MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Tanoc | 2026-01-12 06:02:58+00:00
A general strike at the level required to change things requires roping in unwilling participants as well. Probably on the scale of breaking infrastructure like payment systems or over the road shipping. If nobody can ignore current events because it's not just impacting but impeding and quickly degrading their quality of life they'll get angry. However just so long as people can go home and play their videogames, or listen to their podcasts, or read their books, they'll be able to focus enough of their attention away from events and keep their stress below the critical threshold just enough that they won't do anything. Calhoun's Rat Utopia Experiment comes to mind in that the rats suffered any number of indignities, maladies, and stressors just so long as they had ample access to endorphin and melatonin sources in strong enough bursts to stave off the constant floods of cortisol and norepinephrine.

Political theory is that ten to fifteen percent of a given population needs to actively rebel in order to enact change in a nation. The U.S. is fragmented enough by distance that you would need at least thirty percent of the national population to reach this state in order to get the ten percent in each of the six regions. Currently the number of people protesting is thought to be around four to six percent nationally, meaning it's less than one percent regionally. Part of that is because it's January, and most large scale protests happen in late spring or in the summer because schools are out and the weather doesn't suck. But part of it is simply because not enough people are motivated to act. Either pessimism or lack of direct harm is keeping them from caring.

So no matter what you're going to have to piss some people off. But it'd be better to piss off the people who will share your goals and ask forgiveness, because the other group was pissed from the beginning and have no forgiveness to ask for.
by bigfatkitten | 2026-01-12 06:03:27+00:00
I manage both, alongside macOS. There are heaps of things that are trivial to do on a Windows or macOS desktop fleet that are a headache on Linux.

macOS is the easiest endpoint platform to manage. Apple’s MDM capabilities are amazing, and don’t leave me wanting for much at all other than application control, but there are plenty of commercial apps to do this.

Windows (in an Active Directory environment) is pretty good, but Group Policy has grown unwieldy over the decades. Policies can conflict in strange ways, and Microsoft has no made no effort to keep their policy language consistent. Sometimes ‘enabled’ means a feature is enabled, other times it means it is disabled, and vice versa.

Deploying hardware-bound machine certificates for 802.1x, VPN etc to Windows or macOS is extremely easy. Takes 10 minutes to set up.

On Linux, this is a very significant engineering effort that would take months, assuming you happen to have people with the skills on your payroll at all.
by trueno | 2026-01-12 06:03:50+00:00
I actually think it's less about code style and more about the disjointed way end outcomes seem to be the culmination of a lot of prompt attempts over the course of a project/implementation.

The funny thing is reviewing stuff claude has made isn't actually unfamiliar to me in the slightest. It's something I'm intimately familiar with and have been intimately familiar with for many years, long before this AI stuff blew up...

..it's what code I've reviewed/maintained/rejected looks like when a consulting company was brought on board to build something. Such a company that leverages probably underpaid and overworked laborers both overseas and US based workers on visas. The delivered documentation/code is noisy+disjointed.
by meenal_xyz | 2026-01-12 06:03:54+00:00
Hey HN! Author here.

I work on AI products and was constantly missing school events because information was scattered everywhere—emails, WhatsApp groups, paper flyers that mysteriously appear in backpacks.

Over the holidays, I built Relay as a personal project. Forward emails to a Relay address or send messages/photos to Relay on WhatsApp → AI extracts tasks/events → you review and add to calendar.

The AI part was trivial (Claude handled it day one). What nearly killed me:

- WhatsApp's 24-hour messaging rule - Can't send messages outside the 24hr window without approved templates
- Template categorization - Kept getting marked "marketing" when they're clearly utility
- Platform dashboards that lie - Status showed "verified" but actually meant "pending"
- OAuth security reviews - Would have taken months for Google Calendar integration
- Telecom compliance - A2P rules, toll-free verification, things I never planned to learn

Three product decisions I'm proud of:

1. Meet users where they are (WhatsApp) - Could have built a standalone app, but parents are already drowning in apps. Zero new habits > technical elegance.

2. Transparency over workarounds - When WhatsApp's limitations broke deliverability, I added one sentence to onboarding explaining how it works and what to do. Support issues dropped to near-zero.

3. User advocacy - When templates got miscategorized as "marketing," I requested a review. WhatsApp surveyed my users directly. They reclassified it as utility.

Eventually WhatsApp surveyed my users and approved the templates as utility, which felt like a huge win.

This is a personal project I built for myself and a few other parents—not a business, just solving a real problem. When things break, parents message me directly and I fix it.

Current state: Few dozen parents using it, retention is strong (parents who use it for a week keep using it), shipping daily improvements.

The lesson: The AI is never the bottleneck. It's the boring infrastructure, platform constraints, and product decisions about where to meet users and what to be transparent about.

