The OM1 is pretty huge, even though it's smaller than the ridiculous Panasonic G9. I think it's close to the Sony a7 line and the canon r6, which are full-frame. Of course, if you're into long lenses, it wipes the floor with them, if the compromise works for you. On the wide end, the advantage isn't as clear-cut, though nobody else has anything comparable to the 8-25.

What I'm hoping to see is a new penf. When it came out, they somehow managed to cram into that small body almost everything the em1 had at the time. The om3 is pretty small, too, but for some reason they decided to keep the faux-pentaprism bump. It would have been great if it had the viewfinder to the side.
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-07 13:32:12+00:00
HN has a subset of users -- they're a minority, but they hit threads like this super hard -- who really, truly think that if they say that AI tools suck and are only for nubs loud enough and frequently enough, downvoting anyone who finds them useful, all AI advancements will unwind and it'll be the "good old days" again. It's rather bizarre stuff, but that's what happens when people in denial feel threatened.
by throwaway132448 | 2026-01-07 13:32:16+00:00
The basis of this is flawed because the "peace" started several decades before the 90s, and completely neglects the role of Mutually Assured Destruction in creating that peace. If anything, America's position was detrimental to that peace because it allowed it to wage its own unilateral wars.

This continues to be the case now. The main difference is that in the 90s, the opposition to Vietnam was still fresh enough in the average American mind. I suspect what we're seeing now is the effect of that memory fading.
by zcw100 | 2026-01-07 13:32:18+00:00
I just came across a situation where I had a DSL but it was clear that a language would have been better. What I don't like about this is the dogmatic tone which is pretty common in IT. Don't to it that way, do it my way! Sometimes a DSL is a solid choice, sometimes a language is a better one, sometimes you might want to support both but I guess "Choose the right abstraction for your domain" doesn't make for a clickbait title.
by Desafinado | 2026-01-07 13:32:35+00:00
One of the interesting things about how people socialize is that we tend to be less honest with those we're closest to, and more honest with people who have no impact on our bottom line.

Counter-intuitively this means we end up having better conversation with strangers than our closest friends and family. Which makes platforms like Facebook a lost cause for connection.

I've had the same experience. Many of my best friends have been found on forums.
by phplovesong | 2026-01-07 13:32:40+00:00
I can assure you im not using LLMs to generatare any post, comment or reply. But 7/10 posts here on HN are infact just that. Endless AI generated posts, or links to some prompted mess of a project. None of the above are moderated, and/or removed.

Im not avare of the flagging system, but it seems not to be working because the amount of slop increases each month, and thats a big shame as HN news is one of the last "oldschool" forums we have left.
by sjw987 | 2026-01-07 13:32:44+00:00
It'd be great if all public ads were banned and digital ads were the only form. That way those who are savvy enough can also block the digital ones and live a completely ad-free life.

My annoyance is that regardless of how I lock ads out of my own home and devices, I will still always see ads for McSlop and Coca Cola everywhere I walk in my city.
by sanderjd | 2026-01-07 13:32:46+00:00
Yeah I love working with Claude Code, I agree that the new models are amazing, but I spend a decent amount of time saying "wait, why are we writing that from scratch, haven't we written a library for that, or don't we have examples of using a third party library for it?".

There is probably some effective way to put this direction into the claude.md, but so far it still seems to do unnecessary reimplementation quite a lot.
by Yizahi | 2026-01-07 13:32:58+00:00
As a tech support for a person with iOS gadgets, this is exactly some tasks which are way too hard on iPad. Emails getting lost because default Mail app was flaky, so I need to install Gmail app. Travel involves tickets, aka files. Now I need to help find the files in the locked down hell of a UI and figure out how to send them to a different app. Bonus points if they were archived and need unpacking. Messaging - some accounts tied to an old number, and a new number is needed to, well, make calls, and Apple generously doesn't provide dualsim option outside of China, so now I need to figure out sync between two devices with two sims, and then some messengers don't allow that while others do, and then I need to explain all that to an elderly non-IT person... In short - it's a mess, every time any task outside of doomscrolling an watching YT arises on iOS.
by Haaargio | 2026-01-07 13:33:09+00:00
Its not dying slowly right now at all.

