MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elevation | 2026-01-02 18:44:23+00:00
> can't see the benefits for occasional use

I've lost work and personal data to bit rot in NAS filesystems before. Archived VM images wouldn't boot anymore after months in storage. Multiple vacation photos became colorful static part way through on disk due to a bit flip in the middle of the JPEG stream. I've had zero issues since switching to ZFS (even without ECC.)

Another huge benefit of ZFS is the copy-on-write (CoW) snapshots, which saved me many times as an IT administrator. It was effortless to restore files when users accidentally deleted them, and recovering from a cryptolocker type attack is also instant. Without CoW, snapshots are possible, but they're expensive and slow. I saw a 20-user office try to snapshots on their 30TB Windows Server NAS hoping to avoid having to revert to tape backups to recover the occasional accidentally deleted file. While hourly snapshots would have been ideal, the NAS only had room for only two snapshots, and would crawl to a halt while it created them. But ZFS's performance won't suffer if you snapshot every minute.

When it's time to backup, ZFS' send/recv capability means you only ever move the differences when backing up, and they're pre-computed so you don't have to re-index an entire volume to determine that you only need to move 124KB, making small transfers are lightning fast. Once backup completes, you have verified that the snapshot on both sides is bit-for-bit identical. While this is the essential property of a backup, most filesystems cannot guarantee it.

ZFS has become a hard requirement for any storage system I build/buy.
by joshthoward | 2026-01-02 18:44:32+00:00
Cloudflare Durable Objects | Multiple roles | REMOTE | https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/durab...

Durable Objects is the Cloudflare Developer Platform's product for building stateful serverless applications.

We are hiring:

- Senior level systems engineers: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/5390243

- Senior level product engineers: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/7408167

- An engineering manager with systems engineering experience: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/7493943
by dizlexic | 2026-01-02 18:44:58+00:00
It's almost like connected infrastructure is inherently unsafe.
I stand by "your kid, your problem". I don't want any kid to be "unsafe", but commonsense went out the window when schools started to require the internet.

The true "safe" option is not allowing any of this until your child is old enough to understand the risks... so 18? 25?

All I'm saying is there is no route to prevent all bad things (or even most) and people who say otherwise are generally selling you something.
by syngrog66 | 2026-01-02 18:45:27+00:00
Location: Colorado, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Golang (Go), C, Python, Java, SQL, git, Docker, Linux/POSIX, Internet & web dev, cloud IaaS, distributed, concurrency & threading, performance & scalability, some math & ML

Résumé/CV:
https://github.com/mkramlich/portfolio/

Email: groglogic+hn2027jan@gmail.com

programming for decades. solid fundamentals. troubleshooter. tech lead/arch. SRE-ish. solved legacy Heisenbugs & shipped, many times.

author of perf cheatsheet

writing book on HPC

US citizen, native English

ex Orbitz on core tech (JVM, GC, perf regress follow-up, ops, logs, instrum, caches, sessions, threads, db conns)

research & due diligence for US State Dept on public defenses against foreign adversarial propaganda & disinfo (ie. natsec)
game engine creator & toolmaker since kid. once built small sw biz

recent client: sys prog R&D on mem alloc latency & SEGV resilience. C on Linux. delivered code, benchmarks, diagrams & report on how to upgrade perf & avail of their soft-RT (micros mattered), $-impacting backend

LatLearn: FOSS Golang latency instrum & reporting lib
by terminalshort | 2026-01-02 18:45:29+00:00
What if 25 years ago I spoke out against opiods as highly addictive and dangerous. Remember, this was in contradiction to the scientific consensus at the time that modern opioids were not that addictive. A reasonable person could have said at the time that my claims were false and posed a danger to people who were in pain and needed this medication. In hindsight it's obvious that the scientific consensus was catastrophically wrong, but it people like you were in charge, people could be jailed for their dissent.
by reactordev | 2026-01-02 18:45:34+00:00
I took a deep dive into the code.

I respect what you’re trying to do but this feels like a solution in search of a problem.

The kind of markets this would tailor towards already have their own escrow management systems.