Wrote about the full journey on substack https://meenalnalwaya.substack.com/.../i-tried-to-build-a...

Happy to answer questions about WhatsApp API hell, OAuth decisions, or anything else!

Try it if you're a parent: https://relay-parent-parse.lovable.app
by ntnsndr | 2026-01-12 06:04:12+00:00
Remove all the xfce design elements you don't like. Ytou can even use a borderless theme, eg https://github.com/ushioichi/borderless-xfwm-theme

I added i3 so everything is on the keyboard.

XFCE is great because it lets you put it in the background. The GUIs are there when you need them, but it is just as happy if you don't.
by TheDong | 2026-01-12 06:05:17+00:00
> specifically referring to running Asahi Linux.

Asahi linux would have been "a company that's extremely hostile to this effort."

They instead said "a company that's extremely hostile to this _kind of_ effort", which turns it into a broader category, which I believe quite reasonably includes their hostility to general "using their devices outside of the apple walled garden".

If you're going to be pedantic, please at least be correct, but "this kind of" clearly makes it more broad than just asahi linux itself.
by deathanatos | 2026-01-12 06:06:06+00:00
> [Kubernetes…] Managed clusters could make things easier, but they aren’t cheap. That would defeat the initial motivation behind retiring moana.

Kubernetes is perfectly fine running on a "cluster" with a single node / this seems to be under the misconception that k8s requires >1 node. It doesn't, though obviously a single or two node cluster will not maintain a majority if a node goes down. For self-hosting, though, that might be perfectly acceptable.

(My own self-hosted server was a single-node k8s cluster.)
by Kephael | 2026-01-12 06:06:14+00:00
Exactly, interest rates must come down due to the government debt burden. This debt burden creates a strong incentive to force rates to zero, but we have to pretend the Federal Reserve is independent.

Separately, I think Jerome Powell is one of the worst Fed chairs as he is most (but not exclusively) responsible for what happened to the housing market by creating a lock-in effect and focusing on their CPI basket.
by nine_k | 2026-01-12 06:06:27+00:00
Why, running KDE in VirtualBox in full-screen mode must be fine :) At least, I did it breathlessly with Xfce, on much older Apple hardware, and it was... just fine.

(OTOH running text-mode Emacs from a headless VM in a full-screen built-in Terminal may suddenly feel sluggish. Kitty or WezTerm solves this.)
by 9dev | 2026-01-12 06:06:59+00:00
> We just started working on a full book app that will be a private book diary, along with recommendations and insights based on your Book DNA. Think Goodreads, but rebuilt for readers who want a private space to track what they read, keep notes, and get truly personalized book recommendations (like Pandora or Spotify for books).

Oh! This is very similar to the project I am working on, Colibri[1], a self-hostable ebook library. I'm an avid Shepherd user though, and I would love to make some kind of integration happen… would you be open to a chat??

[1] https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri
by teleforce | 2026-01-12 06:08:56+00:00
Yes, it's a just link to an excellent book on virtual communication.

I highly recommend this book for all the remote workers, office workers, and the rest of us for professional virtual communication authored by a well-known researcher in the field that spent decades on the topic. Fun facts, he even interviewed and include quotations from David Heinemeier Hansson of the RoR fame, regarding open source movement where according to him virtual communication has been the default since the very beginning.
by dangus | 2026-01-12 06:09:02+00:00
I am much more in-between. I don’t mind cloud stuff and even consider it safer than my local stuff due to other smart people doing the work. And I’m not looking for a second job self hosting, except for my game servers.

I mostly just don’t want to be stuck with cloud services from big tech that have slimy practices. I’d rather pay for honest products that let me own my data better. With the exception given to GitHub which I guess is out of my own laziness and maybe I should do something about that.

If you’re using gitea you might be interested in Forgejo, it’s a fork and I think it’s well regarded since gitea went more commercial-ish IIRC?
by Grom_PE | 2026-01-12 06:09:06+00:00
I've found Xfce with Wallis theme to be quite comfortable after I ditched Windows 7. Been using it for 3 years now.

Also I enjoyed how easily I could modify it:

- xfwm4: zoom only to multiples of integer, nearest neighbor only

- xfwm4: stop moving zoomed area after the cursor when Scroll Lock is on

- xfce4-screenshooter: supply custom actions with parameters %x %y %w %h of a selected rectangle, allowing me, for example, to select a rectangle and then launch a screen recording script.

Never found the use for multiple desktops, though.

The only part that irritates me is having to interact with the GTK file chooser (file open dialog). Someday I might be annoyed enough to replace it.
by tanin | 2026-01-12 06:09:25+00:00
I'm launching many landing pages these days and want to collect emails into waitlists.

I have been working on Wait: https://github.com/tanin47/wait, a self-hostable CORS-enabled headless waitlist system that connects to Google Sheets.

