MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csomar | 2026-01-04 04:31:59+00:00
Like anywhere else, incentives determine everything. What really surprises me is that revenues continue to climb. I wrote about this 5 years ago: https://omarabid.com/the-modern-web (time flies!). I guess we haven't hit the breaking point yet?

My concern is that regulation and state-corporate dynamics will fill the gap. Take online hotel booking, for example. The experience is abysmal, and yesterday highlighted it perfectly: Booking's mobile app was completely down (or failed to fetch data), though their web app worked. I had to pull out my laptop just to access my booking.

But there's no real alternative. Booking Holdings bought up nearly everything in the booking space, and what they didn't acquire, Trip.com did (sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trip.com_Group / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking_Holdings). The hotel I stayed at has its own reservation system at the same price; but spoiler alert: it doesn't work. It couldn't even get me to the payment processing page.

So everything gets worse, but where else can you go?
by keepamovin | 2026-01-04 04:32:18+00:00
Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentralized -> unindexed/niche -> forgotten fringe. What can come between?
by ericmay | 2026-01-04 04:32:34+00:00
They should study political philosophy a bit more so they don’t say foolish things.

America is very clearly a legitimate democracy, even if who was voted in office and the actions of that democratically elected government don’t align with your expectations or world view.

I didn’t vote for the guy. But I did vote. And as a poll worker I can tell you first hand that we ran a free and fair election as we have for any year I can think of. Legitimate Democracy. Period.
by alwillis | 2026-01-04 04:32:50+00:00
This skill demonstrates how to tell an agent to make a non-generic website [1].

These are the money lines:

NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families
(Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes
(particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable
layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks
context-specific character.

Interpret creatively and make unexpected choices that feel genuinely
designed for the context. No design should be the same. Vary between
light and dark themes, different fonts, different aesthetics. NEVER
converge on common choices (Space Grotesk, for example) across
generations.

[1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
by kenosha | 2026-01-04 04:32:55+00:00
I get conflicted feelings about dismissing detailed prose as doing nothing more than wrapping weak ideas in flowery disguise. Certainly, it’s very possible to write pretentiously. And more than that I’d argue it is __easy__. But simple, straightforward sentences are also __easy__.

I think in both cases, easily written simple sentences and easily written pretentious ones, the author fools themselves with a false understanding. Instead, when they’ve really considered the words and the meaning — they’ve extensively thought and worked on what they are thinking — then writing either way can be impactful.

No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.
by cyphar | 2026-01-04 04:32:59+00:00
I was under the impression that the Mickey Mouse Protection Act 1998[1] extended the copyright protection for works retroactively (though already public domain works were excluded).

That being said, I guess the act had precautions to stop it from reducing the copyright protection for edge cases like these?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-04 04:33:16+00:00
> where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?

The same place people have always discovered problems to work on, for the entire history of human civilization. Industry, trades, academia, public service, newspapers, community organizations. The world is filled with unsolved problems, and places to go to work on them.

Einstein was literally a patent clerk.
by chao- | 2026-01-04 04:33:19+00:00
I value and appreciate good documentation, and am continually disappointed at how overlooked it is in so many ecosystems. I am also a caveman who still uses Cinnamon on X11, but I use an old system to install and test other DEs once or twice a year, just to keep a sense of what exists out there.

Over my 17 years running Linux, I think KDE is the major DE I have run the least, but I have to say: KDE has gotten really good. I am genuinely impressed. I am also watching COSMIC closely, but if I ever found a reason to leave Cinnamon, KDE is currently the first DE I would give a shot at being my daily driver.

I really appreciate the effort people like this (and others) put into the foundations that enable something as impressive as a major desktop environment that feels cohesive and works well.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-04 04:35:44+00:00
From the tutorial:

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
int i;
return i;
}
the behaviour is undefined because i’s value is indeterminate.

D solves that problem by initializing variables with the default initializer (in this case 0) if there is not an explicit initializer.

That was in the first version of D because I have spent days tracking down an erratic bug that turned out to be an uninitialized variable.
by ragequittah | 2026-01-04 04:36:38+00:00
Usually studying a test book is reconceptualizing it in whatever way fits the way you learn. For some people that's notes, for some it's flash cards, for some it's reading the textbook twice and they just get it.

