MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lproven | 2026-01-12 11:29:31+00:00
> dual monitor setups that aren't the same.

Absolutely categorically false: I daily-drove such a config on openSUSE for 4 years, 9-5 Mon-Fri.

One portrait, one landscape: fine. 2 portrait flanking one landscape: fine. Laptop + 2 external displays, 1 big in portrait, 1 small in landscape: fine. 2 screens, vertically stacked: fine. 2 side-by-side, one big one small: fine.

Everything works exactly as expected. Panels stay put. Some apps can't remember their positions but they can't on any WM or desktop.

Very dissimilar resolutions gets tricky but that's down to Xinerama not Xfce. It's true on all X11 desktops.

Xfce can do fractional scaling on a per-display basis to get on-screen features the same size, but it results in some displays getting slightly blurry. Tolerable for short-term use but not all day every day, for me.

But Xfce is 100% usable in heterogenous multihead and indeed handles this as well or better than almost any other mainstream X11-based desktop.
by arcbyte | 2026-01-12 11:29:36+00:00
I’m honestly curious what drives this kind of response. You’re aiming a lot of negativity at someone who’s voluntarily spending his own time and money to do something that, until recently, simply didn’t exist at this level of detail. Yes, there are scientific limitations and fair critiques to be made—but the tone here feels less like constructive criticism and more like punishing the effort itself. That pattern is exactly what drains the internet of anything generous or experimental: people stop sharing when every imperfect attempt is met with hostility. It’s a bit like being stranded in the desert, dying of thirst, finally offered water, and rejecting it because it isn’t cold enough. You don’t have to call the work perfect to acknowledge that it’s valuable, imperfect progress rather than something deserving of contempt.
by froddd | 2026-01-12 11:30:04+00:00
This is absolutely true. The demo seems quite deceptive in that respect. Nobody would attempt to resize a window by launching their cursor at the corner with great speed as the demo shows. The resize pointer seems to show in exactly the right place, and allows for an extra hit area slightly outside the rounded corner — I don’t see any problem with that.

As for the fact that one cannot resize from inside the window, it makes absolute sense for every other corner of the window, where the user would instead be clicking an icon or some other button (try the top right corner of the finder, where the search button sits).

So, while I agree on the whole that Tahoe is a huge step backwards in terms of design, this seems like an odd gripe to point out, as it doesn’t in fact seem to be an issue at all.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-12 11:30:43+00:00
Enterprise code writer here.

> If you're writing enterprise code, it has to take into account so many things, explaining it all to the AI takes forever. Things like use the correct settings from IUserContext, add to the audit in the right place, use the existing utility functions from folder X, add json converters for this data structure, always use this different date encoding because someone made a mistake 10 years ago, etc.

The fix for this is... documentation. All of these need to be documented in a place that's accessible to the agent. That's it.

I've just about one-shotted UI features with Claude just by giving it a screenshot of the Figma design (couldn't be bothered with the MCP) and the ticket about the feature.

It used our very custom front-end components correctly, used the correct testing library, wrote playwright tests and everything. Took me maybe 30 minutes from first prompt to PR.

If I (a backend programmer) had to do it, it would've taken me about a day of trying different things to see which one of the 42 different ways of doing it worked.
by Biologist123 | 2026-01-12 11:30:56+00:00
Thank you. This was well-written and made a point I think I needed to see set out in this form.

> We cannot go through our days questioning everything all the time if we want to remain functional, some things we will have to take for granted.

On reading this, it struck me how much of the world we engage with on these terms. And how much of the information soup we live in seems designed to persuade us of things being just so.
by al_borland | 2026-01-12 11:31:38+00:00
I usually end up with XFCE by necessity. I’m usually running Linux on older systems. I completely gave up on KDE many years ago, as it was always so heavy and slow. I want to like Gnome, but some of their decisions are ones I can’t wrap my head around or get used to. Depending on the system, it can also be a bit slow.

XFCE seems to just work.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-12 11:31:43+00:00
> Generally the demand for software engineers has increased as their productivity has increased, looking back over the past few decades. There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.