I have many landing pages hosted for free on Netlify and Github Pages as static pages. All of them have waitlist forms that send cross-domain AJAX requests to the Wait server, which then writes the emails to Google Sheets. Since there's no iframe, it's easier for me to style the form and customize the after actions.

The Wait server is hosted on OVHCloud for $4/month. It's probably the most economical option for a waitlist system.
by furyofantares | 2026-01-12 06:09:26+00:00
I think you should try harder to find their limits. Be as picky as you want, but don't just take over after it gave you something you didn't like. Try again with a prompt that talks about the parts you think were bad the first time. I don't mean iterate with it, I mean start over with a brand new prompt. Try to figure out if there is a prompt that would have given you the result you wanted from the start.

It won't be worth it the first few times you try this, and you may not get it to where you want it. I think you might be pickier than others and you might be giving it harder problems, but I also bet you could get better results out of the box after you do this with a few problems.
by wakawaka28 | 2026-01-12 06:10:02+00:00
I happen to think that free speech is a human right. It amounts to the right to communicate. It is impossible to have effective democracy without free speech. But democracy is not the source of free speech rights. As we are born, we have the right to make sounds and communicate basically just like the animals which do so freely. It is only taken from us by force or social pressures (that probably also require force). I also believe in the fundamental right to self-defense. It is not anti-social to resist physical threats, including the use of physical force against aggressors to the full extent necessary to protect one's self.

Why are these natural capabilities and tendencies given the status of "rights"? It boils down to the simple belief that we each have the right to try to be happy and have autonomy. We can't have a free society if people are not allowed to express negative emotions. Likewise, nobody would stand for a civilization that did not grant individuals the legal protections required to be physically safe. That means that the right to self-defense must be respected.

We happen to have legal procedures to protect people against defamation and certain other kinds of speech, but the speech in question must be provably false or somehow violating intellectual property and the damages must be significant for anything to be done about it. I think these exceptions can easily get out of hand to the point where free speech is a distant dream. Anyway, I guess the right to free speech has always relied on people to be wise and tolerant enough to not censor each other. Philosophizing about how much censorship is justifiable will not matter if a majority of your neighbors are willing to censor you over random subjective issues like how you make them feel or whether they think your opinions are correct.
by ntnsndr | 2026-01-12 06:10:06+00:00
I'm not sure I agree. It takes getting used to, and the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need. The settings feel like you're almost in a config file. Except for on old computers, Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.

I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best approach to bring people into the ecosystem.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-12 06:11:31+00:00
I think this post is a great example of a different point made in this thread. People confuse vibe-coding with llm-assisted coding all the time (no shade for you, OP). There is an implied bias that all LLM code is bad, unmaintainable, incomprehensible. That's not necessarily the case.

1) Either you, the person owning the code, or you + LLms, or just the LLMs in the future. All of them can work. And they can work better with a bit of prep work.

The latest models are very good at following instructions. So instead of "write a service that does X" you can use the tools to ask for specifics (i.e. write a modular service, that uses concept A and concept B to do Y. It should use x y z tech stack. It should use this ruleset, these conventions. Before testing run these linters and these formatters. Fix every env error before testing. etc).

That's the main difference between vibe-coding and llm-assisted coding. You get to decide what you ask for. And you get to set the acceptance criteria. The key po9int that non-practitioners always miss is that once a capability becomes available to these models, you can layer them on top of previous capabilities and get a better end result. Higher instruction adherence -> better specs -> longer context -> better results -> better testing -> better overall loop.

2) You are confusing the fact that some labs subsidise inference costs (for access to data, usage metrics, etc) with the true cost of inference on a given model size. Youc an already have a good indication on what the cost is today for any given model size. 3rd party inference shops exist today, and they are not subsidising the costs (they have no reason to). You can do the math as well, and figure out an average cost per token for a given capability. And those open models are out, they're not gonna change, and you can get the same capability tomorrow or in 10 years. (and likely at lower costs, since hardware improves, inference stack improves, etc).
by lostlogin | 2026-01-12 06:11:34+00:00
When you first turn on iCloud Photos, it can take a while to upload your photos to iCloud. You can continue to use Photos while your photos are being uploaded.
To have iCloud Photos sync photos to all your devices, sign in to the same Apple Account to turn on iCloud Photos on all your devices.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/photos/phtf5e48489c/ma...
by nine_k | 2026-01-12 06:12:57+00:00
Exactly my point. It was too hard to make the grab box different. It was not too hard to pretend that the hyper-rounded corners would also make some layouts look and maybe act problematic. It was not too hard to splurge time and effort on liquid-glassing the entire UI toolkit.

