MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saint-evan | 2026-01-18 08:33:45+00:00
This is absurd! The author raised money without a concrete execution plan, treating capital as permission to “think,” and then panicked when thinking alone didn’t magically turn into value. The post implies there was no wedge, no market insight, not even a search strategy... just the weird hypothesis that people say 'I fit the founder profile, therefore I should found something'
It frames the absence of structure as a psychological tragedy, but irl this was a self-inflicted governance failure. The author clearly had no personal theory of value creation before taking investor money, and the money simply magnified that undefinedness. Paying yourself to think is ridiculous unless you’re running a consultancy otherwise it’s just accountability theater... Cinema being what this post is!
by gethly | 2026-01-18 08:34:06+00:00
Dark mode is stupid fad that should have never been. Proper way to protect your eyes during later hours is to use entire color spectrum adjustment with appropriate applications, like f.lux, or built-in tools right in the operating system. Consuming white/bright text on black/dark background instead of the other way round is beyond any sane talk on ergonomy.
by sirwhinesalot | 2026-01-18 08:34:24+00:00
Better can be argued. More performant though? Yes, massively so.

Turns out spending some time understanding what your CPU and GPU are actually doing when running your app, and how to make them do less work, leads to pretty speedy software.

Then it also turns out that this does not seem to impede most of the features of the software it is competing with, meaning that software is by definition wasteful.

It can't even be argued that the other software made better use of human resources since it's a large team vs one guy who is often not even getting paid, and the guy is the one with the fast software.
by TwoNineFive | 2026-01-18 08:34:55+00:00
> IPSec is terrible, huge, and messy standard that company that made it took 20 years to stop getting CVE every year

This is fact, not FUD.

Microsoft has had multiple RCE vulns in their ipsec stack in the last two years.

The big vendors like Cisco had ipsec vulns for decades.

These days the issues are pretty well known and documented, but it really is a bad standard.
by bandrami | 2026-01-18 08:35:55+00:00
It's a cliché that the first 90% of a software project takes 90% of the time and the last 10% also takes 90% of the time, but it's cliché because it's true. So we've managed to invent a giant plausibility engine that automates the 90% of the process people enjoy leaving just the 90% that people universally hate.
by flomo | 2026-01-18 08:36:20+00:00
There are some really retrograde government and bigcorps, running ten year old infrastructure. And if that is your customer-base? You do it. Plus I worked on a consumer launch site for something you might remember, and we got the late requirement for IE7 support, because that's what the executives in Japan had. No customers cared, but yeah it worked in IE7.
by ezst | 2026-01-18 08:37:52+00:00
My ThinkPad (T480s) is turning 8 this year, and only got its first battery replacement last month. I've been carrying it with me everywhere, on every single trip (office or holidays alike), on all continents. In that same timespan, I used up 3 backpacks and 2 suitcases along the same routes. All I want for its replacement is not to cost an insane amount of money because of the made-up by AI components shortage, and maybe now that I'm older I would prefer a smaller form factor like the X1.
by rene-veerman | 2026-01-18 08:38:36+00:00
All you need is a linux box :) I use kubuntu.com 24.04.3LTS with updates.
it runs locally, and expected run time for 4 AI models and 2 questions (description, keywords) is about 9.5 days for 22K 1080p+ photos. But that's on a box that cost me 4 grand back in 2023. Yeah, just the box. Already had the monitors. I got 64GB RAM and 2TB nvme storage, on this board : https://www.amazon.nl/ASUS-CROSSHAIR-X670E-moederbord-geheug...

You can get started with https://github.com/rene-ajm-veerman/nicerApp-WebOS-5.10.z/bl...

and https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_366bdd45-7dbf-47fa-8e0a-fd...
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-18 08:39:11+00:00
> you have a level of pessimism that would prevent anyone from trying anything innovative

Dead wrong. I’m a risk taker. I wanted to see Doctorow’s argument because I respect him and would love if the numbers allowed for constraining Washington.

