MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dontlaugh | 2026-01-02 15:17:39+00:00
All major consoles support keyboard & mouse or similar.

The problem is more the audience. Console players generally expect to be able to just connect the console to the TV, sit on the sofa and play with the official controller. That’s all the game are required to support to be published on the platform.

Even if you were willing to play at a desk, you’d be matchmaking into a special (and small) mouse pool on the console game. Anyone willing to go through so much faff will accept the extra annoyances of a PC, even with kernel anti cheat.
by kentonv | 2026-01-02 15:17:40+00:00
From what I read, SteamOS isn't really intended to run on any device other than official Steam devices. In particular I read that it doesn't support nvidia GPUs at all, since all official Steam devices are AMD.

Also, I have a pretty unusual setup: my machines netboot from an shared iSCSI volume, setting up a local copy-on-write overlay on each machine.

SteamOS is based on Arch, so I'm sure it would be possible to make it do anything Arch can do. But I don't know Arch -- I know Debian. So I was a lot more comfortable installing Debian and tweaking it the way I needed, then installing Steam on top.
by lostmsu | 2026-01-02 15:17:44+00:00
This brought up memory of Hungarian notation. I think now I will try to use it in my PyTorch code to solve the common problem I have with NN code: keeping track of tensor shapes and their meanings.

B, T, E = x.size() # batch size, sequence length, embedding dimensionality

q, k, v = self.qkv(x).split(self.embedding, dim=-1)
q, k, v = map(lambda y: y.view(B, T, self.heads, E // self.heads).transpose(1, 2))

attention = (q @ k.transpose(-2, -1)) * (1.0 / math.sqrt(k.size(-1)))
...

vs

B, T, E = bteX.size()

iHeadSize = E // self.heads
bteQ, bteK, bteV = self.qkv_E_3E(bteX).split(E, dim=-1)
bhtiQ, bhtiK, bhtiV = map(lambda y: y.view(B, T, self.heads, iHeadSize).transpose(1, 2))

bhttAttention = (bhtiQ @ bthiK.transpose(-2, -1)) * (1.0 / iHeadSize)

Looks uglier but might be easier to reason about.
by kalenvale | 2026-01-02 15:18:07+00:00
The paper was aimed at a broader audience, which is why it simplifies some concepts and makes certain assumptions. While there are potential drawbacks to consider, it’s reasonable to assume that a seller of a fraudulent item gains nothing if the item gets rejected. In that scenario, their goal of making money wouldn’t be achieved, and any additional losses wouldn’t significantly impact the protocol. In fact it would deter fraudsters. I'd love to hear more thoughts on this!
by f4stjack | 2026-01-02 15:18:17+00:00
This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel Bazzite (and immutable distros in general) is the future for the normal users. Yes I know, they take the freedom of messing with the system core but for most people this is fine. All they need is a device that works without any problems.

First time I switched to asus kernel from the generic one was magic - I know asus-linux exists and following the instructions probably would have ended up in a working system, but with bazzite I wrote only one command and everything worked. It still feels weird not to monkey around with package installations (and this was a dangerous path, usually ended up with more work for me) but this is a tradeoff I can live with. The software I used - luckily - already moved to Flatpak so everything was a breeze. Also the fact that I can switch to a working state with one keypress is a stress reliever.

I agree. Linux is good now - for the common user. I still can't see immutable distros can be used for all scenarios but for gaming/home use, this is a methodology I can easily recommend for my friends and family who only want a computer that works without messing with console.
by vorpalhex | 2026-01-02 15:19:27+00:00
The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends.

So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app.

I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any predators.

This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.
by danmelnick | 2026-01-02 15:19:41+00:00
This is part of the problem for sure, but it's also how the revenue is split between back catalog vs new music.

In the physical media era, when you bought a record/CD you owned it forever and your marginal cost of listening to a song approached zero over time. Most dollars went to new music.

Now, it's close to a 75/25 split of dollars going to back catalog vs new music on streaming services.

If you're a new musician, you're not competing against new music, you're competing against the entire history of recorded music. You're fighting for a piece of a pie that the Beatles are still taking a chunk of.