In a word, it's hubris. It's not care about the user, it's not even care about market domination or setting a fashion trend; both have been flunked. It looks like somebody's ego needed an affirmation, or someone's grip on corporate power needed a demonstration. It's a bad, bad sign of a deadly corporate disease.
by deangiberson | 2026-01-12 06:13:17+00:00
I have time to code up little tools for myself and my team. I can now automate simple things quickly to improve workflow, like gathering all the modified tickets in the past 24 hours and writing them out in our daily sprint document (it's the process they want so I go with it). Am I directly contributing to the critical path code, no, but I'm able to understand more quickly. I'm a Sr SDM and have been divorced from daily code for several year, now I'm able to get a broad view of things more quickly. Even just the act of finding dependent packages removes a little friction which means I'm less likely to let it become a road hump.
by goose0004 | 2026-01-12 06:13:51+00:00
GLyphLang is intended to be a whole standalone language. It's implemented in Go, but it doesn't transpile to or from it. It has its own lexer, parser, type checker, bytecode compiler, and stack-based VM. If it helps, the compilation pipeline currently looks like this:

source (.glyph) -> AST -> bytecode (.glyphc) -> VM.

While the original intent was to have something tailored to AI that a human could manage, I'm realizing (to your point) that will absolutely not be necessary sometime in the likely near future. I've started working on making GlyphLang itself significantly more token-friendly and am adding a top layer that will essentially do what I think you've suggested. I'm adding expand and compact commands for bidirectional conversion between symbols and keywords that will allow engineers to continue developing with more familiar syntaxes on a top layer (.glyphx), while LLMs will generate actual .glyph code. Once completed, the pipeline will look like this:

.glyphx (optional) -> .glyph -> AST -> bytecode -> VM

Regarding #2, that's a great point and actually something I considered, though admittedly maybe not long enough. Regardless, I've tried to develop this with a value proposition that isn't purely about cost (though that does drive a lot of this). I'm also working on these 3 points:
1. Reduced hallucinations: symbols are unambiguous - there shouldn't be confusion between def/fn/func/function across languages (no formal benchmarks yet, but they're planned)
2. Context window efficiency: fitting more code in context allows for better reasoning about larger codebases, regardless of cost
3. Language-neutrality (someone else brought this up): symbols work the same whether the model was trained on English, Spanish, or code

I think even if tokens become free tomorrow, fitting 2x more code in a context window will still significantly improve output quality. Hopefully it will be necessary or at the very least helpful in the next 12-18 months, but who knows. I really appreciate the questions, comments, and callout!
by verdverm | 2026-01-12 06:14:20+00:00
Token efficiency is only one metric. Simplicity of syntax and semantics are another valuable one.

re: tokens and session length, there are other ways to manage this than language choice. Summarization is one, something I do is to not out read_file content in the messages, but rather in the system prompt. This means that when it tries to reread after edit, we don't have two copies of the file in context.

Going to 10M token sessions, keeping per turn context under 100k, working on Golang... language choice for the sake of tokens does not seem a good thing to decide based on
by trueno | 2026-01-12 06:15:15+00:00
lmao same. actually a really cool fun/concept it's definitely wordle popularity caliber, but once i got to the last 3 words and ended up in this scenario and the hint button said that i was like -_- owned.

not sure what the right game experience would be for that. a notif that says "You can still solve more words but you'll never solve them all!" doesn't quite work here, because it's sort of saying "there's only one _right_ way to win, but good luck figuring out the right order". Still, it would be better than me finding that out at the very end.

it would probably be pretty important to design levels so that the unwinnable states can't happen early in the game, but it's getting a little abstract to think about at this point. sort of brings me back to that unblock it game from the old ipod touch days.
by vintermann | 2026-01-12 06:15:57+00:00
I think it was a manufactured bestseller. Selling books is a for-profit exercise. I don't think crazy theories are anything new, "new age" beliefs are really a continuous thing since the second great awakening at least. But in the 70s, bookstore chains realized that a certain demographic bought a lot of books, and you no longer could leave all that profit to ill-run independent crystal-selling bookstores just because of some high-minded concern for truth. Give the voracious book buyers the books they want, let the marketplace sort out what's true or not. That was the ethos of the time.

This demographic was called "new age" by the marketers, but almost no one who bought such books called themselves new age.

But people who wrote such books became very aware of the demographic profile too. And while there had certainly been grifter cult leaders before who didn't sincerely believe what they preached, now they realized that they could go straight to profit, just by writing a book. No need for the messy high-intensity "make a cult" step. The bookstores were on their side now.
by andrei_says_ | 2026-01-12 06:16:00+00:00
A few thoughts:

Someone smart recently wrote that the key factor is becoming who is responsible for the functionality, not who wrote the code. Who guarantees correctness and takes responsibility when shtf?

I’d add - especially when the codebases are becoming unknowable because of complexity and speed of code generation.

And the code is generated by entities that do not have a distinction of correctness, or reality.

Essentially emergent genies which we know are blind to the world but very capable of putting together well-sounding sentences.