I do, however, see this being relevant to MLS and the Housing industry. It’s a shady industry with scammy ads and “handyman special” vibes from people trying to sell legitimate and illegitimate listings.
by mystraline | 2026-01-02 18:45:54+00:00
And they can have sex legally when they are 16. But oh noes if 2 16 year olds send nudes to each other. Then, somehow, is "child" sexual assault images.

Frankly, these half-assed laws disenfranchise an already not-permitted-to-vote populace. But somehow these "kids" can be declared as adults if they are 16 and having sex or courts deem them 'adults', but simultaneously find them to be parental property.

Glad I dont have children. The situation is a toxic cesspool.
by skybrian | 2026-01-02 18:46:15+00:00
It sounds like you might be under the impression that it's a pro-AI industry law that's intended to reduce liability? It's not.

It's more like saying that if the zoo animals get out and hurt someone, it's not a defense that to say that they're wild animals. Sure, monkeys can be pretty clever, but the zoo has a responsibility to protect the public.

(I think AI characters are more like ghosts than animals, but it's a similar principle.)
by xg15 | 2026-01-02 18:46:41+00:00
Maybe OT, but I thought for a long time that "follow" was some sophisticated file descriptor trickery that required you to somehow "stream" the file while reading and would therefore be incompatible with opening a file "normally".

My mind was blown when finding out its really just "keep on polling after EOF". Meaning there is absolutely no difference between opening a file normally and "following" a file - and software could easily switch between the two "modes" on the fly.
by user_7832 | 2026-01-02 18:46:44+00:00
I think this is a very interesting observation, because my experience has been fairly opposite. Disclaimer, I've grown up with windows.

Yet I've never had to reinstall windows on any of my devices ever. I've never had things behave in unusual or unpredictable ways.

Meanwhile, a highly suggested utility (on reddit, SE/SO, and even a few distro forums) for touchpad gestures borked my gnome setup. (Uninstalling it, as you might have guessed from my story and tone, did diddly squat.)

Just today I manually flushed my dnf packages (or clear them? Not sure of the terminology.) In the past, I had to debug manually because apparently the default timeout for Fedora was causing timeout issues with a few 100ms internet latency. That was a fun rabit hole "why can't I install an app that's only available via dnf install" "Oh, because Fedora assumes you have good internet. But don't worry if you have Ubuntu, because that doesn't have these issues!".

...I've never even been made aware what download timeouts windows has. As it should be for a user.

I could go on and on. My windows partition goes nearly months without sleep, typically only rebooting if I run out of battery or want to install an update. Linux... doesn't have hibernate yet. Fortunately it doesn't matter! ...Because some odd memory leak (and gpu driver stuff perhaps?) forces me to shut down ever so often. Oh well.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-02 18:46:51+00:00
> I agree, but I also see absolutely no reason why 5 years old children would have access to a gaming device. Pretty much any other activity I can imagine is better for them.

I suggest expanding your imagination skills. There are definitely worse activities, like watching TV.

And there's physical limit to how much physical activity one can be doing. There's definitely a point of diminishing returns there.

And the skills one can develop with carefully curated games are hard to reproduce in any entertaining manner.

I mean, sure, I could have him do math but it's a lot more boring.

Playing games is definitely an "and", not an "exclusive or" proposition.

I was given access to computer games at that age and I'm definitely appreciative for it. I only realized the value when I was well into my 30s.
by epistasis | 2026-01-02 18:46:52+00:00
Thanks for the EarlyOOM pointer, it's one that I found (from HN) on my investigation of why an entire process group was getting killed rather than single processes.

The problem is not that OOM killing happens earlier under memory pressure, but rather the problem is what gets killed. Previously an offending process would get killed. Now it's an entire cgroup. So if you are using process isolation to run a batch of computation jobs, each of which takes different amounts of memory and it is not foreseeable which will take too much memory until runtime, the OOM killer takes out the batch manager and its shell and everything. So the process can't know ahead of time if it's taking too much memory, because allocations never fail, and the process itself shouldn't be monitoring what is going on the rest of the system to make run time decisions to quit. The entire batch of jobs is killed, rather than a single process dying (as happens for any number of errors) and continuing in with the rest of the batch of jobs. In fact, without interacting directly with systemd-run to create a new cgroup, it's impossible to monitor WTF happened to your process because of this new "nuke it from orbit" behavior.