To imagine LLMs have no use case here seems dishonest. If I don't understand a particularly hard part of the subject matter and the textbook doesn't expand on it enough you can tell the LLM to break it down further with sources. I know this works because I've been doing it with Google (slowly, very slowly) for decades. Now it's just way more convenient to get to the ideas you want to learn about and expand them as far as you want to go.
by defrost | 2026-01-04 04:37:30+00:00
The left barely altered course in any perceptable manner, at least to disinterested parties outside of the US.

The US right, however, went all in on woke .. they literally couldn't shut up about "the left", "woke" and immigrants eating pets.

Outside of that Fox / Carson / Turner Network et al altered reality bubble it was hard to see evidence of significant increases in Drag Conversion therapy in school libraries and litter boxes in school classrooms.

Good effort though, it was years of sustained make believe and dead cat after dead cat thrown on the table of public discourse.
by dleeftink | 2026-01-04 04:40:08+00:00
Instead of having chat-interfaces target single developers, moving towards multiplayer interfaces may bring back some of what has been lost--looping in experts or third-party knowledge when a problem is too though to tackle via agentic means.

Now all our interactions are neatly kept in personalised ledgers, bounded and isolated from one another. Whether by design or by technical infeasability, the issue remains that knowledge becomes increasingly bounded too instead of collaborative.
Android Tablet as Mac Display
by jefferyabbott | 2026-01-04 04:40:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I wanted to use an Android tablet as a second display on macOS, similar to Apple’s Sidecar — and I wanted it to work at the same time as an iPad running Sidecar so I could have 2 external displays with my MacBook (Sidecar only allows 1 iPad).

I couldn’t find anything that I liked, so I built Caboose.

Caboose lets you use an Android tablet as an additional macOS display via USB or Wi-Fi. It’s optimized for low latency and works well even wirelessly. You can use it alongside Apple Sidecar to drive both an iPad and an Android tablet from the same Mac.

To use Caboose and Sidecar together, Caboose needs to be started first, and the iPad added via Sidecar afterward. This is due to how macOS manages display devices.

I’ve been using this daily while traveling with a MacBook + Android tablet + iPad and it’s been very solid for my workflow.

Website: https://www.jefferyabbott.com/caboose

This is my first time posting to HN — happy to answer questions or talk through technical tradeoffs.
by ar_turnbull | 2026-01-04 04:40:54+00:00
The point about recognizing what’s valuable and making sure you don’t outsource that resonates.

The other day I was on LinkedIn and a Chief Design Officer at a notable company posted her reflections on leadership for the year. There were some potentially interesting insights, but they never got past a surface level. The AI-ness of the writing was as clear as day (and GPTZero tagged it as 100% likely to be AI).

It’s disappointing when you see leaders and so-called stewards of taste farming out that part of their voice.
by Biganon | 2026-01-04 04:41:34+00:00
> What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

That's how I feel with programming, and sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see so many of my colleagues using AI not only for their job, but even for their week-end programming projects. Don't they miss the feeling of..... programming? Am I the weird one here?

And when I ask them about it, they answer something like "oh but programming is the boring part, now I can focus on the problem solving" or something like that, even though that's precisely what they delegate to the AI.

Weird times.
by sharkjacobs | 2026-01-04 04:41:49+00:00
copyright law has been pretty goofy for a pretty long time now

