MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-18 01:28:17+00:00
> I don't think the majority of Trump voters wanted this kind of harm and chaos.

Sorry to be vulgar, but it’s about fucking time they find the fucking courage to speak up.

I am angry at the conservative people in my life, first and second connections and beyond, not because they fell for 8 years of increasingly fascist propaganda, but because now they’re too weak and scared and cowardly to stand up and recognize that they were wrong and they’ve ushered in some of the darkest days in American history.

The American right continues to be complicit. I am losing respect daily while I watch my conservative friends not speak out. It’s heartbreaking.
by jcranmer | 2026-01-18 01:28:17+00:00
From what I understand of the advertising market, companies like Google and Facebook make bucketloads of ads primarily because they own so much of the vertical integration of ad markets. Meanwhile, the way OpenAI appears to be integrating ads makes it seem to me that they're positioned only to take the smallest slice of the pie--a place to hoist ads--which means they're revenue-per-user I would estimate to be a lot closer to, say, a newspaper website than the biggest of social media sites, or maybe along the lines of Twitter or Tumblr, which never posted spectacular profits.
by OgsyedIE | 2026-01-18 01:28:20+00:00
The assumption that all critics of the author are operating from equal levels of effort aside, there's an interesting error in the article:

> I think who owns the robots is going to be a key aspect of what the future looks like. And I don’t mean “owns” from a legalist perspective, I mean “owns” as in the hacker meaning, like “owning” the box. Who has root?

This is a very bizarre point compared to the author's more cogent comment on the same topic yesterday:

> GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have, be that with targeting advertising, a scam you fall for, or lobbying your government to take it from you.

.

Given that any AI product that is made can be parallelized and coordinated faster than any human organisation using productivity software that already exists, either the brainpower is sufficient that we get an Accelerando-esque displacement where all power relations favouring humans vanish or the AI tech hits some kind of brainpower ceiling that makes it incapable of competing with humans and we don't even get viable robotic blue-collar replacements.

There is no in-between.
by rudedogg | 2026-01-18 01:29:01+00:00
> increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at

Something is lost each step of the abstraction ladder we climb. And the latest rung uses natural language which introduces a lot of imprecision/slop, in a way that prior abstractions did not. And, this new technology providing the new abstraction is non-deterministic on top of that.

There's also the quality issue of the output you do get.

I don't think the analogy of the assembly -> C transition people like to use holds water – there are some similarities but LLMs have a lot of downsides.
by m3047 | 2026-01-18 01:29:38+00:00
Is that farm hands, or farm operators? What about corps, how do you calibrate that? Is a corp a "person" or does it count for more? My point is that maybe the definition of "farmer" is being pushed to far, as is the notion of "developer". "Prompt engineer"? Are you kidding me about that? Prompts being about as usefully copyrighted / patentable as a white paper. Do you count them as "engineers" because they say so?

I get your point, hope you get mine: we have less legal entities operating as "farms". If vibe coding makes you a "developer", working on a farm in an operating capacity makes you a "farmer". You might profess to be a biologist / agronomist, I'm sure some owners are, but doesn't matter to me whether you're the owner or not.

The numbers of nonsupervisory operators in farming activities have decreased using the traditional definitions.
by 827a | 2026-01-18 01:30:05+00:00
I don't feel that an "agricultural export powerhouse" is all that desirable a title to own on the global stage, but yes; it is within reach for the Mercosur block. Possibly the only thing within their reach at this point. Agriculture represents ~3% of all US exports, and ~7% of that ~3% flows to the EU; a very small cut indeed.
by II2II | 2026-01-18 01:30:11+00:00
Pages, which is a word processor. I could only figure that out from the 5th and 6th icons, which are breaking the cardinal rule about having text in the icon.

Personally, I wouldn't be able to figure out what the first three icons are for without the context of the other icons. The first two icons are meaningless. The third icon vaugly represents a pen drawing a line, which would lead me to think it is a drawing program. The fourth program would allow me to identify it as word processor, and is my favourite. The rest are identifiable as well.

Microsoft office isn't much better but at least there were consistent elements between versions to make them easier to identify for experienced users who are upgrading. I couldn't say the same for Apple's icons. LibreOffice's icons make it easier to identify each program, even if they aren't the prettiest.
by jefflester | 2026-01-18 01:31:50+00:00
Hey folks,

Title, mostly. I'd wager most of us know what debugging is already, and a solid chunk of us have at least some hands-on experience using debuggers in any given language.

"AI Debugger" exposes familiar debugging capabilities to agents through an MCP interface. Think operations like:

- Breakpoints (basic breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, logpoints, etc.)
- Stepping (into, over, out of)
- Inspection (locals, globals, call stack, single stack frame, etc.)

I built it using the debugger components VS Code already uses (mainly debug adapters) to ensure reusability and a 100% open source codebase.