I see this fallacy all the time but I don't know if there is a name for it.

I mean, we make used fun of MBAs for saying the same thing, but now we should be more receptive to the "Line Always Goes Up" argument?
by daulet_b | 2026-01-12 11:32:55+00:00
Some context from my side.

I’m working on an internal ledger runtime (not a blockchain, not a payment system) and we kept running into cases where a database + application logic wasn’t enough to guarantee accounting invariants across services.

Typical problems were:
– retries breaking balances,
– race conditions across microservices,
– difficulty explaining “where the money went” after incidents.

I’m curious how others here draw that line in practice:
At what point did you decide a database was no longer sufficient?
Was it an incident, scale, regulatory pressure — or did you decide a ledger was overkill after all?
by abielefeld | 2026-01-12 11:33:14+00:00
Hey! Talk speaker here, thank you so much for these words.

This is exactly what we wanted to convey: Let's act, our way isnt the best way, but it is the path we're on, and there is little we can do on our own to get to another path.

We don't want to build the european JLCPCB, we don't even know what our company will be in 20 years if it still exists.

What we want is to give knowledge and see more people get into the business of electronics. We also want to give meaningfull jobs to engineers and factory workers which will eventually join us.

We are not going to change the world, I would settle for selling 1 unit of 1 well made product to 1 customer. I would settle for giving one person a job that they love working with cool guys to make electronics. I would settle for the ability to pay my rent from this, from bringing value in the world.
by falloutx | 2026-01-12 11:33:33+00:00
Claude code has aggressive limits on $18/month plan. You can get much farther with Minimax 2.1 or Qwen3 on the same amount of money. I have noticed opus is much better in some scenarios but Minimax and Q3 are not as bad or behind. Or my setup is now too used to the quirks of those models, who knows. I am using Claude Haiku as small model anyway, just not using Opus because it burns credits very quickly.
by antfarm | 2026-01-12 11:34:19+00:00
I was against AI-assisted coding until I started a pet iOS project and used Calude (Code) Desktop to have someone to discuss my architecture and design decisions with. At first, I only accepted code snippetsd that I copy/pasted myself, but with Claude Code`s use of git worktrees I now more often trust Claude to edit my code.

I review every single line and keep the increments small. I also commit often. Wouldn't want to go back to coding alone.
by snasan | 2026-01-12 11:34:22+00:00
I've been busy organizing hackathons and promoting the demos developed by our team, all to get OpenAgents known by more people. Yet, there’s been little to show for it. Two months ago, I joined OpenAgents—an open-source project dedicated to building an open and collaborative AI Agent network.https://github.com/openagents-org/openagents
by darkwater | 2026-01-12 11:34:26+00:00
I don't fully understand your topology use case. You have different peers that are "road-warriors" and that sometimes happen to be both on the same LAN which is not your home LAN, and need to speak the one to the other? And I guess you are connecting to the other peer via DNS, so your DNS record always points to the Wireguard-provided IP?
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-12 11:34:36+00:00
> I have another project in the works in Go which is proving to be a ton of fun from a software design perspective, but it's not ready for outside eyes just yet.

As a long-time user of the language I'm happy see that Go seems to be excellent for LLM agent development. The language is simple, there's only one way to do loops etc. It hasn't changed that much syntax wise (I think `any` is the only thing that LLMs miss).

Gofmt (or goimports) makes sure all code looks the same, there are VERY robust linters and a built-in testing framework so the LLM only needs to know one. And the code won't even compile if there are unused variables or other cruft.

It might be boring or verbose, but it's also very predictable and simple. All things LLMs like :D
by menaerus | 2026-01-12 11:34:54+00:00
I really do wonder what sort of economy change is coming to us because companies will hypothetically need to hire less people to sustain the equal output of today. They can do that basically today so not even hypothetically anymore, it just needs some time to take off.

