MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atonse | 2026-01-19 17:00:52+00:00
More and more evidence that the a-holes with spreadsheets are taking over at Apple and they’re completely devoid of any ideas on the software side.

I heard someone randomly say that they should replace Tim Cook with Scott Forstall. I chuckled at the idea but this might be a great idea.

Apple is having its Ballmer moment. Google did too before AI lit the fire under their feet.

Who is going to be Apple’s next Nadella? Steve Jobs was the original.
by ikidd | 2026-01-19 17:00:52+00:00
The fleet task app has been really useful. I have my hired hands using it, tasks are shared and can be deferred so they don't show up until spring or midsummer when we have weather or time to work on them, or we're going to need that piece of equipment readied.

Honestly, I have so many features in it now it's hard to describe it, shared work calendar, parts shopping list, recurring maintenance, blah blah blah. It's very bespoke and I doubt anyone else would want to use it the way we do.
by hollerith | 2026-01-19 17:01:03+00:00
>macOS is able to achieve consistent sizing across displays irrespective of pixel density because it . . . downsamples it proportionally for each screen

For me, the most important thing (more important for example than things staying the same size when moving from one screen to another) is completely avoiding downsampling.

On both macOS and Linux, the way I do that is to choose to scale the UI by an integral factor (usually 200% in my case) and then fine tune the apps in which I spend most of my time (namely, Emacs and my browser).

Specifically, Emacs relies on GTK, which does not do fractional scaling, so if I were to set a fractional scaling factor in Gnome Settings, then Emacs is be blurry (because IIUC Gnome downsamples the Emacs window) whereas if I set an integral scaling factor in Gnome and use (set-face-attribute 'default nil :height 190) to fine tune the size of text, everything stays nice and crisp.
by KPGv2 | 2026-01-19 17:01:39+00:00
I feel like you people are intentionally misconstruing what "Luddite" means. It doesn't mean "avoids specific new tech." It means "avoiding ALL new tech because new things are bad."

A luddite would refuse the covid vaccine. They'd refuse improved trains. They'd refuse EVs. etc. This is because ludditism is the blanket opposition to technological improvements.
by windowpains | 2026-01-19 17:01:58+00:00
We also pay the counter tariffs. As Americans, we basically pay for everything, even for other Americans. I read Modi was going to tariff lentils at 30%, idk for Putin’s oil or something (?), didn’t really read it closely since it could be an AI fake anyway. Pretty sure my lentil costs will skyrocket as a result. It’s tough being the global leader.
by dominicrose | 2026-01-19 17:02:23+00:00
I don't "like" taxes I just think that people are more generous when they are obliged to be. It won't make them generous on top of the taxes but at least they'll pay the damn taxes.
I live in France where the taxes are much higher than in the US. It's annoying but there are clearly some advantages and we are adapted to a more humble lifestyle, which is fine.
by pear01 | 2026-01-19 17:02:27+00:00
Really? What about phone theft? If someone sticks you up and knows all it takes is your finger to unlock the phone, I would think they would be more tempted to do so, as it takes more or less the same level of coercion as taking the phone. And it's easier than fumbling around with a password... therein is the double edged sword...
by mikepurvis | 2026-01-19 17:02:29+00:00
But a monarchy/autocracy hardly guarantees you success either. Isn't this Bill Gates and charter schools all over again?

Basically, the boring solution (democracy) gets you boring, middle-of-the-road results, while a monarchy is more likely to get you an outlier. The outlier might be at the top or the bottom of the pack, but because it's not democracy any more you don't have any say, so tough toenails if it's the wrong one.
by jacekm | 2026-01-19 17:02:40+00:00
Animals on tracks remain a problem, although they do not pose risk to human life (just damages to the trains). One of the attempts to protect animals include acoustic deterrents, here's a Polish one as an example [1] but they are manufactured around the world. The Polish one plays sounds of predators, dying creatures, hunting dogs, etc to scare away forest animals (search for "UOZ-1" on youtube if you want to hear the sounds). Such devices significantly lower the number of collisions but unfortunately they are not 100% effective.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0j68iepI88
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-19 17:02:59+00:00
I mean, the liberals would all be at brunch, at least. I suppose it's "better" when the mask of destructive empires is firmly in place, because at least then they have to maintain some decorum when mass deporting folks.