Compute is a massive driver for everything ML. From number of experiments you can run in paralle, to how much RL you can try out, how long stuff is running etc.

ML is pushing scaling on dimensions we haven't had before (number of Datacenters, amount of energy we put into them) and ML is currently seen as the holy grail.

But i'm definitly very very curious how this compute and current progress is playing out in the next few years. It could be that we hit a hard ceiling were every single % point becomes tremendesly costly before we hit a % point of benchmark archievements which makes all of that usable daily. OR we will se a significant change to our society.

I do not think its something in between tbh because it def feels like in an expoential progress curve we are currently in.
by CastIron888 | 2026-01-07 13:33:36+00:00
You can see in the picture the boiler is taking the load of the machine. There is no additional chassis.

That's less frame than a Ducati has between the front and rear wheels.

Without speaking to the wisdom of stressing batteries mechanically, the idea of using drivetrain components as structural members of a vehicle is as old as self-propelled vehicles.

Hell, even a chariot sees the horse taking a part of the vehicle load.
by grugdev42 | 2026-01-07 13:35:19+00:00
I assume you are concerned with keeping your children safe? If so, whether the computer has an internet connection is much more important than the OS.

I would rather have my children use Windows offline, rather than Linux online. There is simply too much bad stuff out there regardless of the OS.

Another thing to consider is what their school uses. If you want to give them an advantage at school, use the same OS. They will already be more familiar with it!
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-07 13:36:15+00:00
Pretty much all these franchise chains operate on hub and spoke for their fresh baked stuff.

The thing you buy at 6am (or 6pm, lol) was in an oven or a mixer (depending on whether the chain in question is baking on site or at the hub) at 12am that morning and on a truck at 3:30.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-07 13:36:19+00:00
The Intel server CPUs with P-cores support AVX-512, like all current AMD CPUs, and they also support a few extensions not currently supported by AMD, like AMX (Zen 6 will add FP16 arithmetic support in AVX-512, reducing the differences vs. Intel P-core servers).

The Intel server CPUs with E-cores, both the current Sierra Forest CPUs with Crestmont cores and the future Clearwater Forest CPUs with Darkmont cores do not support AVX-512 and they are almost identical with the E-cores from Intel laptop/desktop CPUs.

Therefore, for demanding applications you cannot run the same programs on Intel servers with P-cores or E-cores, unless they use dynamical dispatch to select at run-time between AVX and AVX-512 libraries, as the gain from AVX-512 can be very substantial and on server applications not using it would lose money by lowering the throughput.

The Intel Darkmont cores of Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest are almost identical with the Skymont cores of Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake (the main difference is that the Skymont cores are made by TSMC, while the Darkmont cores are made by Intel in their new 18A CMOS process) and they are extremely similar in die size and in performance with the ARM Neoverse V3 cores from the newly launched AWS Graviton5 (which are known as Cortex-X4 in their smartphone variant).

Intel has said that they will eliminate this ISA difference between E-cores and P-cores, but a couple of years might pass until this will reach their server CPUs.
by jakkos | 2026-01-07 13:36:36+00:00
Have you seen nushell? It lets me one-liner so many things that would have previously taken breaking out a "real" language to do

Contrived example:

ls | where type == 'file' | sort-by size | take 4 | each {|f| {n: $f.name, s: ($f.size | format filesize MB) }} | to json

outputs

{
"n": "clippy.toml",
"s": "0.000001 MB"
},
{
"n": "README.md",
"s": "0.000009 MB"
},
{
"n": "rustfmt.toml",
"s": "0.000052 MB"
},
{
"n": "typos.toml",
"s": "0.00009 MB"
}
by EMM_386 | 2026-01-07 13:37:00+00:00
> ... Proceeds to explain how it's crippled and all the workarounds you have to do to make it less crippled.

