MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hereonout2 | 2026-01-18 08:52:31+00:00
I often favour low maintenance and over head solutions. Most recently I made a stupidly large static website with over 50k items (i.e. pages).

I think a lot of people would have used a database at this point, but the site didn't need to be updated once built so serving a load of static files via S3 makes ongoing maintenance very low.

Also feel a slight sense of superiority when I see colleagues write a load of pandas scripts to generate some basic summary stats Vs my usual throw away approach based around awk.
by doix | 2026-01-18 08:53:03+00:00
Yeah, I mostly use it for QoL improvements but for work related things. So Jira, Bitbucket, GitHub, Linear etc. basically whatever my employer uses. Back in the early 2010s most of that software was fully software rendered. Nowadays it's pretty rare for that to be the case.

I just try and get LLMs to do it for me because I'm lazy, and they like to use setInterval instead of mutationObservers and if it works, I just live with the inefficiency.
by redwall_hp | 2026-01-18 08:54:35+00:00
Staring at a bright light makes floaters visible, so dark is a must for me. Plus, code should never be dark-on-light, that's disgusting.

Astigmatism can cause eye strain headaches. I don't know if LASIK corrects that or not, or if you have it, but getting glasses with cylindrical correction helped reduce some of my headaches. Apparently most people don't see a big starburst around lights at night, or have a faint/fuzzy halo around text at any distance.
by throwa356262 | 2026-01-18 08:54:52+00:00
This is not new. Operating a windows machine has always included a bunch of magical commands. It's just that it has usually been in the registery. The cmd and powershell stuff is kind of a new direction.

Regarding Linux, I dont think most people need command line for normal work. Obviously the guy that runs an obscure dist in RAID-6 on his toaster would be different, but for most normal people just install Ubuntu and use it.
by godelski | 2026-01-18 08:55:24+00:00
I'm writing this comment at night, on my phone with its absolute lowest brightness; it is still too bright.

Maybe, just maybe, people aren't "holding it wrong"

Unlike screens produced light. To make them the same brightness as ambient would make them unreadable in my current situation. Yet a black background is much more pleasant. Why? Because the light being produced is less. You're right that the contrast matters. Black background and white text gets us closer to ambient light level while providing contrast. You simply cannot do same with black text on white background. I mean go to a dark room, put down the phone and ask yourself what the natural background is. It's black. That's the ambient level
by kstrauser | 2026-01-18 08:55:42+00:00
This is the part that I find the strangest:

> We also dropped support for other very old browsers, including Edge Legacy, iOS versions earlier than the last 3, Firefox versions earlier than the last 2 (aside from Firefox ESR), and Android Browser.

Safari from iOS 16, released in 2022, is more modern in every conceivable way than MSIE 11. I'd also bet there are more people stuck with iOS 16- than those who can only use IE 11, except maybe at companies with horrid IT departments, in which case I kind of see this as enabling them to continue to suck.

I'd vote to rip the bandaid off. MSIE is dead tech, deader than some of the other browsers they're deprecating. Let it fade into ignomony as soon as possible.
by krethh | 2026-01-18 08:56:43+00:00
LLM's don't learn on its on mistakes in the same way that real developers and businesses do, at least not in a way that lends itself to RLVR.

Meaningful consequences of mistakes in software don't manifest themselves through compilation errors, but through business impacts which so far are very far outside of the scope of what an AI-assisted coding tool can comprehend.
by UltraSane | 2026-01-18 08:58:00+00:00
"But the CO2 emissions between a completed transition away from fossil fuels (France last century) and Germany (still ongoing) can obviously not be compared"

Isn't that convenient? The truth is that Germany could already have completed the "transition away from fossil fuels" that France did if it wasn't so irrationally afraid of nuclear electricity.

"Once the transition is done"

It will NEVER be done due to the intermittency of wind and solar.
Show HN: Hot Macropad – a user-level Linux macropad daemon using evdev and Bash
by nejdetckenobi | 2026-01-18 08:58:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Hot Macropad, a small user-level daemon for Linux that lets you bind scripts to keys on a macropad (or any input device exposed via evdev).