And the labels are a part of the problem there, they made the deals with the streaming services that allows back catalog to dominate.
by raegis | 2026-01-02 15:20:06+00:00
They were talking about instability. I had an old Radeon workstation card in my desktop at home for at least a decade, but with the most recent AMD drivers, Firefox (with hardware acceleration turned on) would crash Gnome and the system when watching videos on YouTube. So I wasted money on one of those new Intel graphics cards to get the stability back (in addition to the time wasted diagnosing the problem).
by happytoexplain | 2026-01-02 15:20:41+00:00
I'm always amazed when I see how many people are unfamiliar with VLC hate. It was notorious (to the point of it being a popular meme topic) for video artifacts, slow/buggy seeking, bloated/clumsy UI/menus, having very little format support out of the box, and buggy subtitles. I assume nowadays it's much better, since it seems popular, but its reputation will stick with me forever.
by lalitmaganti | 2026-01-02 15:20:47+00:00
I'm talking about apps similar to Mint and YNAB. Specifically I used to use an app called Yolt (which was shut down) and then was on an app called Emma for a bit.

I'm sure GnuCash would also work just fine but ultimately it's also a full double entry system. I never tried it because I came across ledger/hledger/beancount first and, being command line tools, they appealed more to my sensibilities.
by user34283 | 2026-01-02 15:21:13+00:00
After checking the responsiveness of the start menu earlier, I uninstalled or unpinned the useless stuff in Pinned.

I don't think it made a difference, it was already lag free before.

It's annoying they put Office Copilot and Instagram there, but it uninstalled with just two clicks per item, taking a minute or so to get rid of everything.
by robin_reala | 2026-01-02 15:21:45+00:00
I’m not based in the US and have no intention of travelling there, so I don’t count myself in much danger for US copyright law.

Regardless, my understanding of copyright is that people broadly get annoyed when you infringe by distribution. In this case the distribution didn’t happen until the copyright had expired. People preparing these projects for later launch do it purely on their own machines, and nothing arrives at Standard Ebooks until the day of release.
by lopezb | 2026-01-02 15:22:17+00:00
Hey HN, happy new year.

I built PDS, a standalone server for probabilistic data structures in Go. In-memory, uses Redis's RESP protocol, supports HyperLogLog, Bloom Filters, Count-Min Sketch, and Top-K.

If you're curious, I wrote a post about how I built it and how I used LLMs during development: http://lopezb.com/articles/pds-a-go-server-and-an-honest-loo...
by djoldman | 2026-01-02 15:22:32+00:00
Intuitively, it seems like the Correct™ feature to handle the concepts of "issues" and "discussions" would be to have only one place to go to comment on a project.

There doesn't seem to be enough of a separation between the concepts of "issues" and "discussions" to support separating them into two features.

Given that discussions seem more general, it seems like the right path forward would be to have only discussions. Sub-features of issues could be added to discussions.
Show HN: Agents UI – open-source macOS terminal for AI coding agents, zellij/SSH
by padho | 2026-01-02 15:23:18+00:00
Open-source native macOS terminal for running multiple AI coding agent CLIs side-by-side (plus normal shells). Persistent zellij sessions, agent detection/status, SSH host picker, projects/prompts/assets, Cmd+K command palette, and session recording/replay everything runs locally.
by lucumo | 2026-01-02 15:23:24+00:00
Family Link is kind of funny like that as well. As a parent you can limit which apps your child can use, and even how long they can use them. My child is above the age we can monitor their every move, but they're below the age where we can trust they won't spend all day playing games when they need to study. So that feature is nice.

Except you have to allow the Google app. And you have to allow it unrestricted time. That's not all that bad yet, though not great. The annoying thing is that Google loves their little easter eggs. So the child is procrastinating by playing Pacman, Snake, that stupid Dino run game, and what not. Courtesy of the makers of the parental controls.
by huhkerrf | 2026-01-02 15:23:41+00:00
Another unexpected side effect is that it made me "excited" to spend money when I had saved up for it. Before it would be a back and forth, "should I buy this? I've wanted it, but I could use the money for something else..."

With YNAB, it's been "hell yeah, I saved up for this and now I get to buy it."
by Scubabear68 | 2026-01-02 15:23:42+00:00
I think categorizing around 90% (from the cited link) as “nearly every” is accurate.