No - that's not what I did.

You don't need an extra-long context full of irrelevant tokens. Claude doesn't need to see the code it implemented 40 steps ago in a working method from Phase 1 if it is on Phase 3 and not using that method. It doesn't need reasoning traces for things it already "thought" through.

This other information is cluttering, not helpful. It is making signal to noise ratio worse.

If Claude needs to know something it did in Phase 1 for Phase 4 it will put a note on it in the living markdown document to simply find it again when it needs it.
by falloutx | 2026-01-07 13:38:01+00:00
Its 2014 levels of total distrust inside the company. Morale has been on the floor since end of 24, due to closing offices, laying off people. Contractors are being left in limbo more and more often.

Half of the people are just talking about layoffs and other are keeping thier mouth shut. There is sense that execs are making one bad decision after another. Xbox division knows this very well, the trust in that division is near zero, but now it has spread to even the orgs which were doing decently well.

Product quality is also completely dogshit/dogslop, we have done nothing in last 2 years except making our products worse. We do hear reports of boomer companies moving to Apple every now and then, and these rumours are increasing. Windows 11 is a disaster, Copilot is an convenience no one asked for. Users are contacting support every day asking how to disable all these features but execs keep ignoring users. The consensus among top guys is that customer is wrong and we need to teach them.

Trusting stock market more than the customers is now the industry standard.
by retsibsi | 2026-01-07 13:38:13+00:00
> So, in other words, you want the cargo, but without the tiring "pay for it" aspect?

I'm not trying to be difficult, but I'm not quite sure what this means! In literal terms, I want the ability to read tweets, see threads and replies, and view a user's tweets chronologically, and I don't think the second and third things are possible on X.com without an account. I don't want an account for various reasons, including that I don't want any temptation to become a regular or active user.
by drob518 | 2026-01-07 13:38:25+00:00
I suspect scaling will not die a slow death, but rather slow for a while and then all at once. Further, I think we’re at the knee. We know scaling doesn’t work for resolving the fundamental issues we have with large models at this point. If it did, the latest models would have solved the issues. Now, we’re in the acceptance phase. That’s not technical, it’s human psychology. People who made bold claims and huge promises that things would get better if we just spent a few more billion dollars on data centers and GPUs need to unwind those claims and find a way to save face.
by runctl | 2026-01-07 13:39:12+00:00
Agents are easy to prototype and annoying to run in production. RunCtl is a multi-tenant runtime that deploys, schedules, retries, kills, and sandboxes agents, with cost-aware scheduling and tenant isolation built in. Not another agent framework, just the layer you use to operate them at scale. I’m building the MVP now and would love feedback from anyone running agents in production.
Show HN: Metabase-Impact – Find which Metabase questions break before you deploy
by yukipeters | 2026-01-07 13:39:32+00:00
I built a CLI tool that scans your Metabase instance to find which SQL questions reference a column or table you're about to drop/rename.

metabase-impact --metabase-url http://localhost:3000 --api-key "mb_xxx" --drop-column orders.user_id

It outputs affected questions with direct links so you can fix or archive them before deploying.

Built this after breaking dashboards one too many times. Uses sqlglot for SQL parsing (handles aliases and complex queries). Only works on native SQL questions, not MBQL/GUI queries.
by sanderjd | 2026-01-07 13:39:52+00:00
This is the question! Your narrative is definitely plausible, and I won't be shocked if it turns out this way. But it still isn't my expectation. It wasn't when people were saying this in 2023 or in 2024, and I haven't been wrong yet. It does seem more likely to me now than it did a couple years ago, but still not the likeliest outcome in the next few years.

But nobody knows for sure!
by globular-toast | 2026-01-07 13:40:12+00:00
This is the kind of thinking that leads to stupid stuff like "a vehicle loses 1/3 its value when you drive it off the forecourt".

It doesn't, obviously, unless maybe one of the seats falls out or something.