It does kind of suck, though, when you're in Ferguson, Occupy, at Standing Rock, protesting the second Iraq war, in the streets because the police murdered another of your fellow humans, because the folks who think all this started on Oct. 7 or Jan 20 will tell you that you're just being hyperbolic and that you should accept all this violence done in your name.

So, I dunno. I'm not stoked about being in an actual insurrectionist moment- I'd rather just be playing music. I'm not at all happy about being in a house I despise while it burns down. But having read at least one or two books, it feels like, I dunno, folks who were actively stoked about Harris don't want -less- violence, they just want it done to folks they don't see...
by salezred | 2026-01-19 17:03:16+00:00
The funny thing is that I personally have ended up creating a "large" google sheet with all the Messier objects which my rig could image, and added a column for "when" to image (i.e., spring, etc). It's served me quite well.

As I said in another comment, a true killer feature would be to image my yard, with all the obstacles blocking the sky, and intersecting the available sky space with the trajectories of those objects, and use that info to actually tell me what I can image.
by lxgr | 2026-01-19 17:03:34+00:00
No, attenuation in vacuum is exactly the same, and the difference between humid air, dry air, and vacuum doesn't really matter at frequencies below a few GHz.

> For example, attenuation at 1 km for 144 MHz (ham VHF band) is about -76 dB while for 2.4 GHz, it is about -100 dB.

This is a common misunderstanding of the free-space path loss formula, which is expressed in terms of the idealized isotropic radiator, the length of which is frequency-dependent. In other words, this calculation is assuming a proportionally (much) smaller antenna for the 2.4 GHz case.

With the same antenna size, the path loss is exactly the same. After all, where else should the radiated energy go?
by zenoware | 2026-01-19 17:03:45+00:00
Laravel shipped an official MCP server before Rails, Django, or any other major framework. I cracked it open to see how it works.

Turns out it's not magic—it's a well-built MCP server that exposes the web framework's app's internals through JSON-RPC. Database schemas, routes, config, error logs, even browser console errors. Laravel Boost was also one of the first plugins to get published in Claude Code's official marketplace.
by gtirloni | 2026-01-19 17:03:48+00:00
Let's say it works and we're in the future where the manufacturing has returned to the US and you have US citizens building iPhones in large-scale factories and they are earning minimum wage. But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day? Do you have faith the US has an edge in manufactoring automation and won't need these semi-slaves? Do you have faith the national manufacturing will ever reach the same prices on finished goods that the foreign manufacters were able to provide before the tariffs? I'm asking these questions sincerely as I don't see how this advances the US society in any way (unless you trust the US could have been doing a much better job than China and others in manufacturing consumer goods).
by flembat | 2026-01-19 17:03:53+00:00
I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance: I always like unconventional systems, but cant find a reason to like these, they are much slower than similar priced arm systems, the software/hardware support is not as good, and the instruction set is also just not that interesting. Also once you run Linux, you are just running Linux, it is just like Linux only harder to install, and slower.
by dr_kretyn | 2026-01-19 17:04:07+00:00
Why is this a problem? You don't need an LLM; you need a "model for detecting whether and where the given context appears". We're so used to LLMs now that we forget these NLPs problems have been worked on for a long time and they don't require a huge computational beast and it takes a few ms to run (on only the response, while it's being streamed).
by nathan_compton | 2026-01-19 17:04:09+00:00
Like I said, I canvassed for and voted for Harris, but when I think of her campaign, all I can think of is "wiping the debt of Pell Grant recipients who start successful businesses that benefit disadvantaged communities."

This is the lamest bullshit policy which almost seems calculated to alienate voters who it doesn't put to sleep.

Please don't act like democratic politicians are losing because they have a moral compass. Ridiculous.
by koolba | 2026-01-19 17:04:16+00:00
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.

