MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by peter_d_sherman | 2026-01-10 22:12:33+00:00
Random Idea: A Completely Open-Source Banking App...

Consider an Open-Source Web Browser (Chromium, FireFox, ?, ???, or any open-source browser from: https://github.com/nerdyslacker/desktop-web-browsers).

OK.

We know the following:

A) That most Banks have web pages / websites which can be accessed via one or more of the above web browsers (AKA "Online Banking"), where the provided functionality is exactly the same, or very close to the functionality provided by stand-alone banking Apps

B) That the source code for any open-source web browser is available, and can be downloaded (A self-evident truth!)

From which the following understanding can be derived:

C) The security for the transactions (user authentication, authorization, etc., etc.) is NOT provided on the client side (the user's computer or smartphone) by an obfuscated "binary black box" piece of software where source code is not provided, but rather on the server side (the Bank's side!)

(Oh sure, Web Browsers provide encryption to prevent the middle segment of the communication path, the Internet, from listening in, but the encryption libraries of open-source web browsers are also typically themselves open-source, thus easily transferred to / imported into the source code bases / software component stack -- of other Apps!)

Well, if we know A), B), and C), then we also understand that a truly Open-Source Banking App, giving exactly the same security guarantees that an Open-Source Web Browser does today, is possible!

Such an app, if it were to exist, due to its open-source nature, would not be bound by artificial constraints, such as the absence or presence of an underlying rooted Smartphone, or not...

Also, in theory such an App, were it to exist, could be ran on very minimal, possibly more secure (than your average bloated Smartphone) alternative hardware...

Also, if you think about it... Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency apps -- are fundamentally that App (!) -- just that they use the Blockchain, and not a Bank, as the back-end! :-)

You know, you have a payment-provider App. It could have any number of back-ends to it... Bank, Blockchain, ?, ???

You tell me... :-)
by tedmiston | 2026-01-10 22:13:29+00:00
> The question I suppose is whether an LLM can detect, perhaps by the question itself, if they are dealing with someone (I hate to say it) "stable".

GPT-5 made a major advance on mental health guardrails in sensitive conversations.

https://www.theverge.com/news/718407/openai-chatgpt-mental-h...

https://openai.com/index/strengthening-chatgpt-responses-in-...
by glemion43 | 2026-01-10 22:14:08+00:00
I'm carrying a thought around for the last few weeks:

A LLM is a transformer. It transforms a prompt into a result.

Or a human idea into a concrete java implementation.

Currently I'm exploring what unexpected or curious transformations LLMs are capable of but haven't found much yet.

At least I myself was surprised that an LLM can transform a description of something into an IMG by transforming it into a SVG.
by Animats | 2026-01-10 22:15:21+00:00
Bindless Vulkan is in some ways simpler than binding for each draw. But there are now more synchronization conditions.

That big table of descriptors is an unusual data object. It's normally mapped as writable from the CPU and readable from the GPU. The CPU side has to track which slots are in use. When the CPU is done with a texture slot, the GPU might not be done yet, so all deletes have to deferred until the end of the frame. This isn't inherently difficult but has to be designed in.

The usual curse of inefficient Vulkan is maxing out the main CPU thread long before the GPU is fully utilized. This is fixable. There can be multiple draw threads. Assets can be loaded into the GPU while drawing is in progress, using transfer queues and DMA. Except that for integrated memory GPUs, you don't have to copy from CPU to GPU at all. If you do all this, GPU utilization should reach 100% before CPU utilization does.

Except most of this stuff doesn't work on mobile or WebGPU yet. Portable code has way too many cases. Look at WGPU.

What you get by using Unity or Unreal Engine is that a big team already worked through all this overhead. Most of the open source renderers aren't there yet. Or weren't as of a year ago.
by trollbridge | 2026-01-10 22:15:50+00:00
Welcome to the 1970s, when IBM published design guidelines that went along with the then-new 3270 terminal, including trying to keep response times very prompt (under a second) to prevent minds from wandering. This was supposed to allow non-technical users to use the full power of customers without having to master a command-line teletype style interface.