> The Conan Doyle Estate filed a lawsuit against Netflix over [Enola Holmes (2020)], claiming it violated copyright by depicting Sherlock Holmes as having emotions. They argued this aspect of the character did not fall under the public domain as he was only described as having emotions in stories published between 1923 and 1927, and the copyright for the stories published in that period still had not expired under copyright law in the United States.
by hamadj | 2026-01-04 04:42:04+00:00
This article misses a very prominent issue in Canadian housing, and more so, in the condo market - the use (read: abuse) of assignment clauses. Not only were investors buying preconstruction condos to rent out, they were also effectively buying a futures-contract on condos with the ability to sell the condo prior to completion. Often times, realtors themselves would hoard preconstruction condos and assign them to their own clients at a large profit...depending on the structure of the deposits required, seeing 50-100% return on capital was not uncommon and they did not need to qualify for a mortgage. This structure was doomed to fail; you often see now that many investors are unable to close (really, they never intended to close).
by Sam6late | 2026-01-04 04:42:10+00:00
The so-called Arab spring has shown us how manipulation works by using favored slogan words that bypass our logic. Islamists often repeat a hilarious slogan: ‘Islam is the solution’. Don’t worry about questioning ‘solution to what’, or ‘how’. Illiterate or lesser educated people will support that identity factor that may also attract educated folks.
This way language could also be seen as a tool for reduction. Complex realities are messy, but language allows us to "package" them into neat little boxes as with politicians and preachers as great examples. They come up with slogans as solutions: A weak idea can be turned into a catchy three-word slogan. It feels powerful because it’s easy to remember, even if it doesn't actually solve the problem. Language also uses metaphors and "loaded" words to bypass our logic and go straight to our feelings. Once you're emotionally invested, you stop checking if the idea actually makes sense, it sounds like common sense.
Now which one for of language is the most effective: Spoken, Printed, digital?
by hunter-gatherer | 2026-01-04 04:42:18+00:00
Yeah, I remember reading it in highschool and all we talked about eas the love story and parties. I re-read it in my early thirties for some reason and quickly realized the story was about temporal and moral tragedy. Daisy and Gatsby aren't romantics; they are morally shallow and selfish. I felt like the book was more about how we created a world were we train ourselves to chase glamor, but are punished for it in the process.

Funny enough a while back my wife and her friends were talking about having a "Gatsby" themed party. I think that is exactly what woukd have Fitzgerald rolling in the grave. Haha
Show HN: SixLogger, a Simple POSIX-compliant Logger function for shell scripts
by EatFlamingDeath | 2026-01-04 04:43:09+00:00
Hi HN! I built this very simple logger function that is POSIX-compliant, so it's very portable.

I did it because I wanted to learn a little bit more about POSIX-compliant shell scripts and how I could test if my script is POSIX-compliant.
I'm using shellspec with Docker and Vagrant to test this logger function in different OSes, with different shells.

This is one of my first open-source projects, so let me know what you think!
Show HN: Create PDFs in ChatGPT natively. Convert Latex to pdf and download
by apulkit6 | 2026-01-04 04:43:13+00:00
Gemini's inbuilt canvas could compile Latex and create a pdf. ChatGPT can now as well, with the launch of their Apps SDK. We made an app that compiles the Latex code written by ChatGPT and shows the PDF in the chat window. Users can then ask ChatGPT to make further edits, or download the PDF and share it. It's most commonly used by math teachers to make math worksheets

I would love to see what other apps the community has made and submitted to OpenAI for approval!
by why-o-why | 2026-01-04 04:43:48+00:00
Are you confusing the open openSSL library with the CLI? Absolutely none of this is true when used as a signing tool on the CLI. Seems like you just needed to rant, rather than answer my question. Which is fine: I do it to, but I was legit asking a question that you ignored and you seem to know about openSSL?
by flakes | 2026-01-04 04:44:16+00:00
Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more.

I have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board.

With AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September).

I don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) "open-ended questions" being mixed into the normal questions feed.
by immibis | 2026-01-04 04:44:18+00:00
If you're still treating Reddit, especially large subreddits, as a serious source of information rather than an extremely manipulated outlet of 90% propaganda bots, that is quite foolish.

Maybe I should make a website where example.com/e/Europe shows whatever I want people to think Europe thinks, and people will treat it as an authority for some reason? That's basically what you're doing with Reddit.
by thisguydocT | 2026-01-04 04:44:30+00:00
Orland Me, USA
Yes to remote or in office
A Renaissance Man(master of many things):
From Landscaping for the rich and famous, to becoming A top chef, from Infantry scout to music and audio engineering. Song writing to mix craft 10.6
Honestly can use any audio software grew up playing on computers I have no coding experience have no clue about hn’s or what Java script does I know if I read up I can figure any of the terms and technology types they are.
From foster care to 1125 miles on the Appalachia Trail at twelve Army at 17, made mistakes fell got up again, just to train under Brandon Chravtowski personally a James beard winning chef, to becoming his R/A helping and holding a Monday morning reflection class. I’m honestly just an asset to anything I’m involved, innovative ideas and creative in many ways and have traveled and I have Seen a lot so I have a lot of experience and I work very well with people as well as actually take my time to learn and ask a lot of questions I don’t think I will ever truly stop studying.
by tomyedwab | 2026-01-04 04:45:07+00:00
I find this complaint totally asinine. You can hand-craft software if you like, but cheap is what customers want and that's what they're going to get. Do you spend 10x as much for hand crafted solid wood furniture, or do you buy MDF flat pack? Most people are happy buying cheap stuff from China, and if it doesn't last as long they're happy to replace it.
by tclancy | 2026-01-04 04:45:18+00:00
Hang on you’re asking me to consider a philosophy that is explicitly aligned with the concept as a counterpoint?