The question IMO is, who will be creating the demand on the other side for all of these goods produced if so many people will be left without the jobs? UBI, redistribution of wealth through taxes? I'm not so convinced about that ...
by IshKebab | 2026-01-12 11:35:47+00:00
I don't think it's really that bad in Rust. If you're happy with an arena in Zig you can do exactly the same thing in Rust. There are a ton of options listed here: https://donsz.nl/blog/arenas/

Some of them even prevent use after free (the "ABA mitigation" column).
by dannersy | 2026-01-12 11:36:08+00:00
I had a failing work laptop that had bad battery power and finally just said fine, give me a Mac. The battery and build quality is the only good thing I can say about it. I absolutely hate the OS, despite using MacOS in the past and felt only mildly inconvenienced. It is still amazing to me how unwieldy it is to make keyboard shortcuts, have tiling that isn't embarrassingly bad, and something that is visually consistent. Now I know most people aren't using this tool like I do and Linux has been historically bad at this, but lately, I'm not so sure. KDE and COSMIC seem to handle these cases flawlessly, and even GNOME, which is divisive in the DE discussion seems to get these things right. MacOS/Windows have officially crossed over to being more cumbersome rather than less than your bog standard Linux distro. Have you ever tried to do anything other than adjust volume for your sound settings on Windows 11? It's absurd. You can see the remnants of the Windows 10 attempt at simplifying it with a new flavor of 11 nonsense, and to really do anything meaningful you STILL end up with the old school Control Panel style settings window. A company worth billions couldn't come up with something better for decades. Tahoe is a similar stumble. How does one take these companies serious as a consumer product anymore if you're anything but a casual browser user?
by mattmanser | 2026-01-12 11:36:38+00:00
There was an example on here recently where an AI PR to an open source literally had someone else's name in the comments in the code, and included their license.

That's the level of tell-tale that's its just stealing code and modifying a couple of variable names.

For me personally, the code I've seen might be written in a slightly weird style, or have strange, not applicable to the question, additions.

They're so obviously not "clean room" code or incredibly generic, they're the opposite, they're incredibly specific.
by spuz | 2026-01-12 11:36:48+00:00
This was really fun. I actually went back to the beginning of the archive to find more puzzles to solve. I think it would be nice if you have solved one of the historical puzzles it would give you a button to click onto the next day's puzzle.

I actually never came across the situation where my grid was unsolvable. As I was playing I was wondering what kind of algorithm you used to come up with grids that have no possible dead ends. Since this is clearly an issue, I wonder if it's possible to come up with puzzles that always have a solution similar to how the algorithm for creating Sudoku puzzles always guarantees it can be solved without guessing.
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 11:37:15+00:00
Personally, I'd argue that if the AI killed someone due to being incompetent (as in, a human in a fit state to drive would not have made this mistake), the punishment should go to the corporation that signed off on the AI passing all relevant tests.

The nature of the punishment does not necessarily follow the same rules as for human incompetence, e.g. if the error occurs due to some surprising combination of circumstances that no reasonable tester would have thought to test, which I can't really give an example of because anything I can think of is absolutely something a reasonable tester would have thought to test, but for the sake of talking about it without taking this too seriously consider if a celebrity is crossing a road while a large poster of their own face is right behind them.
by baalimago | 2026-01-12 11:37:51+00:00
When it's done, it'll be one hell of a project!

Suggestion: continue in the current LLM-generated track and ask Claude (or whatever) to create an example + unit tests validating the idiom. Then tell Claude to remove half the example, leaving only a stub + failing unit tests. Add a go.mod at root + instructions on how to run all tests. The go initiate is "certified" once he/she has forked the repository and made the tests pass.
by abielefeld | 2026-01-12 11:37:52+00:00
Hey, I'm one of the two speakers :)

The commenter above you phrased it well: "Price-reasonable", to us, it's first about breaking even.

I will look into the companies you linked, looks interesting!

Though to give you food for though, I will tell you about a french drone manufacturing company, they manufacture in house, they turn over probably around 10 million € a year.

I know first hand they stencil print around 10k boards a year using a "machine" that is 2x4's from the hardware store, and a credit card :)
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-12 11:38:40+00:00
Automate tools, not jobs.