During my searches on this another common error case is in an IDE where one process goes wild and takes too much memory, and then the whole IDE gets killed silently instead of single process killing allowing the app to save state.

This is a very fundamental change to how Linux has worked, it's a novel concept unfamiliar to long time users (who the fuck actually knows about cgroups or uses them extensively except for people heavy int containerization?), and workarounds for the behavior require introducing heavy dependency on systems in order to get basic functionality, making my code far less portable. I can understand being dependent on GNU, and some linuxisms in syscalls, but changing the basic semantics of launching new processes such that new code dependencies are needed for intricate cgroup control, well, that's a bit much for me. Leave systems-oomd to manage cgroups and containers, but having it manage desktop apps and standard Unix process launching leads to bad code.
by systemdesignai | 2026-01-02 18:47:11+00:00
Hi HN,
I have noticed a pattern, AI tools like Claude/Cursor/Windsurf/Antigravity write great functions but terrible architecture. If you ask for a "chat app", you get a toy implementation that won't scale.

But if you use System Design terms in your prompt (e.g. "connection pooling", "idempotency keys", "cache-aside pattern"), the AI changes its probability distribution and writes senior-level code.

I built this guide to bridge that gap. It covers standard System Design (Load Balancers, Kafka, etc.) but specifically focuses on *how to prompt for them*.
It's open source and I am planning to add more real-world designs weekly. Would love your feedback on the "Senior Thinking" sections!
by walz_only | 2026-01-02 18:47:38+00:00
WalzOps | https://walzforgovernor.org/
| Frontend, Backend, DevOps Engineers | Remote (non-US applicants only)

WalzOps is building fully automated daycare business infrastructure, treating “opening and operating a daycare” as a repeatable software pipeline. We focus on leasing coordination, synthetic receptionist systems, electronic paperwork submission, compliance workflows, scheduling, and payments, with the goal of replacing manual, human-heavy operations with end-to-end automation.

We’re hiring frontend engineers to build complex form-driven dashboards and operational UIs, backend engineers to design workflow engines and APIs for licensing, compliance, and automation, and DevOps engineers to own deployment, infrastructure, and repeatable multi-tenant environments. Our stack is modern, cloud-native, and automation-first, and we value people who enjoy turning messy real-world processes into deterministic systems.

This is a full-time, remote role with an async-first team. Non-US applicants only.
Apply by emailing hiring@walzforgovernor.org
with a short note about a boring business you’d automate next.
by metadope | 2026-01-02 18:48:00+00:00
People imagine there's an AI investment bubble, and the inevitable bursting will have financial consequences. Many will suffer (but we'll recover).

People also fear being erased from the labor market, as Prompt Engineers sharpen their AI pencils and draw guidelines that eliminate jobs.

There's also a knowing fear of misguided AI, newly hired into what was once a human's job, applying seriously stupid criteria to reject applicants for credit, housing, employment, benefits, etc. (This AI is already deployed. Here, there's another bubble, as many companies attempt competitive advantage by becoming early adopters.)

My personal main AI anxiety concerns the ongoing competitive build-out and the unknown ripple effect which the demand for more resources will incur.

The race to construct bigger better data centers is intense and expensive. I fear the recklessness of the magnificent seven, as they attempt to blaze a trail across the country, recommissioning rickety infrastructure and (I speculate) cutting corners, putting the entire national grid at risk of cascading failures.

I could live with all the other failure modes, but I really don't want to have to live without electricity.
by quechimba | 2026-01-02 18:48:34+00:00
Location: Colombia
Remote: Yes, or in Medellín
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Node, React, TypeScript, CSS, Next.js, Postgres, and more!
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u8lj0Hes9jugQt2l7_ZrMxgPVkk7zJU1/view?usp=drivesdk
Email: it's in my CV
by tensor | 2026-01-02 18:48:48+00:00
> BYD is valued as an auto manufacturer. Tesla is not.