I’m adamantly against all forms of illegal immigration. There are plenty of people around the world that want to come here and are willing to wait in line. I’m perfectly fine with the intentions and methods of the current administration.

I’m in favor of doing whatever we can to increase our manufacturing base for the future. I’m perfectly fine with paying more for imported goods that I don’t actually buy anyway. Paying 95% for crap from China that I have no intention of purchasing does not impact me.

I hate all taxes and do not consider it charitable to spend other people’s money. Taxes are a necessity as we need to fund government functions. But it is those functions that should be limited. Because government is generally terrible at most of them.
by smeej | 2026-01-19 17:04:26+00:00
Yes, but it spikes BEFORE the attack begins, which means we learnt someone thought there was a string reason to believe things were about to change earlier than we otherwise would have.

That's the whole point, isn't it?

And if you're going to tell me the paragraph I quoted nullifies what I've said, would you please explain how? Obviously I don't currently understand it the same way you do, and I have asked for help understanding what I'm missing. Saying, "You're missing it," isn't helpful.
by projektfu | 2026-01-19 17:04:37+00:00
PowerToys has a wonderful QuickAccent feature. The dashes and hyphens are on hyphen-KEY and some other characters are on comma-KEY, and many symbols are on the key that they resemble, like ¶ is on P-KEY where KEY is the follower key you want to use. I turned off using SPACE because it conflicted with some other software, but right arrow works great for me.
by KPGv2 | 2026-01-19 17:04:41+00:00
> It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.

IME young people use Discord, and those servers often require permission to even join. Nearly all my fandom communications happen on a few Discord servers, most of which you cannot join without an invitation, and if you're kicked (bad actors will be kicked), you cannot re-join (without permission).
by antonvs | 2026-01-19 17:04:45+00:00
> vibe-breadboarding has drawn me deeper into the electronics hobby.

Exactly. I'm a life-long software guy, but I've dabbled in electronics at various times. But typically I'd hit walls that I just didn't know how to get past, and it wasn't easy to find solutions. If I'd had an LLM to help, I'm pretty sure I'd have become much more deeply involved in electronics.
by RomanPushkin | 2026-01-19 17:04:50+00:00
Worst engineer's nightmare would be if you're hired, delivered the "working website with 100 of different calculators", and someone like myself needs "just to code review it" and "make sure all corner cases are covered and stuff like that", and "provide constructive feedback" (that would be copy-pasted later on to AI), but mostly "this work is 99.9% complete". And you "can't understand why such a simple code review takes so much time, because everything just works for me".
by munificent | 2026-01-19 17:05:20+00:00
I have no insight, but I assume they are doing it because they can use AI to make a few variations of a video and then automatically A/B test them to see which ones get more engagement, and then use that to make videos that are more engaging than what the author actually uploaded.

This is "innocent" if you accept that the author's goal is simplify to maximize engagement and YouTube is helping them do that. It's not if you assume the author wants users to see exactly what they authored.
by worksonmine | 2026-01-19 17:05:25+00:00
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.

The point when Trump was elected was to make americans buy american and to get international companies to move their production to the U.S.

In Sweden they did something similar when they thought people were buying too much cheap stuff directly from China instead of from the middlemen paying taxes. The solution was to add a tariff on cheap goods from China specifically.

I don't enough to know if it works, but it's not a new strategy. In Trumps current politics though it's used more as a bargaining tool and not something that's supposed to stimulate the economy, is anyone even claiming it is the goal?
by mylifeandtimes | 2026-01-19 17:05:25+00:00
I appreciate the moral stance behind your tariff support. I read it as a way to discourage slave labor (even abroad) and encourage decent wages/allowing people to live with dignitiy.

I can see how this stance can be justified for imports from countries who do not provide a meaningful minimum wage.