Key points:

Written in Bash, minimal dependencies

Uses evtest to listen to evdev events

One script per key (KEY_A.sh, etc.)

Supports “pages” (key layers) and page switching from scripts

Runs as a systemd user service (no root daemon)

Designed to work with stable /dev/input/by-id/ or custom udev symlinks

Packaged as a .deb (manual install also supported)

The goal was something transparent and hackable: no DSL, no config language — just scripts and directories.

This is mostly aimed at people who already live in the terminal and want full control over what their macropad does (xdotool, wmctrl, notify-send, custom scripts, etc.).

Repo:
https://github.com/nejdetckenobi/hot_macropad

Feedback very welcome — especially around device handling, systemd integration, and packaging.
by lrvick | 2026-01-18 08:58:45+00:00
There are no fully open/auditable android phones. All of them have privileged binary blobs. An end to end chat service where there are no options permitting full accountability of the client software and operating system is largely security theater.

Even if you do all that, it is not an official option, let alone a recommended one. The recommendation is to accept the google or apple terms of service.
Show HN: Design Rails – Complete brand package for AI coding agents
by amitbar | 2026-01-18 08:59:01+00:00
Hey HN, we're building Design Rails.

It's a chat-based brand builder. You describe your project, iterate with an AI designer, and walk away with a logo, color palette, typography, and style guide - all formatted as specs you can drop into your project for Claude Code, Cursor or whatever you're coding with.

Free tier gets you a full logo (PNG) and basic palette. Paid tier ($49 one-time) - everything you need for your next project - full coding-agent ready specs, SVG logos, icon variants, etc.

Built with Next.js, Vercel AI SDK, and Inngest for the async generation jobs.

Would love to hear your feedback - what's missing, what would make this more useful for your workflow?
by nchagnet | 2026-01-18 08:59:19+00:00
HN has become my main feed for non-news stories and I quite like it, particularly because it has a higher density of small web tech articles and those are my favourite. It doesn't have to be highest quality or most innovative, but reading someone's articulated opinion on their blog is what I go on internet for.

I also generally enjoy the comment section because people here tend to at least argue intelligently, even if I don't always agree with the viewpoints. I will say I find the dissonance between the "hacker" and the "tech startup" ethe to be quite amusing. I may work for a large company in their 'tech' area, but I can never feel fully at home among the more entrepreneurial-minded people. I really struggle to cheer for tech companies' stocks like they are football teams, but to each their own.

Thank you HN for being a unique place on the Internet, it's truly refreshing.
by bitwize | 2026-01-18 08:59:49+00:00
I knew a guy like that, except his tool of choice was Access. He could code, but it wasn't his strong suit, and when he was out of his element he typically delegated those responsibilities to more technical programmers, including sometimes myself. But with Access he could model a business with tables, and wire it together with VBA business logic, as easily as you and I breathe.
by wiether | 2026-01-18 09:01:01+00:00
The only podcasts I still listen to are the ones I've been listening too since the 0's when I had to download .mp3 files and put them on my USB key MP3 player

100% amateur stuff, no ad, nothing to sell, just humans having fun in front of a mic

----

The recent reboot of the medium is more akin to the talk shows from TV, but instead of trying to reach a wide range of audience, podcasts are targeting niches.

Which allow more podcasts to exist... but make it harder to be sustainable since their goal is mostly to make money
by papanoah | 2026-01-18 09:01:44+00:00
I wrote a tiny game that was basically a dice war clone and needed to implement an enemy AI. I researched the probability formula for throwing a higher number with N dice versus M dice and spent days on the math. In the end I simulated every possible combination aka. fight up to 12 dice (which was the max amount) with an simple python script and stored the results in a key value table. It was soo much easier.
by metalman | 2026-01-18 09:03:10+00:00
there are so many things published that I make it a couple of paragraphs in, and get the cold grue from the impossibly bad phrasing and disconected garble.
other times it's something filled with lots and lots of stated fact and figures in an authorative voice, that is lacking any solid evidence of experience, some sort of combination of news anchor and nobel lauriat
that ,again gives the cold grue, and makes me wish for brain wash fluid.
fuck it, the web is dead
by krethh | 2026-01-18 09:03:11+00:00
A $3 calculator today is capable of doing arithmetic that would require superhuman intelligence to do 100 years ago.