Looking up the potential market value of your car regularly is exactly the kind of ridiculous thing regular people don't need to do. Just put it in your assets as "1 car" and don't think about it again. Most people aren't going to be liquidating all their assets and moving half way across the world, and even if you are you don't need to do this.
by niemandhier | 2026-01-07 13:41:00+00:00
From the website:
“The Lazuli Space Observatory is a 3-meter–class space-based astronomical facility designed for rapid-response observations and precision astrophysics across optical and near-infrared wavelengths.”

And we wall should be happy he doesn’t want to put a swarm of micro telescopes into the sky to mimic his approach for the ground based telescopes.

The last thing astronomy needs is even more satellite constellations polluting the night sky.
by ethersteeds | 2026-01-07 13:41:01+00:00
As another top level comment describes, there are very inexpensive hardware store mold testing kits which are essentially just petri dishes you leave open and then mail in for testing.

Also if it is indeed mold, the source is typically some source of moisture. You want to rule out roof leaks and plumbing leaks, and bear in mind that water is incredibly non intuitive and creative in getting from point a to point b.

Another major source of humidity is the human body. Between sweat and respiration, we emit quite a bit of water. This goes into the air and into the bedding and requires ventilation to dissipate. Tightly sealed under-bed areas prevent the mattress from breathing. You might consider stripping the bedding and lifting up the mattress to see how things look.

Consider the rooms' ventilation system. Are the filters new, are the ducts clean? Hiring a professional to check the HVAC system is good routine maintenance.

A final source of moisture leading to mold to consider is condensation. Anywhere warm air meets a much colder surface leads to liquid water and mold. This can mean cracks and poor insulation in exterior walls during winter, or the air conditioning parts during summer. I've seen this combine with the bed-human moisture where under a bed against an exterior wall in a poorly insulated house was staying cold. The bottom of the mattress was moldy.

Mold is insidious. You often need to get into the mindset of a detective, or hire one, to find it. Good luck.
by sjw987 | 2026-01-07 13:42:00+00:00
It's unlikely ads would ever actually fund any meaningful real world product or service like public transport. The most they can fund is some crappy apps, websites and digital platforms, and most of the time they can barely do that.

It's only a matter of time before our ad-driven tech economy pops when they realise how much fraud is committed by the adtech companies, how little return these ads really give, and peoples susceptibility to ads further declines, causing them to exhaust even the most invasive and penetrative advertising techniques.

A nice idea I saw was a service where you can get a free/discounted public transport ticket for doing some squats or other exercise in front of a machine. Something like that would shift a lot of money from handling healthcare for the inactive over to providing free public transport.
by pzo | 2026-01-07 13:42:23+00:00
> Adherents of the popular financial independence, retire early (FIRE) movement scrimp and sacrifice to retire early. Only for many of them to discover their dream of post-work life does not match reality.

I think the more important goal in FIRE is the 'FI' part - financial independence. Something that allows you to retire early - not necessary that you have to use this privilage. Something that allows you to next day take a day off or week off or 1 year sabbatical to recharge without asking anyone for permission or worrying if you will be able to pay the bills.

I think even in 4-hour-workweek Tim Ferriss called it taking mini-retirements throughout your life rather than at the end of you life.
by gen220 | 2026-01-07 13:42:43+00:00
Situations like this work as a filter of sorts (If you’re so obsessed with measuring relative status/prestige that you want to reduce me to a job title, we’re probably not going to be friends?).

The fact that you’re neighbors with these people changes things. Maybe it’s a wedge into a Socratic discussion about how work isn’t and has never been your identity, where you come to some new and better mutual understanding.

But yeah it’s challenging. If people are so accustomed to viewing about themselves and others thru the conventional status/hierarchical lens… sometimes they can’t understand that it’s a lens and not reality.
by n4r9 | 2026-01-07 13:42:45+00:00
Fun article. I liked the bit about how the size of A0 can be uniquely determined from abstract constraints. But I'm not convinced that the "Measuring Stuff" section involves anything more than memorising the exact dimensions of A4. I don't see how it applies the stuff about preserved ratios.