Dismissing a stupid proposal for being wrong isn’t rejecting solutions in general. In this case, it’s pointing out that Europe escalating a trade war for copyright reform doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re rallying folks to that cause.
by krethh | 2026-01-18 08:39:23+00:00
Respectfully, you seem to love the sound of your writing so much you forget what you are arguing about. The topic (at least for the rest of the people in this thread) seems to be whether AI assistance can truly eliminate programmers.

There is one painfully obvious, undeniable historical trend: making programmer work easier increases the number of programmers. I would argue a modern developer is 1000x more effective than one working in the times of punch cards - yet we have roughly 1000x more software developers than back then.

I'm not an AI skeptic by any means, and use it everyday at my job where I am gainfully employed to develop production software used by paying customers. The overwhelming consensus among those similar to me (I've put down all of these qualifiers very intentionally) is that the currently existing modalities of AI tools are a massive productivity boost mostly for the "typing" part of software (yes, I use the latest SOTA tools, Claude Opus 4.5 thinking, blah, blah, so do most of my colleagues). But the "typing" part hasn't been the hard part for a while already.

You could argue that there is a "step change" coming in the capabilities of AI models, which will entirely replace developers (so software can be "willed into existence", as elegantly put by OP), but we are no closer to that point now than we were in December 2022. All the success of AI tools in actual, real-world software has been in tools specifically design to assist existing, working, competent developers (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code), and the tools which have positioned themselves to replace them have failed (Devin).
by seviu | 2026-01-18 08:39:37+00:00
The fact that since Tahoe everything is a squircle kills me. I can’t visually find my apps anymore.

It takes me several seconds to find an existing opened app when I hit cmd tab, it has been months already, I use my Mac for work, I know this stuff.

It’s not just the new design but also something else, like if part of my Mac lost its soul.
by metalman | 2026-01-18 08:40:02+00:00
why? there is no why to something that is not possible
there is zero evidence that ai has achived, slow crawling bug level abilities to navigate ,even a simplified version of reality, as there would already be a massive shift in a wide variety of low level human unskilled labour and tasks.
though if things keep going like they are we will see a new body dismorphia ,where people will be wanting more fingers.
by alentred | 2026-01-18 08:40:36+00:00
The two words that struck me are this chemical compound [1] (quite artificial as a name if you ask me, but apparently considered as a word), and this perfectly real hill name [2]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Protologisms/Long_wo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taumatawhakatangi%C2%ADhangako...
by iamcalledrob | 2026-01-18 08:43:09+00:00
Designer here: there's a trade-off between visual harmony (all icons look the same) and ease of differentiation.

A standardized container adds regularity to irregular shapes.

Recently, Apple has been heavily opting for visual harmony, so their icons look consistent when seen as a set. Google too. It's an industry trend that is fairly annoying.

Similar "let's remove the differentiation" decision made for menu icons in macOS: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
by Culonavirus | 2026-01-18 08:43:19+00:00
> The results are always mediocre.

I think this is a major point people do not mention enough during these debates on "AI vs Developers": The business/stakeholder side is completely fine with average and mediocre solutions as long as those solutions are delivered quickly and priced competitively. They will gladly use a vibecoded solution if the solution kinda sorta mostly works. They don't care about security, performance or completeness... such things are to be handled when/if they reach the user/customer in significant numbers. So while we (the devs) are thinking back to all the instances we used gpt/grok/claude/.. and not seeing how the business could possibly arrive to our solutions just with AI and wihout us in the loop... the business doesn't know any of the details nor does it care. When it comes to anything IT related, your typical business doesn't know what it doesn't know, which makes it easy to fire employees/contractors for redundancy first (because we have AI now) and ask questions later (uhh... because we have AI now).
by godelski | 2026-01-18 08:43:55+00:00
> perhaps it's not about escaping all the details, just the irrelevant ones

But that's the hard part. You have to explore the details to determine if they need to be included or not.