The sixties were over 50 years ago, I know as I am a child of the sixties :-)

Given how necessary driving is to living in nearly all of America, and that a with certificate is the primary point of ID to get one, there is a very strong motivation to get a birth certificate.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-02 15:24:05+00:00
How do you know it is technically correct without explanation. It's not much different from someone getting blown off for being annoying because they constantly question simple answers when seeking better understanding. I was fortunate to work with a group of engineers when I was very young that accepted my constant use of "why?" not as disrespectful questioning but realized I was actually learning so they naturally just provided more details leading to less "why?" being asked. This eventually got to the point where I would ask a question, and the answer would be to read a specific book on the shelf. This was way before the internet. I received a better education on the job than I ever was going to get in school.

So no, I'm not just going to take an opinion without more information. I don't change my mind just on say so.
by kstenerud | 2026-01-02 15:24:14+00:00
This is great! The more human-readable, the better!

I've also been working in the other direction, making JSON more machine-readable:

https://github.com/kstenerud/bonjson/

It has EXACTLY the same capabilities and limitations as JSON, so it works as a drop-in replacement that's 35x faster for a machine to read and write.

No extra types. No extra features. Anything JSON can do, it can do. Anything JSON can't do, it can't do.
by linuxftw | 2026-01-02 15:24:36+00:00
What? I have been using Linux daily for almost 20 years. I have typically only installed the OS fresh once each time. I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for well over a decade. I can't remember having to re-install a distro unless I was switching distros. My current system was installed in 2019, Fedora 30. Over a dozen painless upgrades, the last several of which have had Steam flatpak installed with no breakages.

Fully open source drivers using AMD video cards. It just works (minus the early x11/wayland debacle, I had to switch back to x11 for a while).
by sovietmudkipz | 2026-01-02 15:24:40+00:00
I always thought the companies I worked for would implement chaos testing shortly after this talk/blog released. However; only last year did we do anything even approaching chaos testing. I think this goes to show that the adage “the future is already here just unevenly distributed” carries some truth in some contexts!

I think the companies I worked for were prioritizing working on no issue deployments (built from a series of documented and undocumented manual processes!) rather than making services resilient through chaos testing. As a younger dev this priority struck me as heresy (come on guys, follow the herd!); as a more mature dev I understand time & effort are scarce resources and the daily toil tax needs to be paid to make forward progress… it’s tough living in a non-ideal world!
by fenwick67 | 2026-01-02 15:24:58+00:00
Allow me to give my anecdotal experience.

When my child was three, he really liked to watch 'spidey and his amazing friends'. But unfortunately, when he watched it he would emulate some of the bad behaviors from the show, pretend to be one of the bad guys and act out. Easy solution right, we just won't watch the show anymore, we don't leave him alone to watch TV by himself anyways.

Well, on Disney plus, you can't simply hide the show. Even if you remove it from your "recently watched" or whatever, it will show up in preview cards and search results and I'm categories. It became a big friction point, whatever he would see it he would want to watch it. And when Grandma would come over and babysit him, he would ask for it and she'd put it on for him despite our wishes.

So, since then, I've spun up a jellyfin server and ditched Disney plus. If we don't like a show we just remove it, and then it's simply not an option.
by zzzeek | 2026-01-02 15:25:12+00:00
Yes this is the identical pattern we strive for at SQLAlchemy.

However github has no option to close issues to contributors only.

These folks do what we do, they have an issue template called "do not use this". big whoop. People blow through those all day so we're clicking on "convert to discussion" all day.

Github please add this feature!
by AstroNutt | 2026-01-02 15:26:32+00:00
I hope this doesn't become a trend across the NWS. In Texas. When major weather events are developing, I regularly check forecast discussions as they are updated.

It's far more valuable than looking at the plain Jane forecast with pretty pictures. In the discussions, they'll break down my region from north to south or east to west which is valuable. The west Texas dry line plays a huge roll in our west Texas severe weather and they discuss which area of is more likely to be impacted. It's not just a broad forecast.
by fn-mote | 2026-01-02 15:26:57+00:00
Dear All,

As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing.

There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old.

Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online.

Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.

Having been involved with a reasonable number of problems, I’d say in the teen years negotiating and enforcing some kind of no-device sleep schedule is the most critical.

If I had an answer to the rest of the addictive behavior, I wouldn’t be here making this post.
by tolerance | 2026-01-02 15:27:19+00:00
This was a tough read. On one end I want to hold this parent accountable...and he should be held accountable for any negligence on his part. As noted, Gabb does indicate that GroupMe facilitates communication with strangers. Because, well, it’s a messaging app like any other.