Every single tool or utility you have in the back of your head, you can just make it in a few hours of wall-clock time, minutes of your personal active time.

Like I wanted a tool that can summarise different sources quickly, took me ~3 hours to build it using llm + fragments + OpenAI API.

Now I can just go `q <url>` in my terminal and it'll summarise just about anything.

Then I built a similar tool that can download almost anything `dl <url>` will use yt-dlp, curl and various other tools depending on the domain to download the content.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-12 11:39:01+00:00
I'm assuming she hit him for the sake of argument, but I have no way of knowing either way. I don't think the video makes this unambiguous.

> Are you suggesting hitting a federal agent when not trying to hit them after fleeing a lawful order is not sufficient to show self defense?

No. I'm suggesting two things:

1) Any accusation of her being a "domestic terrorist" is obvious politically-motivated bullshit.

2) The danger the officer was in was clearly not life-threatening. The use of deadly force in this case was not justified. I haven't seen a single video that shows her "gunning it" towards any officer.

> you've racked up 2 felonies even before you hit the officer. Obstructing federal law enforcement and fleeing.

Not relevant. She could have racked up a dozen felonies and it still doesn't justify death. The police are not judges, juries, and executioners. Their job isn't to punish anybody. It's to investigate crimes and bring suspects into the courts for justice. In this case, since they would easily be able to find her later, they should have let her flee and then brought charges at a later date when things weren't as chaotic.

That this woman ended up dead represents, at best, an incredible failure on the part of ICE. At worst, it represents an attempt at instilling fear in everyone in order to suppress dissent.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-12 11:39:02+00:00
I want to like KDE, but it's just too unreliable for me. My last foray was about a year or two ago, I had to stop using it because an update something in KDE's power management broke and my laptop no longer reliably suspended when the battery was low (manually triggered suspends still worked fine.) I've been repeatedly having experiences like this with KDE, each time I fall back on LXQt with kwin and everything looks a bit uglier but just simply works.

I don't know what's going on in KDE, but I assume they've got too many software architects with their heads in the clouds, designing a byzantine mess of abstraction and indirection until even they lose track of where in the code the functionality actually lives. That's all just my assumption though, all I really know is that basic features keep breaking between releases.
by xnorswap | 2026-01-12 11:39:05+00:00
It's missing what's sadly the only important difference:

Git: Used by everyone else
Fossil: Not used by everyone else

Everything else is kind of irrelevant. Git is hard to use and awkward to master, but you need to do so anyone to work with everyone else.

I wish it wasn't the case, but network effects are really important. Mercurial was a better DVCS launched around the same time as git but it lost out, not because "worse is better" but the network effects spreading out from the of the linux kernel itself.
by reeredfdfdf | 2026-01-12 11:39:15+00:00
The thing is, not all edible plants like higher temps. Then there's the issue of changing weather patterns, more extreme weather, drought. Agriculture is easier when weather stays predictable and pattern.

Also, it's entirely possible Europe will get a new ice age as a result of global warming, as it might cause AMOC to collapse. Thus, it appears global warming is causing more harm than good to food production.
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-12 11:39:49+00:00
Lifetime costs...

- How much does a top-end "pro" AI account cost? Who can pay that on a sustained basis through a career? (Someone has to pay --- the cost gets loaded onto fully-loaded employee cost. And when it's the business doing it, you can bet that eventually CFOs are going to ask the hard questions.).

- How much does pro photography gear cost? Does every photographer own all the gear? (No. Renting is standard, and in fact, preferred. Nobody wants to buy thousand-dollar marco lens they will use only a few times to lean macro photography and do the occasional pro shoot. A specialist macro photgrapher will, because they can amortize the cost.)
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-12 11:40:07+00:00
I gotta say, the "sitting around waiting" comment hits - I have the same with current-day merge request based development, a lot of time is fragmented because I'm waiting for the CI to finish. I've got seven open merge requests at the moment, some of which have been open since before the holidays. It's a lot of fragmented waiting, fixing, prodding people to review code, and shitposting on HN to pass the time. It's uh. Not healthy.