You can't just know right off the back. Doing so contradicts the premise. You cannot determine if a detail isn't important unless you get detailed. If you only care about a few grains of sand in a bucket you still have to search through a bucket of sand for those few grains
by kikkupico | 2026-01-18 08:44:21+00:00
Here you go - https://www.kikkupico.com/posts/vibe-discovery/#the-meta

The blog post was written by Claude Code, reviewed by Gemini Pro, ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Kimi K2 Thinking, Deepseek Deep Thinking and me. Naturally, all the LLMs failed to judge that AI-generated writing is a turn-off for most readers. I failed to judge that too.
by manarth | 2026-01-18 08:45:11+00:00
In 18th century England, priests played a semi-political role, perhaps equivalent to a contemporary head of a local council. In addition to religious duties, they effectively administered their parish.

The monarch was (and titularly remains) the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and senior church positions were appointed by parliament.

The tithe was more a local tax rather than a religious offering.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-18 08:45:15+00:00
Neither?

If your monitor is so bright that a white rectangle hurts your eyes, you need to turn it down.

On my current monitor I go from 100% brightness during the day to around 20% at night. I change it roughly twice a day.

I don't understand how, even with dark mode, someone could run a modern panel full tilt at 100% through the evening. My brain can sense the intense heat of that backlight behind every pixel. I don't even want the possibility of a momentary dark mode glitch to be a concern. It took me a long time to appreciate the harm of not controlling this stuff.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-18 08:45:17+00:00
Any day, I (as a manager) would prefer to have an experienced Developer do a Production Support role, rather than a cheaply obtained non-engineering campus graduate hired as "Tech Ops" resource to do Production Support on complex, mission-critical systems.

It is a bad idea for a company to give shoddy after-sales support to customers, because they would then lose the customer's trust and relationship in the long run. No customer wants to see their production systems have frequent incidents caused hours or days of outages.

Vendor companies ignoring investment and support for Production Support on their Products/Services, do so at their own peril.

In fact, canny companies have realised the real money is not in upfront cost, but in volume billing (billing/invoicing, based on monthly transactions counts, number of users/licenses and tiered rate card), so they need to have adequate Production Support teams

This is why companies are trying their level best to move existing customers to subscription services (e.g., Office 365 by Micro$oft).
by avidiax | 2026-01-18 08:46:26+00:00
Heuristics often work well enough that an AI/ML approach isn't needed. If it is needed, you still need the heuristics. If you were writing a chess engine, you wouldn't just pass the board state and history to a model. You'd still work with chess experts to come up with scores and heuristics for the material and strategic state of the board. You'd come up with detectors for certain conditions or patterns that experts have noted. Along with the board state, that's the input. And you'd still have a long way to go.

----

For storage, people often overcomplicate things. Maybe you do need RAID 5 in a NAS, etc. Maybe what you need is a simple server with a single disk and an offsite backup that rsyncs every night. That RAID 5 doesn't stop 'rm -rf' from destroying everything.

For databases, people often shove a database into an app or product much too early. The rule of thumb that I use is that you should switch to a database (from flat files) when you would have to implement foreign keys, or when data won't fit in memory anymore and memory-mapped files aren't sufficient. Using a database before that just complicates your data model, introducing ORM too early seriously complicates your code.

For algorithms, there are an awful lot of O(nLogn) solutions deployed for problems with small n. An O(n) solution is often faster to write, and still solves the problem. O(n) is often actually faster when things fit in L1 or L2 cache.

For software architecture, we often forget that the client has CPU and storage (and network) that we can use. Even if you don't trust the client, you can sign a cache entry to be saved on the client, and let the client forward it later. Greatly reduces the need for consistency on the backend. If you don't trust the client to compute, you can have the server compute a spot check at lower resolution, a subset, etc.
by rene-veerman | 2026-01-18 08:46:50+00:00
yeah, virtual box should work, but here's a tip : make sure all of your scripts (i recommend asking grok.com for scripts, and asking him again to fine tune it) are (A) resumable and (B) save their overall results often (to a real disk).