GUIs were supposed to the big huge thing that would let non-technical staff use computers without needing to grasp TUIs.
by luckylion | 2026-01-10 22:16:04+00:00
But technically you can also do that with chromium and gecko, but it's a lot of work, so very few do. And those that do don't cut the line, they'll almost all still follow upstream and just apply their changes.

So in the end, they're still dependent on the decisions made in the US. That doesn't need to be a problem, but I don't think "you can get the source code" really changes that.
by lurking_swe | 2026-01-10 22:17:24+00:00
i’m not the person you replied to. but a quick google search is just as much effort (on your part) as replying with a sassy “this sounds like a hallucination”. A low value comment in my opinion.

I found this:

https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/19-11-2025-is-your-doct...

Quote:

> “AI is already a reality for millions of health workers and patients across the European Region,” said Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe. “But without clear strategies, data privacy, legal guardrails and investment in AI literacy, we risk deepening inequities rather than reducing them.”
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-10 22:18:44+00:00
> Are they able to deliver reasonably up-to-date set of features that general population care?

No, they are very much an experiment at the moment.

> Does the cost reflect the value that the customer gets out of them?

Also no, for what they are they are vastly overprices. It makes much more sense to buy an old device that an run Lineage or PMOS.
by tombert | 2026-01-10 22:19:21+00:00
I disagree with this characterization.

I don't run Gnome now (since I have more fun hacking on Sway), but I really don't think that the characterization of it being a "tablet desktop" is actually very fair. I found Gnome to be very productive, and actually extremely keyboard focused. Outside of a tiling window manager like Sway or i3, I actually have found it more keyboard-centric than any other desktop I've used.

The reason I am harping on keyboard is because to me the keyboard is the signature differentiator between "desktop" and "tablet".

I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.

It wasn't until I decided to stick with Gnome for a few weeks (using the Antergos distro of Arch) that I came around, and now I find it to be the most productive of the "normie" desktops on Linux.
by tom_0 | 2026-01-10 22:19:28+00:00
Our initial plan was to simply ask enough for the game that the price would cover the costs on average... but that means that we're basically encouraged to have people play the game as little as possible? We're looking into some kind of subscription now, it sounds weird but I do think it's a better incentive in this case. Plus we can actually ask for less upfront.
by cyrialize | 2026-01-10 22:19:29+00:00
My daily log file basically looks like this:

* Year

* Month

** Day

For example:
* 2025

* January

** Saturday 01/10/26

In each day heading I'll have either a short note (like saying what meeting happened), or a link to a separate org file.

I keep an org file for each JIRA ticket I'm working on, so I'll link it out there. The presence of a link indicates that I've worked on that ticket that day.

Then in each individual ticket file I'll just keep top level day headings with notes of what I've done on the ticket, as well as other headings.

For example, an org file for a ticket would look something like:

* PR 1

#+BEGIN_SRC markdown

I like to pre-write up my PRs in a doc block in markdown in org mode just to use my keybindings. I copy-paste when I create a PR.

#+END

* Monday 01/01/26

- Started work on this today, figuring out where in the codebase to touch

- Straightforward, got a PR out

When I need to find something, I use something like consult-org-heading or consult-outline or consult-line.
by mikro | 2026-01-10 22:19:33+00:00
I've been waiting for someone to dig into this more deeply! Looking forward to Part 2!

I use both Claude Code and Xcode with a local LLM (running with LM Studio) and I noticed they both have system prompts that make it work like magic.

If anyone reading this interested in setting up Claude Code to run offline, I followed these instructions:

https://medium.com/@luongnv89/setting-up-claude-code-locally...