It's extremely hard to define "human-level intelligence" but I think we can all agree that the definition of it changes with the tools available to humans. Humans seem remarkably suited to adapt to operate at the edges of what the technology of time can do.
by mejutoco | 2026-01-18 09:03:44+00:00
Sometimes while on an ai thread like this I see posts with obvious and many grammatical mistakes. Many will be "typos" (although some seem conceptual). Maybe some are dictated/transcribed by busy people. Some might be incorrect on purpose, for engament. These are posted by pretty accomplished people sometimes.

And I always think: any of these users could have ran a basic grammar check with an llm or even a spellchecker, but didnt. Maybe software will be the same after all.

P.S. prob I jinxed my own post and did a mistake somewhere
by antisol | 2026-01-18 09:04:56+00:00
I think that this is probably the most realistic / sensible suggestion here if you want to preserve digital data for as long as possible.

(and assuming you don't have millions of dollars handy to put towards this goal - I could probably build you something pretty OK, but the cost might get into tens of millions or more depending on how many nines you want on that "chance of it existing in 100 years" figure)

I also agree with others who say "print out multiple redundant copies and put them in filing cabinets and/or bank vaults". This is probably the most reliable way to have a high probability of it lasting that long without spending a lot.

The core issue that you're going to have is that it's impossible to predict whether any institution you might trust to hold on to the data will still exist in 100 years. Having multiple copies on multiple redundant hosts gives you a higher chance, but it's still not possible to say what that chance is. And that's before we start thinking about things like climate change and the water wars everyone loves to predict.
by kikkupico | 2026-01-18 09:05:47+00:00
There was a very specific purpose here - to build a web-based accelerometer game. If I were to compare this with playing, I would say this is more akin to playing with a special kind of clay that shape-shifts itself based on your instructions.

As for the LLM-generated writing - I've updated the blog post with a 'meta' section explaining how LLMs generated the post itself. I've shared the link to the specific section as a response to other comments with the same criticism - I don't want to link to the blog again here and risk looking like a spam bot.
by thiht | 2026-01-18 09:06:13+00:00
Again, can you find articles using some of these "unreliable" sources (I don’t know Salon or PinkNews, and I know that BuzzFeed News actually had pretty good articles back then) to promote biased content?

Just looking at the front page of PinkNews, the content appears sourced and factual. A media being oriented (LGBT in this case) doesn’t necessarily mean it’s biased or lying. Taking this article as an example[1], I see no reason why it shouldn’t be used as a Wikipedia source.

[1]: https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/01/16/trump-eliminates-rape...
by efreak | 2026-01-18 09:06:25+00:00
MDI in browsers isn't enforced though, you can still use each tab in it's own window, and (depending on your browser) you can open other sites in a sidebar (? Used to be possible) or split-tab (I think I've seen this in some desktop browser? I know chrome does it on mobile). Office documents though? SDI is now enforced on office. You can't hide that taskbar entry for every single document you have open, even though there's only 2 important ones each open in their own window and the rest could all share a window for all you care.

MDI wasn't a failure, the requirement was a failure. SDI requirement for office is also a failure. More so than the escapable (multiple window support) MDI of browsers on desktop.
by wrxd | 2026-01-18 09:07:25+00:00
I wouldn’t mind YouTube if my kids asked to watch videos of volcanoes.
Instead they always end up trying to watch the most annoying people possible playing video games for a few minutes before we ask them to switch it off.

If YouTube really cared about kids they should allow users to pick a subset of channels and never ever mention again anything else.
Alas, we all know this will never happen because YouTube doesn’t care about what people watch as long as they come back watching some more
by spit2wind | 2026-01-18 09:07:41+00:00
I never understood the Handmade Network. AFAIU, it came from people who watched Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, a game developed on video over several years from scratch. But Casey, as far as I know, didn't start the Network and it never seemed to align with the intent of Handmade Hero.