This in no way addresses the accusation that Teslas valuation is built on nothing. BYD also has self driving software. So what exactly does Tesla have that is not cars and batteries?

The ludicrous humanoid robots with dubious use cases? That’s not it either because the stock was absurdly high before that was a thing.

I have never seen a better example of how arbitrary and irrational markets are than Teslas valuation.
by robhlt | 2026-01-02 18:49:09+00:00
Desktop/Laptop Linux is improving pretty fast, but by using an LTS distro like Debian you miss out on a lot of that.

I had to run Ubuntu 22.04 on a laptop for a while and encountered similar monitor switching and bluetooth issues. Eventually I figured out I could get the latest version of most desktop packages from the KDE Neon repos since they were also based on 22.04 at the time.

Running the latest KDE Plasma desktop with the latest mesa and pipewire made a huge difference. Monitor switching now works every time, all the bluetooth features worked, battery life improved, and Firefox stopped crashing when using webgl.

I'm not saying it'll fix all your problems, but most of these problems are being actively worked on and I think its worth trying a distro that actually keeps up with the pace of that work.
by eviks | 2026-01-02 18:49:30+00:00
> I would recommend you to just learn basic ffmpeg usage instead
> but ffmpeg is fine for beginners

No, that's just nonsense for any guide targetting beginners, it's not fine, it's too error-prone and complicated and requires entering the whole unfriendly land of the cli!

> If you must use a GUI

Of course you must! It's much better to provide beginners with your presets in Handbrake that avoid the footguns you mention (or teach them how to avoid them on their own) rather than ask them to descend into the dark pit of ffmpeg "basics"

> Before you start complaining about how complicated ffmpeg is and how arcane its syntax is, do yourself a favor and read the start of its documentation. It turns out that reading the (f.) manual actually helps a lot!

It turns out that wrapping the bad UI in a simpler typed GUI interface wastes less of the collective time than asking everyone to read dozens of pages of documentation!
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-02 18:49:37+00:00
Those giant companies in China are supported by the cities/provinces. It is just that they are comparable to not even small countries, the central government doesn't need to create champions for consumer goods, more local governments can do that just fine. SOEs are also mostly zombies in China, it should be very telling that BYD is not an SOE; we aren't even talking about any of the SOEs FAW Group, Dongfeng Motor, Changan Automobile, SAIC Motor, BAIC Motor, and GAC, who are still more known for their JVs.
by bpodgursky | 2026-01-02 18:49:52+00:00
This is for the visa-free travel program (VWP). The US wants to check whether people who show up for vacation without a visa have a criminal record.

If European countries don't want to grant access that's their right, but it's not at all an unreasonable thing for the US to want access to, if the data exists and is easy to check. If someone is a convicted sex trafficker or drug dealer or whatever, I'm fully in favor of not letting them into the country.
by Too | 2026-01-02 18:50:02+00:00
Sure you can secure boot the kernel and the game binary itself but then you have all the surrounding support from the OS that also need to interop without being tamperable. Screenshots, network and input devices for example are routed through user space before reaching the game, and they can be used to make cheats. Now some of those layers are getting more isolated, for example with Wayland. Even so, that means your secure boot chain must go all the way up to include a non tampered window manager too, taking you closer and closer into reinventing a Android like console OS.
by ronef | 2026-01-02 18:50:08+00:00
[Disclaimer: biased Flox/Nix person]

There's a lot of reasons to use Nix instead of or WITH Homebrew depending on your exact needs.

Where it’s paid off for me (and where I think it actually wins) is when the problem is recreating environments: multiple machines, teammates, CI, nasty native deps, CUDA stacks, etc. At that point you’re choosing where entropy lives: in invisible drift (brew/manual installs) or in a repo you can diff/rollback.

Also, you don’t always need to go full “immutable everything.” Really depends on your needs here. Hybrid tends to be another sane path. In certain situations this can get you 80% of the upside without having to rip it all out. So kinda the "good enough" which I've seen a lot of folks do.

We (Flox) actually worked on this with Kelsey Hightower a while back - https://bsky.app/profile/kelseyhightower.com/post/3ld2rsccls...
by MikeyLi | 2026-01-02 18:50:13+00:00
You should never guess what you're spending money to eat.