I do not see how this stance can be justified for tariffs on EU countries (where worker rights are strongly protected), especially when the basis for that tariff is to "punish" those countries for not wanting to change national borders against the will of the people inside those borders.
Show HN: I built a system to drive my RC car from anywhere in the world
by roman01la | 2026-01-19 17:05:31+00:00
Wanted to share a project I've been working on. Basically lets you drive an RC car remotely over the internet with live FPV video. I'm arranging outdoor time attack tournaments with friends, somewhere in woods or in the open field.

The setup:

- Raspberry Pi Zero 2W mounted on the car with a wide-angle camera
- ESP32 on the transmitter generating joystick voltages (needed because ARRMA's 2-in-1 ESC/receiver has no accessible inputs)
- Cloudflare for the networking magic (TURN, Tunnel, Workers)
- Browser-based controls - works on phone or desktop

What it does:

- ~100-200ms control latency over internet (10-15ms on LAN)
- 720p @ 30fps live video
- Touch controls on mobile, keyboard on desktop
- Admin dashboard for race management
- Token-based access so I can let friends drive
- Auto-stops if connection drops (safety first)
- Adjustable throttle limits
- Optional re-streaming to YouTube

Built it because I thought it'd be cool to let people drive the car without being physically present. Currently running it on my 4G modem and it works surprisingly well.

The whole thing is open source if anyone wants to check it out or build their own. The thing is, it's obviously not easy to get up and running for an average user. But maybe you'll find this useful.

Total hardware cost is around $75 (Pi + camera + ESP32) assuming you already have the car and transmitter.

Some features are work in progress:

- Speedometer
- GPS and track position
- Gates system (will probably use short-range Bluetooth beacons)

Here's a a technical article about the project that reveals a bit more of under the hood thinking https://romanliutikov.com/blog/building-internet-controlled-...
by colin_jack | 2026-01-19 17:05:48+00:00
"Agent 1, refactor that method to be more efficient. Agent 5, tighten up the graphics on level 3!"

I'm not sure its even that, his description of his role in this is:

"You are a Product Manager, and Gas Town is an Idea Compiler. You just make up features, design them, file the implementation plans, and then sling the work around to your polecats and crew. Opus 4.5 can handle any reasonably sized task, so your job is to make tasks for it. That’s it."

And he says he isn't reviewing the code, he lets agents review each others code from look of it. I am interested to see the specs/feature definitions he's giving them, that seems to be one interesting part of his flow.
by plagiarist | 2026-01-19 17:06:27+00:00
I have been disappointed with Orange Pi hardware, I am not surprised.

Seldom does an SBC vendor want to actually support their products. You get the distro they made at launch, that is it. They do no updates or support. They just want to sell an overpriced chipset with a fucked and unwieldy boot sequence.

Same thing with all the Android devices. Pick a version of Android that you like because that's what you'll have on it forever.
by jolmg | 2026-01-19 17:06:45+00:00
It doesn't say they used Copilot. It says they used output *from* Copilot.

> his force used fictional output from Microsoft Copilot

That doesn't mean they used Copilot; it only means that the content originates from Copilot. They apparently got it from Google search result:

> officers had found this material through a Google search

And apparently that source either used Copilot or the source of their source used Copilot, etc.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-19 17:06:49+00:00
With the older microarchitectures there was a large penalty for crossing a cache line with AVX-512. In some cases, the performance could be worse than AVX2!

In older microarchitectures like Ice Lake it was pretty bad, so you wanted to avoid unaligned loads if you could. This penalty has rapidly shrunk across subsequent generations of microarchitectures. The penalty is still there but on recent microarchitectures it is small enough that the unaligned case often isn't a showstopper.

The main reason to use aligned loads in code is to denote cases where you expect the address to always be aligned i.e. it should blow up if it isn't. Forcing alignment still makes sense if you want predictable, maximum performance but it isn't strictly necessary for good performance on recent hardware in the way it used to be.
by smeej | 2026-01-19 17:06:56+00:00
But it's not a bounty. It's a market, right? So the payout is split among everyone on your side? And the if you try to dump a ton (measured relative to the size of the market) into the market, the price tanks because there aren't enough people coming in on the other side. You get a big wick in the trading candle, so you scoop up the much less favorable terms of the bet at higher cost.
by DSingularity | 2026-01-19 17:07:01+00:00
Of course that’s possible — but the context matters doesn’t it? You know - the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Iran because it wasn’t sufficiently pro-west? The installation of a brutal shah who eventually got overthrown in a popular revolution and all the subsequent attempts to attack Iran and overthrow its government (by the CIA and Mossad) — this is all important context.