The purpose of Handmade Hero was to show people that they are capable of making a game themselves and to learn things which have a reputation for being too hard. There was, of course, an emphasis on the hard things being hard because of complexity introduced by things like OOP, C++, etc. But the main purpose always felt like education and enablement. Casey's a great teacher and the videos are very informative.

The Network, on the other hand, was some weird "we want to make stuff by hand", whatever that means. That's fine. But that's not what Casey spent like 7 years doing. He didn't do it "just cuz". Instead, it was to teach and share. That seemed lost on the Network.

As a result, it seemed just like a less toxic Suckless project without the focus on making a new ecosystem. It was just a forum to say, "Hey I made this thing", all the while co-oping the feel-goods from Casey's Handmade Hero.
by catoc | 2026-01-18 09:07:59+00:00
If the point was triggering a reply, the length and sarcasm certainly worked.

I agree brevity is always preferred. Making a good point while keeping it brief is much harder than rambling on.

But length is just a measure, quality determines if I keep reading. If a comment is too long, I won’t finish reading it. If I kept reading, it wasn’t too long.
by ksec | 2026-01-18 09:08:02+00:00
>Oracle should not be trusted as the steward for open source projects

They have been doing great work with Java. But everyone takes it for granted. Truffle along with TruffleRuby was also under Oracle.

But I guess the point for MySQL stands, development wasn't halted per se but it has been very slow. Most of it goes to Heatwave, the enterprise version of MySQL.

Unfortunately, Facebook, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Shopify, Spotify, and booking.com are all on mySQL and see not problems with it.

Considering Oracle no longer need MySQL I sometimes wonder if they would sell the control out to another company.
by jrflowers | 2026-01-18 09:08:04+00:00
He seems pretty emphatic that everything is burning and that we are watching it burn, right now, because it is on fire, presently. Is it your interpretation that Doctorow is a fan of this administration’s actions and wants them to continue? Or that he is advocating for a sort of… double fire? Like lighting fire on fire?

Is there a physical world analogy for what you’re describing in terms of burning/not burning?
by wtetzner | 2026-01-18 09:08:26+00:00
> The trendline is clear. Just as early aviation was dangerous but steadily improved, this technology is getting better month by month.

I'm yet to be convinced of this. I keep hearing it, but every time I look at the results they're basically garbage.

I think LLMs are useful tools, but I haven't seen anything convincing that they will be able to replace even junior developers any time soon.
by robocat | 2026-01-18 09:08:58+00:00
He's not playing 4D chess... He's playing Risk (the board game from the 80's) where he needs Quebec and Greenland to attack Europe.

Or he's been looking at a Mercator map projection and thinks Greenland is waaay bigger than it is.

Fortunately I'm from New Zealand and we've been hiding off of maps for years because security by obscurity is effective against some opponents... We've even pretended it is a conspiracy against us as chaff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_of_New_Zealand_from_m...

Nice article that shows a Risk map (with a big important Greenland) and no New Zealand.

If someone told Trump that Quebec is full of Frenchies, maybe the rest of Canada could palm that problem off onto the US?
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-18 09:09:03+00:00
Would you say that you really digest the books you listen to like that? It seems difficult to fathom to me. I generally try to use tedious downtime to think through things and solve problems in my head rather than listening to anything, but I've found that I can't even really keep my thoughts straight while walking outside due to watching where I'm going and the large variety of distracting external stimulus. I feel like I would get absolutely nothing out of listening to an audiobook at 2x speed while cycling.
by arthurofbabylon | 2026-01-18 09:09:06+00:00
I was speaking with an architect a few months ago and dismayed to learn that they no longer bother designing for thermal management (relying on air-conditioning alone). They are fully focused on the aesthetic "integration" of the structure in the landscape. (I use quotes for the word "integration" because it implies a harmonious coalescing across domains, including temperature.) Their prior work beautifully incorporated passive heating/cooling, much to the benefit of the clients' health and happiness. Where did this architect lose the thread?