I hate ordering blind. So many restaurants don't show pictures and use too many fancy food words. It's impossible to know what you're getting. In a different country, it's even worse. You're stuck translating complicated food words, hoping for the best, and half the time you end up with something you didn't even want.

I built FoodieLens – snap a photo of any restaurant menu, and AI instantly translates it (100+ languages), organizes it neatly, and shows real photos (or generates realistic ones) of every dish.

No more ordering surprises. Eat with confidence anywhere!

This is my new side project, I would love to see people trying this web app!

https://foodielens.app
by TimorousBestie | 2026-01-02 18:50:14+00:00
The novel _Endymion_ imagines a “Schrödinger’s Catbox”: a sealed studio apartment with a radioactive sample hooked up to a geiger counter hooked up to a quantity of cyanide gas. So it randomly kills its occupant.

The need for the box is premised on the argument that whoever sticks someone in the catbox isn’t actually guilty of murder. The primary cause is the random decay of the radioactive sample.

This is, of course, sophistry. But it illustrates how easily a can convince oneself that the presence of a random element waters down ethical responsibility. Particularly if there’s a financial or political incentive driving the desire for absolution of blame.
I built a screen-aware desktop assistant; now it can write and use your computer
by luthiraabeykoon | 2026-01-02 18:50:23+00:00
I posted Julie here a few days ago as a weekend prototype: an open-source desktop assistant that lives as a tiny overlay and uses your screen as context (instead of copy/paste, tab switching, etc.)

Update: I just shipped Julie v1.0, and the big change is that it’s no longer only “answer questions about my screen.” It can now run agents (writing/coding) and a computer-use mode via a CUA toolkit. ((https://tryjulie.vercel.app/))

What that means in practice:

- General AI assistant, it hears what you hear, sees what you see, and gives you real-time answers for any question instantly.
- Writing agent: draft/rewrite in your voice, then iterate with you while staying in the overlay (no new workspace).
- Coding agent: help you implement/refactor with multi-step edits, while you keep your editor as the “source of truth.”
- Computer-use agent: when you want, it can take the “next step” (click/type/navigate) instead of just telling you what to do.

The goal is still the same: don’t break my flow. I want the assistant to feel like a tiny utility that helps for 20 seconds and disappears, not a second life you manage.

A few implementation notes/constraints (calling these out because I’m sure people will ask):

- It’s opt-in for permissions (screen + accessibility/automation) and meant to be used with you watching, not silently running.
- The UI is intentionally minimal; I’m trying hard not to turn it into a full chat app with tabs/settings/feeds.

Repo + installers are here: https://github.com/Luthiraa/julie

Would love feedback on two things:
1. If you’ve built/used computer-use agents: what safety/UX patterns actually feel acceptable day-to-day?
2. What’s the one workflow you’d want this to do end-to-end without context switching?
by fn-mote | 2026-01-02 18:50:51+00:00
Think about your future health while your mind is clear. After the trauma of divorce is not the time.

Also, I think these questions are in bad faith.

It is actually hard to get people to change any behavior. The public health benefits should be a primary concern. Avoid vaccination if there is a downside to you personally, but that isn’t what I’m hearing from your comments.
by xl0 | 2026-01-02 18:50:58+00:00
Location: Nomadic, Colombia at the moment
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: depends
Technologies: PyTorch, Deep Learning, LLM, Diffusion models, NumPy, JAX (a bit), CUDA | SvelteKit, TypeScript, tailwind, drizzle | DevOps: Linux (25 years), AWS, Docker, common sense
CV: https://alexey.work/cv?ref=hn46466073
Email: alexey.zaytsev@gmail.com

I'd love to get back into Deep Lerning (torch, cuda, etc, etc), but also cofortable with the usual "Agenetic AI", whatever you want it to mean, and :heart: SvelteKit.
In my past lives: Linux kernel development, Molecular Biology masters, Electronics engineering in Shenzhen.

Some cool stuff, or just check my gh:

https://github.com/xl0/lovely-tensors

https://chat.congusto.ai/chat

https://lovely-docs.github.io/

https://pelican.alexey.work/