Nitpick: typo in the dimensions for A3.
by NovemberWhiskey | 2026-01-07 13:42:56+00:00
Outside of a very narrow range of safety- or otherwise ultra-critical systems, no-one is designing for actual guarantees of performance attributes like throughput or latency. The compromises involved in guarantees are just too high in terms of over-provisioning, cost to build and so on.

In large, distributed systems the best we're looking for is statistically acceptable. You can always tailor a workload that will break a guarantee in the real world.

So you engineer with techniques that reduce the likelihood that workloads you have characterized as realistic can be handled with headroom, and you worry about graceful degradation under oversubscription (i.e. maintaining "good-put"). In my experience, that usually comes down to good load-balancing, auto-scaling and load-shedding.

Virtually all of the truly bad incidents I've seen in large-scale distributed systems are caused by an inability to recover back to steady-state after some kind of unexpected perturbation.

If I had to characterize problem number one, it's bad subscriber-service request patterns that don't provide back pressure appropriately. e.g. subscribers that don't know how to back-off properly and services that don't provide back-pressure. Classical example is a subscriber that retries requests on a static schedule and gives up on requests that have been in-flight "too long", coupled with services that continue to accept requests when oversubscribed.
by bigfishrunning | 2026-01-07 13:43:43+00:00
Your world seems small -- I never said anything about dumping codebases. If i have a library implemented in Rust, which gets called by a program written in C++ through FFI, and contacts a service which is implemented in python, I don't need to dump or waste any old work. A carpenter that only uses a hammer isn't a very good carpenter; different tools have different strengths and weaknesses.
by heyjamesknight | 2026-01-07 13:44:07+00:00
A mentally healthy person wants to be helpful. They want to be seen as helpful and they expect others around them to be helpful as well. This is the foundation of "pro-social" behavior: I benefit the group as much or more than the group benefits me.

Tying your identity to the place where you're helpful and where that help is appreciated and acknowledged isn't mental illness.
by kshacker | 2026-01-07 13:44:45+00:00
The typical FIRE requires compounding growth. You start with portfolio worth 25 years of expenses but if expenses keep on growing due to inflation and portfolio shrinks because of expenses and zero growth, it can get hairy quite fast.

There are various ways to look at numbers but my thumb rule is 4% inflation 9% growth keeps you perennially happy with some choppy years of course. 4% inflation 9% growth implies you can withdraw 4-5% every year and still have equivalent portfolio in inflated money.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-07 13:44:55+00:00
>It's also a low risk topic

In modern life, yes. I wonder if it was such a low risk topic as we moved towards the past? For example the fear of the stranger is something that is very common in past writing across a number of cultures. If you met a stranger and they said they were a soldier it would have different ramifications than if they said they were a baker. Also in smaller social groups that required the work of everyone to survive it was a way of measuring the resources available in said group.
AI-Stack.dev – A persistent, community index for AI dev tools and MCPs
by aistackdev | 2026-01-07 13:44:58+00:00
Building a new MCP? Testing one in development? Taking it to production?

Useful ones get shared in threads, people bookmark them, and then they become hard to find once the discussion moves on.
To address that, I started keeping a public index of MCPs with real usage notes, where:

-reliable MCPs don’t get lost
-setup quirks and limitations are documented
-contributors are credited by name

AI-Stack.dev is where developers share MCPs at any stage and update the notes as they scale.

For MCP creators:
→ Post your alpha/beta MCP to get early user feedback
→ Update documentation as you fix bugs and add features
→ Let users find working MCPs, not just popular ones

For MCP users:
→ Find production-ready tools with real usage notes
→ See development-stage MCPs you can test and contribute to
→ Watch tools evolve from "works on my machine" to production-tested

If you’ve built or discovered an MCP that’s held up in real use, it can be added there.

https://ai-stack.dev

Not trying to replace discussion here, just trying to preserve the useful stuff once the thread scrolls away.