Image-to-text takes "forever".
In this case, I already let grok make the script that starts this thread, resumable and often-saving.
by mdhb | 2026-01-18 08:47:15+00:00
I don’t know how to make this any clearer.

Nobody invited you to this conversation.

By your own admission you don’t want to be here.

Nobody else wants you here either.

So just leave and take your weird fucking content policing nonsense with you and let adults have a conversation in peace. Don’t you have some kids skateboarding on the sidewalk to yell at instead?
by robotpepi | 2026-01-18 08:47:19+00:00
It is true that people are not forced to buy things. But even if one is not _forced_ into something, one can be _manipulated_ into something. This is what happens with ads: they're most of the time misleading (and in many cases they lie, tobacco industry being the classic example), they encourage addictive or compulsive behaviors, they try to manipulate you emotionally (which is easier if they know a lot about you), etc. Ads have too much power nowadays so that they even shape reality, they're not purely descriptive as you say, that's way too naive.

And ML models are not only based on what you've already bought. On instragram, for instance, I have ads for bird toys/vets/etc because I follow bird owners.
by janpmz | 2026-01-18 08:49:40+00:00
> You'll find thousands of shows with perfect audio quality and professional-grade cover art that contain absolutely zero intellectual nutritional value

This is why I switched to audio books. Many podcasts with real guests contained too much salad and not enough meat (e.g. a machine learning podcast but they talked about going to conferences).

Contrary to what many think, I believe AI generated content can increase the nutritional value. I've done experiments with turning technical PDFs into podcasts, e.g. summarizing machine learning papers (similar to NotebookLM).
by Karliss | 2026-01-18 08:50:22+00:00
I disagree with Apple caring about legibility. You can have legibility in simplicity but apple isn't doing that.

Legibility requires contrast, the whole liquid glass transparent background thing kills contrast and thus legibility. Having random noise from the background windows kills legibility.

As for icons specifically - having white semitransparent (vertical gradient) shape on top of brighter color background makes it harder to perceive the shape which is currently only remaining distinguishing feature. Half of them are gray on gray. If you can't recognize the shape while squinting your eyes then it's not a good legible shape for icon.
The Messages/FaceTime is other comments mentioned is one of the best/worst examples of this. In theory shape of camera and speech bubble are unique, but in practice the real difference is very small. They are both similar size elongated blobs. Messages have tiny little triangle in bottom left corner, camera has two notches. Overall and in combination with color choice this makes it harder to recognize the shape. Phone also uses the same color but at least the general shape is significantly different.

It's not all completely bad. The rainbow button strip and darker background for Audio Midi setup in my opinion made it more distinct. The contact icon also improved contrast, but only because old one had very bad contrast.

There are plenty of others where contrast was made worse. For example Time machine, Font book, Clock, Finder.
by gethly | 2026-01-18 08:50:43+00:00
Podcasting started mostly due to curiosity. People used to discuss topics that were interesting enough to warrant investment into the needed hardware and labouring the entire setup and production. If the topics weren't as interesting, the people were. That is how Joe Rogan begun and built his brand, after all. There was quite a lot of "whoah" factor back in the early days.

I do not think this has gone away. Yes, market saturation waters everything down to the common denominator. Podcasting is no different than any other commercial or public market. But there will be always outliers. The only difference is that back in the old days(early 2000s and 2010s), your choices were limited, which made it easier to pick. Today, you have to invest time and effort and hunt down those good podcasts that match your interests by sifting through a ton of the noise(badam, tssss).

I was big into podcasts, even started my own. Until I realised that without interesting guests to bring in week after week, there is no point in it.