We can all have our ideological preferences (democracy, socialism, free-market capitalism, etc) but geopolitics does not operate in the world of ideals — there are adversarial relationships that force governments to act in a certain way in order to remain sovereign.

Zionists want to rewrite history so we can all ignore the long list of grievances the Iranians have with the west (Israel in particular) and instead operate in a false reality where the only criminals are the Iranian. The bottom line is you can’t spend decades savagely attacking a nation to undermine its government (because you don’t like their policies ) and then expect to easily paint the government as the evil ones as they fight for survival with the kind of brutality you can expect from a government that has its back to the wall. We all saw you wage economic war with sanctions. We saw you block medicine and food. We saw you assassinate their intellectuals and academics. We saw you bomb their embassies and assassinate their leaders. We can dislike the brutal Islamic dictatorship but we know who is the greater evil — the Zionist hypocrisy doesn’t go far with the free people in this world.
by rich_sasha | 2026-01-19 17:07:54+00:00
It's still a bit of a mystery to me TBH. Not that Americans are paying it, but where's the cash?

The headline suggests it was all passed into consumers. So why is inflation still so low? If you add 10-30% to prices (granted, of imports, not of houses, domestic food etc), you'd expect more.

If companies were eating it (which apparently they aren't) then their profitability should be down. But that doesn't seem to be the case either.

So..??? It's like that riddle with the three guys buying a pizza. Where did the money go?
by 0xy | 2026-01-19 17:08:00+00:00
I'm not unconvinced by the idea that businesses in the US dulled inflation by pulling forward stock purchases and stockpiling goods. But 9 months worth of goods? SMBs can't afford to do that. Large enterprises don't have the warehousing capacity to do that.

Could you imagine Amazon increasing their stock on hand by 30%? Maybe. Could you imagine them quadrupling their stock on hand? Seems unlikely.

Impacts should've shown up by now, most of the stockpiled goods would've been sold down.
by rm30 | 2026-01-19 17:08:24+00:00
It depends on which step of the staircase, from pure hardware to pure software, you want to position yourself. Some projects require staying closer to the metal, while others can be purely software. I move up and down this staircase depending on the specific requirements.

If the requirement is to communicate where consumer standards like Bluetooth fail, like in a ship, you have to choose the system for the environment. I evaluate these choices like an architect building a robust system, rather than just using what is available at the nearby shop.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-19 17:08:33+00:00
Top marginal federal income tax rate in the US over time:

2018+: 37%

1993 - 2000: 39.6%

1981 - 1986: between 50% and 28%

1964 - 1980: 70%

1944 - 1963: 91%

1930s: 63 - 79%

1913 (income tax created): 7%

In most, though not all states, there's also State Income Tax. NYC also has a city tax on income.
by kyancey | 2026-01-19 17:08:33+00:00
> Is this just a huge boon to those too lazy to learn? And what does that mean for later security and tech debt issues?

In the same way that GPS is a boon to people too lazy to learn celestial navigation or read a paper map.

In the same way that word processors are a boon to people too lazy to use a typewriter and white-out.

In the same way that supermarkets are a boon to people too lazy to hunt and gather their own food.

In the same way that synthesizers are a boon to people too lazy to hire a 40-piece orchestra.

In the same way that power drills are a boon to people too lazy to use a hand crank.
by punkpeye | 2026-01-19 17:08:39+00:00
The current implementation is HTTP-focused as that was the primary use case. TCP tunneling is possible architecturally but not something I've had in mind. I suggest start by raising an issue on GitHub and adding thumbs up. If it receives enough attention, I will prioritize it. I am less familiar with what would supporting UDP entail, so cannot answer that right now.