Admittedly I was raised Catholic and it was pretty much the opposite of that. I’m not holding to any one point I guess. I just feel like I “know” regardless of outcome, the current administration did what they did for all the wrong reasons.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-04 04:46:11+00:00
Elegance is NOT bullshit. Elegance is efficiency. Although you do need to be very literate to see why. To elaborate, lets use LLM's as an example.

In LLM's we have tokens and tokens represent concepts or partial concepts. Some LLM's use relatively few tokens, while others use more. GPT 4 used about 100k tokens, while GPT-4o got much better performance by using 200k tokens. LLM's that use the most tokens are typically the most efficient.

They're more efficient because they can represent more concepts with single tokens when compared to smaller models. The same is true of human language.

People with larger vocabularies (of words, or maths, or images, or whatever) can more efficiently express, and therefore process the relationships between, concepts. In fact more words, means there are literally more thoughts they are capable of having. Language constrains thought, but it also enables it. You can't think of a thing, if you can't conceptualize it and whether your vocabulary is words, maths, or images we all have a vocabulary of concepts.

Most relevantly here: The WAYS in which those tokens/words/thoughts are arranged matters. The difference between a model that's been "fine tuned" to a task, and one that hasn't is the efficiency with which it represents the relationships between the most relevant tokens. Again, human language (and human thought) is the same. Elegant language is language that is arranged to express complicated concepts using the fewest tokens possible. Every poet and every teacher know this instinctively. Good authors often learn it the hard way.

Modern readers often miss subtext and other more subtle forms of communication because they're bad readers. That's a different problem, and not the fault of the authors.
by meibo | 2026-01-04 04:46:13+00:00
Quality open source work does not materialize out of existence for free. If you don't want to drive your project through a corporate sponsor that will want to steer it, this is the only way.

And as you can see in the post, this is not just code, it's also people being hired to do docs, planning, conferences, community, design work, web dev, things that are rarely done well in open source because they are hard and people can get paid for them elsewhere.
by myHNAccount123 | 2026-01-04 04:46:19+00:00
Same opinion. It just feels off. Why use `fun` for function declarations instead of func or function? Dropping () before { makes it hard to tell what runs first. It feels like it's trying to be different for the sake of being different. I'm not able to quickly skim kotlin code like other 'C-like' languages and tell what is going on because it's trying to be too clever.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-04 04:46:44+00:00
SO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an entire generation like this now.
by apparent | 2026-01-04 04:47:33+00:00
Tell yourself that if you want, but it's well-documented that the "Kamala's for they/them, Donald Trump is for you" ad was the top performer in the 2024 election cycle.

Kamala declined to walk back her support for, among other things, taxpayer funding of transgender surgeries for inmates. This was an extreme position that most Americans do not support. It is also at odds with the global trend, including in progressive European countries, with regard to the risks/benefits of transgender surgeries.

The Left loves to play the "Republicans pounce" game, and say that the Right is politicizing things. But this is a situation where the Right was reacting to a move the Left had made. This situation helped the Right win in the 2024 election cycle because they had the 80 percent side of multiple 80/20 issues (especially border security and transgender issues).

You can dislike the outcome (I sure do!), but this was a case of the pendulum swinging back, not the Right getting out over its skis.

ADDITION: It also didn't help that the prior administration had lied its face off about Biden being competent, which undermined trust in Dems in general and Kamala in particular. But when Republicans called this out, they were not exaggerating, they were just 6 months ahead of CNN/MSNBC finally admitting it after the debate.
by immibis | 2026-01-04 04:48:48+00:00
Imagine you start a business in another country where the law says your business assets will be seized if you don't file tax form 123(a) before August. That is to say, non-filers don't have any business property rights. And you don't file the form.

Do you:

(Plan A) Realize you fucked up

Or

(Plan B) Send in the military to kidnap the president and take over the country, retroactively claim the law wasn't the law, undo its effects (but only for you) and then change the law so that property rights work exactly the same way they work in your country.

Now you see why people are saying plan B is bad, and would cause everyone to be at war all the time.