My personal LLM preference is for Qwen3-Next-80B with 4bit quantization, about ~45GB in ram.
by derf_ | 2026-01-10 22:19:40+00:00
I do not know anything about this team, but I worked with a team before that migrated from a native app to an Electron-based version. It was worse in literally every way except one: the developers on that team preferred developing that way. Nothing else mattered.

The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.
by 63stack | 2026-01-10 22:20:01+00:00
>With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.

I'd argue it's the opposite. Windows stuff randomly breaking on forced unattended updates is a common trope by now. If you try to search for solutions, you will find "Trusted Microsoft Computing Expert Gold Level Diamond Star" people on MS forums giving you advice ranging from "reinstall drivers, uninstall drivers, update bios, run virus scan, and defrag your ssd".

If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.
by lkbm | 2026-01-10 22:20:15+00:00
Earlier today, I was thinking about doing something somewhat similar to this.

I was recently trying to remember a portal fantasy I read as a kid. Goodreads has some impressive lists, not just "Portal Fantasies"[0], but "Portal Fantasies where the portal is on water[1], and a seven more "where/what's the portal" categories like that.

But the portal fantasy I was seeking is on the water and not on the list.

LLMs have failed me so far, as has browsing the larger portal fantasy list. So, I thought, what if I had an LLM look through a list of kids books published in the 1990s and categorize "is this a portal fantasy?" and "which category is the portal?"

I would 1. possibly find my book and 2. possibly find dozens of books I could add to the lists. (And potentially help augment other Goodread-like sites.)

Haven't done it, but I still might.

Anyway, thanks for making this. It's a really cool project!

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/103552.Portal_Fantasy_Bo...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/172393.Fiction_Portal_is...
by dh2022 | 2026-01-10 22:20:55+00:00
The reason they are bringing the whole crew back is most likely cost related. The whole crew was due back in February anyway. They are bringing everyone home a bit early; otherwise they would need another flight a few weeks later.

And nobody is retreating: there will be 1 American and 2 Russians left on ISS. All of this from the article.
by pipes | 2026-01-10 22:21:30+00:00
I've done the same, though I've used Linux in work and home for 22 years (I think 2004 was my first install).

At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.

A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.

It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.

The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-10 22:22:25+00:00
Yes, prices have gone down over the years, but still unaffordable by people who can afford less.

Don't get me wrong, MacOS graphics, aesthetics, GUI, are awesome and I like its consistency but there are cons, too.

They typically have a higher upfront cost, limited upgrades, fewer ports/software options, repair challenges.

For comparisons, I purchased an Acer Helios 300, three or four years with the following specs:

The Acer Predator Helios 300
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Storage: 512 GB SSD
Display: 15.6" Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS ComfyView
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 20xx.

I upgraded the machine's drives, to three, run Windows on the 500GB SSD drive, Linux on a 2TB M.2 drive and have a 4TB storage drive.

This is not something that I could do on a MacOS without a significant price upgrade. As such, I would say that MacOS is restrictive as far as hardware upgrade, and price. It's just Eye Candy for most people.
by robbiet480 | 2026-01-10 22:22:31+00:00
> Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer.

Linus Torvalds is now vibe-coding
by nh2 | 2026-01-10 22:22:53+00:00
Excellent, I will try it straight away. I'll pay out 75% if it works (as it fixes my immediate problem), and the remaining 25% if it gets merged. I'll email you after my test.

I think one possible complaint you might get in the review is that when refreshing is fully disabled in the menu, people won't see new networks come up (e.g. when they had just enabled Wifi, or unsuspended).

Maybe a good solution would be to to have one unclickable menu entry pop up labelled e.g. "Networks changed, re-open this menu" to solve that. Probably in nm-applet's main context menu of which the list is a child, instead of in the list itself, so that its appearance doesn't move around the networks on which the user is currently intending to click.
by durch | 2026-01-10 22:23:23+00:00
Format conversions (text → code, description → SVG) are the transformations most reach for first. To me the interesting ones are cognitive: your vague sense → something concrete you can react to → refined understanding. The LLM gives you an artifact to recognize against. That recognition ("yes, more of that" or "no, not quite") is where understanding actually shifts. Each cycle sharpens what you're looking for, a bit like a flywheel, each feeds into the next one.
Show HN: Horizon Engine – C++20 3D FPS Game Engine with ECS and Modern Renderer
by bhdr26k | 2026-01-10 22:23:36+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m working on an experimental 3D FPS game engine in C++20, aiming to deeply understand engine internals from first principles rather than just using existing frameworks.