But I think that the main issue is, and has been for a very ling time, that there is really not a single good user interface for consuming podcasts, especially offline, managing podcasts or discovering new ones, keeping tabs on what is going on with individual shows or even getting recommendations on and being able to purchase your own podcasting kit, so that you don't have to research and learn about audio, video and other related things that might detract someone from thinking about starting their own podcast. And also all of this in packaging suitable for different consumption situations - walking, driving a car, riding a bus, being at work or at home. Yes, there were many various apps and websites, but they all suck and lack in any useful feature. They essentially just aggregate podcasts and offer RSS feeds. That's kindergarten bs.

There's your $1B idea.
by stinos | 2026-01-18 08:51:27+00:00
For me 100% brightness is way too much when inside even during the day. Maybe the monitors I have are exceptionally bright to start with, which I doubt, but whenever I get new monitors I usually put them down to about 30-40% for usage during the day. Which is the level which to me makes it looks as if white on the screen roughly matches a white wall in a similar location in the room. This just feels the most natural and least fatiguing, probably because looking at the screen or surroundings hardly changes pupil size. Which I confirmed with a research-grade eyetracker.
by hliyan | 2026-01-18 08:51:38+00:00
I may have written about this before on HN, but once I wrote a simple Perl script that could run the daily trade reconciliation for an entire US primary exchange. It could run on my laptop and complete the process in under 20 minutes. Ten years later, I watched a team spending days setting up a Spark cluster to handle a comparable amount of data in a somewhat simpler business domain.
Show HN: A fast CSV/Parquet viewer built on DuckDB-WASM
by imdms | 2026-01-18 08:52:09+00:00
Hi HN!

There are plenty of CSV/Parquet viewers out there, but I kept running into small frustrations that added up. After bouncing between Excel, Numbers, VS Code, and a bunch of web tools, I realized none of them quite fit how I actually work. So I decided to build one myself using DuckDB-Wasm + Svelte.

I built this mainly for my own workflow. A few things I really wanted:

1. SQL-first exploration + export.
When I'm working with multiple CSVs or messy schemas, clicking around only gets me so far. Being able to write SQL (or programmatic queries) is the fastest way for me to understand the data, and I want to export query results easily.

2. High performance on large files.
I love the Rainbow CSV plugin in VS Code, but once files hit GB scale, my laptop starts to struggle. Apple Numbers can take minutes just to open a file, and it doesn't support SQL at all. I wanted something that stays responsive even for large datasets.

3. A proper GUI for quick inspection.
Sometimes I don't want to write SQL, I just want to sort, filter, and search with a few clicks.

4. Infinite scrolling.
This is surprisingly rare. Most web CSV tools paginate results, which constantly breaks my flow. I really wanted to just scroll through the data naturally.

This is still early and very much a work in progress, but it already covers the core things I personally needed. I'd love to hear any feedback, especially if you work with large CSV/Parquet files or have strong opinions on data tooling

Thanks for checking it out!
by akst | 2026-01-18 08:52:13+00:00
I think if anything if Wikipedia contributes to encouraging someone take an interest in these things like this, despite not in school, that’s definitely a positive.

But if these are moderators on Wikipedia that sounds pretty bad, but even that would surprise me.

It’s tricky cause I think being dependent on funding would also expose it to censorship risk. Like if it was funded by the UN then it’s remit might be limited by what some more influential nations would allow. At the same time you might end up with higher quality resources in the less controversial topics of what’s allowed? But also alternatively bias ones on politically controversial topics.

If it was funded by individual nations it’s same problem possibly worse, if it’s funded by “benevolent” individuals there’s a risk it becomes tool to propagate their personal ideology. Even if it doesn’t, it would probably affect the reputation of the publication.

So in this respect I think this is one case where Wikipedia has some obvious appeal. I think they may need to elevate their standards in their moderation. It feels a bit elitist but maybe some kind of signal for qualifications in a field, or at least specific fields (like natural sciences).

That said political interference aside, some fields are very subjective or operate on lines of thinking that’s can’t be challenged through falsification, are last in the social sciences. Like history can be very political.

Maybe a nonfree encyclopaedia isn’t so bad if it’s free from these issues, but can it even be sustained by a market? idk