I don’t want to digress too far, but you know what I had when I was young and wanted to talk about books? Libraries. That’s beside the point but somewhere is a point to be made and I don’t want to pry into this man’s personal life beyond what he’s already shared about this ugly experience. But I imagine that few things can deter a predator like a swarm of librarians.

“I could almost hear the crack. Could almost see that OLED display splintering into a thousand pieces. The little Joy-Cons skittering across the floor. My son's face. My wife's face. The stunned silence.”

He should've broken the Switch. Anyone who’s ever destroyed electronics knows how cathartic it is. Men are only afforded so many opportunities to display healthy acts of aggression in front of their wives and children. Of course never towards them.

“What I did was announce, in a voice louder than necessary, that nobody was to ask me about anything Minecraft-related on the Nintendo Switch for a minimum of two weeks.”

I suppose that’ll do.

“Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know.

What I know is this. My son just wants to play video games and talk to his friends. I just want to keep him safe. Somewhere between those two things, I'm supposed to become an expert in the convoluted parental control schemes of Gabb, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox, while a stranger's Christmas morning texts sit in my son's phone history.”

Again. It’s easy for me to blame this dude because I live in a world where this sort of scenario is wholly unlikely and to a great degree his experience explains why that is the case for me. But this story was too well put together. I never thought that a curl one liner and a bash script could emote a form of anger that I empathize with so readily.

I hope this inspires him to question the extent to which he’s relegated parental controls in other areas, if it’s at all the case elsewhere. Either destroy them or set firmer boundaries and raise your expectations for yourself and whatever third parties he sees fit to be held responsible for his household and their affairs. It may take another 12 years or so...but your sons should thank you if you’re successful.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-01-02 15:27:28+00:00
When I was starting out (in the US), I didn’t have a CS degree, but I did have one very cheap client connection who was interested in a large project; and almost a decade of hobbyist experience.

It was $22 an hour. No benefits, not even healthcare. Solo, no other developers. Before AI. My theory - $22 an hour is better than school debt, and if it works, then I’ve got money + experience at a level I can’t get anywhere else, which will overcome the lack of a paper degree.

I stuck at that job for almost half a decade, under those conditions, building experience. It paid off - I joined a startup, doubled my salary, got a benefits package, and know some technologies we’re using better than anyone else on the team. The point though is that it took embracing conditions that most people consider themselves too good for, or almost unthinkably difficult.

My recommendation: I think you should entertain the idea that if there is a God who cares about us, praying earnestly is a good idea. He gave me that new job on my first application anywhere, a complete cold call, in a personal moment of weakness, in the Summer of 2025. With nothing but a solo project on the resume at a company nobody knows.
by gruez | 2026-01-02 15:27:30+00:00
>It was notorious (to the point of it being a popular meme topic) for [...] having very little format support out of the box

???

I thought the meme was that it played basically everything? At least compared to windows media player or whatever.

The other items I can't say I've noticed, but then again I only play the most common of files (eg. h.264/h.265 with english subtitles in a mkv) so maybe it's something that only happens with unusual formats/encodes.

edit: based on other comments (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465349), it looks like it might indeed be caused by uncommon files that I haven't encountered.
by mmooss | 2026-01-02 15:27:35+00:00
What column width - don't tell me these plain text gurus use one long line per paragraph? Are Unicode emojis valid? What about a TUI using Unicode box drawing? Or ASCII characters? 7-bit ASCII only for the entire blog? Is there a way to handle input (a telnet connection?)?

We've hardly scratched the surface here.

(Now I want to make a TUI site.)
by alexpotato | 2026-01-02 15:28:10+00:00
> I think people often underestimate how, for dad's in particular, there's a massive need for this.

One of the things that really drove it home for me was going on r/daddit and seeing post after post of dads with young kids talking about how lonely they are.

In the scenario of the "working dad, stay at home mom" + elementary age kids, it's REALLY tough b/c moms can socialize during school hours whereas the dad is only available from 5-6pm onwards which coincides with dinner/bed time.

Some tips for the above:

- Have regularly scheduled "hang out with friends night". Lot easier to manage than "hey, can I hang out with my buddy tonight?"

- Do "swaps" e.g. where after kids are in bed, dad A hangs out with dad B at house B, wife B hangs out with wife A at house A (so you don't need to get a babysitter)