Currently I'm strictly following LearnOpenGL docs.

This project focuses on:
Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture for high performance.
OpenGL 4.1 rendering with a PBR pipeline, material system, HDR, SSAO, and shadow mapping.
Modular systems: input, physics (Jolt), audio (miniaudio), assets, hot reload.
A sample FPS game & debug editor built into the repo.

Repo: https://github.com/jackthepunished/horizon-engine

This isn’t intended to be a commercial rival to any commercial game engines.

it’s a learning and exploration project: understanding why certain engine decisions are made, and how to build low-level engine systems from scratch.

I’m especially looking for feedback on:
Architecture choices (ECS design, render loop, module separation) Your thoughts on modern C++ engine patterns

What you’d build vs stub early in a homemade engine

Tips from experienced graphics/engine developers
Criticism and suggestions are very welcome — it’s early days and meant to evolve.
Thanks for checking it out!
by worik | 2026-01-10 22:23:47+00:00
> Money attracts people who want money.

Yes.

I think the future lies in organisation's bound by ties other that money

In my home town there is an example: Kai Tahu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C4%81i_Tahu#Trading_enterpr...)

Family based. Start with $170M in the 1990s and now worth billions

The basically aquire and never divest.
by bhdr26k | 2026-01-10 22:24:58+00:00
A bit more context on the project and where it’s at right now:

This is a learning-first engine,

The focus so far has been on core architecture: ECS design, render loop, system boundaries, and data flow.

Renderer is OpenGL 4.1, mainly for portability and debuggability; not aiming for cutting-edge features yet.

Physics uses Jolt, audio via miniaudio, with a simple asset pipeline and hot-reload experiments.

Current limitations / things I’m unsure about:
ECS ergonomics vs raw performance trade-offs
Renderer abstraction depth (how far to generalize without over-engineering)
Build times and compile-time vs runtime cost in modern C++
What systems are worth fully building vs stubbing early (animation, scripting, editor tooling)

If you’ve built engines, renderers, or large C++ systems before, I’d especially love:
Architecture critiques
“I regret doing X early” lessons
Suggestions on what to simplify or throw away now
Happy to answer any technical questions — thanks for taking the time to look.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-10 22:25:09+00:00
>These AI companies are paying for the reactors.

This is demonstrably false with negative revenue, and when the gamblers default on the loans it is the public that will bear the consequences. Similar to sub-prime mortgages people on the con are getting tired.

Dismissing facts because you personally feel they are not important is silly. If you think the US will "win" the "AGI" race... than you are fooling yourself, as everything has already been stolen.

Have a great day, and maybe go outside for a walk to settle down a bit if you are uncomfortable with the way imaginary puppies, bunnies, and kittens make you feel. Community non-profit organizations offer tangible goodwill, and are very different from ephemeral LLM fads externalizing a suckers-bet on the public. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcGLveebwjo
by kay_o | 2026-01-10 22:25:23+00:00
The ASPNETCDN site examples all have a fallback so nothing should have broken if you followed their examples. It's interesting they did this given others do not.

such as

Production applications should not take a hard dependency on CDN assets. Applications should test for the CDN asset referenced, and use a fallback asset when the CDN is not available.