I've noticed in general a thorough dismissal of passive benefits. It seems that we are caught by a cultural need for immediacy. Thermal management, and particularly passive thermal management, pays immense dividends slowly, but it takes a greater intelligence or broader perspective for anyone to appreciate these advantages.

Those who sit still and think clearly see the advantages of passive benefits, and anyone who gardens or does systems design intrinsically observes the long-term flows and thus understands the passive benefits at play. But so many people – from practitioners like the architect to stakeholders like their clients – go through life wholly unaware of this goldmine that is right there in front of their imagination.
by roenxi | 2026-01-18 09:09:52+00:00
Yeah but the US presidents would say that - they typically have track records of wanton destruction that are rather easy to criticise. It is notable that Roosevelt was part of a generation of global political leadership that bungled their way into first an economic then a literal bloodbath, the magnitude of which the world has not seen before or since. And US policies had a major hand in setting up 50 years of communist ascendance across a big chunk of the globe. I think he might have nuked two cities on the way through too, don't recall if it was him [EDIT].

If those were events I was involved with, I too would be giving powerful speeches about the importance of disregarding critics. The decision makers only handled the situation well if you assume that the catastrophe of the early part of the century was a bit like weather, sort of coming form nowhere in a way no-one could foresee or really influence.

[EDIT] I checked, he set the program up but it was his successor that actually dropped the bombs. If Truman had any sense he'd also be talking about the importance of disregarding critics.
by _fizz_buzz_ | 2026-01-18 09:10:01+00:00
Chess and Go have very restrictive rules. It seems a lot more obvious to me why a computer can beat a human at it. They have a huge advantage just by being able to calculate very deep lines in a very short time. I actually find it impressive for how long humans were able to beat computers at go. Math proofs seem a lot more open ended to me.
by tasuki | 2026-01-18 09:10:41+00:00
I've had a X1 since 2017. The CPU is pretty weak, but it's still solid overall. Still on the original battery too (yes the capacity has gone down from 57 Wh to 25 Wh). I've gotten other computers through work since, but the X1 is still my favourite laptop! In fact I'm typing on it now.
by gethly | 2026-01-18 09:11:39+00:00
Small pieces of code replacing long pieces of code is a daily routine.

But more on the topic, i would say calling ffmpeg as external binary to handle some multimedia processing would be one of those cases where simple is better.

Generally, I would say that implementing your own solution over an external one(like a library, service or product) will always fall under this umbrella. Mostly, because you can implement only what you need and add other things that might be missing or adjust things that do not work exactly as you'd needed them to, so you can avoid any patches, translation layers or external pipelines.

For example, right now I am implementing my own layouting library, because Clay bindings for Go were not working or manual translations were missing features or were otherwise incomplete or non-functional. So I've learnt about Clay and on what principles it was built, by Nic Baker, and wrote my own version in Go. It has little over 2k lines of code right now and will take me about two weeks to finish, with all or most features I wanted. Now I have a fully native Go layouting library that does what I need and I can use and modify it ad infinitum.

So I would say that I equal a "dumb solution" with "my own" solution.

PS: looking back, when I used to work in advertising/marketing/web agency, we used to make websites in CMSs(I did Drupal, colleague did Wordpress). Before my departure from the job in general, I came to a conclusion that if we would be using static website generators, we could have saved unimaginable amount of work hours and deliver the same products, as 99% of clients never managed their websites as by nature of the job, we were doing presentational websites, not complicated functional ones. And when they did, they only needed such tiny changes that it would make way more sense to do it for them for free upon request. For example, imagine you charge someone 5000€ for a website that takes you two months to ship, because you need to design it, build it functionally, fit the visual style and tweak whatever is needed. If you'd use static website generator, the work would take two weeks - a week for the design and a week for coding the website itself. Now you've saved yourself 6 weeks of work while getting paid the same amount of money. Unfortunately, I did not have a chance to try this out and force a new direction at the company as it was at the end of my career.