But this is my reality in my current line of work, a lot of relatively simple work but a lot of processes and checks to conform to rules (that I set myself lol) and not break existing functionality.
by Luc | 2026-01-12 11:40:20+00:00
Nooo, it's the other way around. Think about it, how would the oil travel to the rest of the tool that's not touching the felt?

Felt is bad, it wicks away oil from the tool's surface and often absorbs moisture from the air. Tools placed on clean felt will often rust where they touch the felt.

Felt is a bad material for toolboxes, you need to mitigate its wicking and hygroscopic properties by applying lots of oil to it. Use rubber mats instead.
by fbouvier | 2026-01-12 11:40:59+00:00
Thanks for the feedback, we will try to make this clearer on the website. Lightpanda works with Playwright, and we have some docs[1] and examples[2] available.

Web APIs and CDP specifications are huge, so this is still a work in progess. Many websites and scripts already work, while others do not, it really depends on the case. For example, on the CDP side, we are currently working on adding an Accessibility tree implentation.

[1] https://lightpanda.io/docs/quickstart/build-your-first-extra...

[2] https://github.com/lightpanda-io/demo/tree/main/playwright
by al_borland | 2026-01-12 11:41:47+00:00
> when the phone is charging at night and connected to a WiFi

Worse yet is auto-update for applications. My phone will be idle, connected to power and WiFi while I’m sleeping for many hours, and it isn’t until I remove it from power in the morning that it starts installing updates automatically, so I can’t use the apps.

They track when the phone is charged at night to try to predict when you’ll remove it from power to optimize charging, but they can’t use this to also intelligently download/install things in the background when it won’t impact the user? It makes no sense, and falls right in line with the lack of logic on the podcast downloads.
by inference-god | 2026-01-12 11:42:07+00:00
> Question is, is this human-caused change or the usual natural climate shift that Earth goes through every few thousand centuries or millennia? And is there anything humans should do about it, other than adapting to it?

From the parent post who he was talking about...it does say "natural climate shift" and mention adaption. I think the point is that some people are way too sure sure that we can just adapt to a rapidly shifting climate even if we don't understand the mechanism behind the warming.

Most natural shifts are explainable by science, so why is the trend of the last 75 years, unexplainable yet people are fine with it and just make assumptions we can adapt if we don't understand what's driving the warming?

I do see this view a lot on podcasts like Joe Rogan (which has one of the largest audiences in the world) and it does seem to maintain the idea that climate change is a natural thing and because of that it will be fine. It's not really a fringe idea even though it's a completely baseless idea IMO.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-12 11:42:22+00:00
It's like any other power tool. It requires skill to use it safely and efficiently.

Anyone can use a band saw to cut things. Then go look what Jimmy DiResta makes with one and you see the difference.

The chance of an inexperienced person cutting off their finger with a bandsaw is also way over zero, there are things you should not and must not do with it. As with any power tool.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-12 11:42:42+00:00
This is where we as software engineers need to be on the ball - just because an LLM wrote it doesn't mean it's right, doesn't mean we can let go of all the checks and balances and best practices we've developed over decades.

Set up tooling like tests and linters and the like. Set rules. Mandate code reviews. I've been using LLMs to write tests and frequently catch it writing tests that don't actually have any valuable assertions. It only takes a minute to fix these.
Show HN: TrackAll – Chrome extension to keep all tracking links in one place
by viikka | 2026-01-12 11:42:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I built TrackAll, a small Chrome extension that lets you manually collect and manage all your package tracking links in one place.

I made it after getting tired of searching emails and carrier apps every time I wanted to check where my package was. I wanted something that:

- Works with any carrier or tracking link

- Doesn’t require accounts and email access

- Stores everything locally and stays out of the way

How it works:

You add each tracking link to TrackAll and you can quickly open and check status of each delivery.

Happy to hear feedback, criticism, or ideas for improvement.

Thanks,
Viktoriia