// Fallback to loading jQuery from a local path if the CDN is unavailable
(window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="/scripts/jquery-1.9.0.min.js"><\/script>'));
by MuffinFlavored | 2026-01-10 22:25:38+00:00
I am surprised that... if they have a session ID of some sort for your chat that they make you re-send the entire message history each time? Not a single kind of cache or stateful proxy/buffering mechanism? Guessing that extra cost in bandwidth is cheaper than having to develop and maintain that? Seems kind of like an obvious optimization/design tradeoff they could eventually decide to change one day?
by timoth3y | 2026-01-10 22:26:28+00:00
What meaningful connections did it uncover?

You have an interesting idea here, but looking over the LLM output, it's not clear what these "connections" actually mean, or if they mean anything at all.

Feeding a dataset into an LLM and getting it to output something is rather trivial. How is this particular output insightful or helpful? What specific connections gave you, the author, new insight into these works?

You correctly, and importantly point out that "LLMs are overused to summarise and underused to help us read deeper", but you published the LLM summary without explaining how the LLM helped you read deeper.
by dust42 | 2026-01-10 22:27:24+00:00
Distilling from a closed model like GPT-4 via API would be architecturally crippled.

You’re restricted to output logits only, with no access to attention patterns, intermediate activations, or layer-wise representations which are needed for proper knowledge transfer.

Without alignment of Q/K/V matrices or hidden state spaces the student model cannot learn the teacher model's reasoning inductive biases - only its surface behavior which will likely amplify hallucinations.

In contrast, open-weight teachers enable multi-level distillation: KL on logits + MSE on hidden states + attention matching.

Does that answer your question?
by noAnswer | 2026-01-10 22:28:12+00:00
Facetiously: Well actually, you didn't need a driver for the SATA drive but the SATA controller.

Something that was also true for Windows and such a common problem that many BIOSes would offer a IDE compatibility mode one could switch to.

26 years ago I installed SUSE and it just worked on my self build PC. Smooth sailing all around. Than I tried Debian and couldn't for the life of me get X11 to work.

So yeah, the distro and hardware lottery is still a problem.
by cowboylowrez | 2026-01-10 22:29:09+00:00
I'd store levels anyways, because each time tables change, you're going to have to determine what to store so you are writing the calculation code anyways in case it turns out storing wasn't a good idea, so you can fall back to deriving. either way you have to code the derivative value calculator. the reason I'd store tho, is that once someone levels up, I think it's be an odd expectation to be demoted somehow but then again depends on the game I guess. I get demoted back to moron often when I'm playing chess haha still they're not going to derive my rating each time so they store it.
by 8organicbits | 2026-01-10 22:29:30+00:00
Can someone break this down for me?

I'm seeing "Thanos committing fraud" in a section about "useful lies". Given that the founder is currently in prison, it seems odd to consider the lie useful instead of harmful. It kinda seems like the AI found a bunch of loosely related things and mislabeled the group.

If you've read these books I'm not seeing what value this adds.
by forgotaccount22 | 2026-01-10 22:30:02+00:00
It only stops refreshing if you are hovering the actual SSID list items which in my opinion is the cleanest way to do it, if you want new data you can reclick/rehover the "available networks". The Other option is putting the refresh on a global timer, but that would add magic which isn't clear to the user.

Thanks, I will be awaiting your test result!
by troupo | 2026-01-10 22:30:36+00:00
You're probably confusing something with something?

CSS Modules are a JS-only third party solution re-invented/re-implemented in a dozen different ways for various JS frontend frameworks. Requires setting up, requires learning an additional library.

If you mean these CSS modules: https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules?tab=readme-ov-fil... then they need to be supported by whatever build chain you use. And you literally need to use them slightly different than normal CSS. E.g. for Vite yuo need to have `.module.css` extension. And they often rely on additional libraries to learn. E.g. you can enable Lightning CSS with aforementioned Vite which comes with its own CSS flavour: https://lightningcss.dev/css-modules.html

If you mean CSS import attributes, they only appeared in 2024 in Chrome and Firefox, early 2025 in mobile Android etc. and they don't provide magical local scoping out of the box: https://caniuse.com/wf-css-modules