These are the key features I've shipped with `0.1.1`:

- VS Code `launch.json` support. Your launch configs in this file can be used to launch `aidb` sessions. Helpful for cross-team sharing, complex debug entry points, or just familiar VS Code workflows.

- Remote debugging. I was able to debug worker nodes in a Dockerized Trino cluster, meaning you can attach to remote ports and debug huge codebases remotely. Seems potentially useful for any sort of remote debugging or CI integration.

- An extensible core API, built around the "debug adapter protocol" (DAP), designed to make it as simple as possible to add support for any given DAP-compliant adapter. Future adapters will soon be added (probably Go, Kotlin (for my own use), and Rust).

- Tight integration with Claude. This made the project possible for me IMO, and hopefully will help contributors in the future. I've got a very nice skills system configured, based on my other project (https://github.com/jefflester/claude-skills-supercharged), which has boosted Claude's efficacy enormously in terms of implementation cleanliness and overall codebase knowledge. Additionally, the `dev-cli`, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the repo's internal developer CLI, bootstraps many of Claude's capabilities, like CI failure analysis, running tests, etc.

- 100% open source and fast CI/CD release times (CI run: https://github.com/ai-debugger-inc/aidb/actions/runs/2065017...). All components in my stack are open source (core Python deps, debug adapter deps, etc.). GitHub CI builds and publishes debug adapters, runs robust integration and unit tests, and ships everything in < 15 mins, which is awesome, considering many of my tests actually test the full stack with misc. external language dependencies, like Node, Spring, Maven, Gradle, etc.

My main goal is to make AI Debugger the go-to tool for agent-facing debugging. If this is interesting to you, let me know – I would love to get a few contributors up to speed, as this is a sizable codebase that needs to expand a bit still, and it will suck trying to maintain it solo indefinitely. Strength in numbers!

Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for taking a look at my project.

-----

*Relevant Links*

- Repository: https://github.com/ai-debugger-inc/aidb
- Documentation: https://ai-debugger.com/en/latest/
- PyPi Package: https://pypi.org/project/ai-debugger-inc/
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-18 01:31:50+00:00
In my usage, the coloring allows my eyes to “snap” to relevant chunks of code and restrict scanning to the bounds of those chunks.

Functionally it seems similar to spatial memory where landmarks are used as navigation shorthand and is impaired in circumstances where everything looks the same (e.g. in one of those sprawling suburbs with 100 of the same house).
by temporallobe | 2026-01-18 01:31:56+00:00
I spent half a year designing and creating 200+ icons for a custom geospatial mapping app. I really enjoyed the work but it was grueling and tedious, especially the design part. Too many people had too many different opinions on which symbols meant what, which styles clearly conveyed ideas without being too detailed, and many other things that kept wasting my time and causing a lot of rework and inconsistencies. It was literally just me doing the work, so I stopped trying to get consensus and took a few weeks to redesign the entire set and even used color science to inform my design decisions. I created the entire set without external input, then presented it. Sure there was some tweaking here and there, but I believe it turned about to be great and no one really complained in the end. The most important part was that end-users were happy. I used Inkscape and developed a set of scripts to automate the build and had everything in a very organized Git repo.
by xiphias2 | 2026-01-18 01:32:12+00:00
Some feedback from me (not a likely user though):

- It was easier to find a link to where you worked at than your repo (https://github.com/skaldlabs/skald?tab=readme-ov-file), you should have linked it visibly

- I had no idea what / why I should use it so I looked at the demo video and it didn't seem to solve any particular use case for any particular problem, it was more a ,,config'' video instead of a demo video

- From reading the (quite interesting) article it seemed like you are focusing on pivoting instead of iteration speed. Have you tried for example to just query an LLM to build the whole project that you have done? How much time would be to vibe code it?

I know that HN is mostly against vibe coding, but if the project could have been created in 1-3 days and you took 3 month, that's a bigger issue than growth itself. In that case the metric that should be looked at is iteration speed instead of just growth (both are super important though!)
by chr15m | 2026-01-18 01:32:20+00:00
You don't have to leave the command line. Claude Code, and other agentic tools like it, make you feel like you've left the command line because they capture the whole terminal and leave you with less agency. There are tools like aider (and my own project runprompt) which let you retain more control in your terminal and in my experience feel much less disempowering, while still giving you a productivity boost.
by aranelsurion | 2026-01-18 01:32:25+00:00
People really look through rose-colored glasses when they talk about late 90s, early 2000s or whenever is their "back then" when they talk about everything being simpler.

Everything was for sure simpler, but also the requirements and expectations were much, much lower. Tech and complexity moved forward with goal posts also moving forward.

Just one example on reliability, I remember popular websites with many thousands if not millions of users would put an "under maintenance" page whenever a major upgrade comes through and sometimes close shop for hours. If the said maintenance goes bad, come tomorrow because they aren't coming up.

Proper HA, backups, monitoring were luxuries for many, and the kind of self-healing, dynamically autoscaled, "cattle not pet" infrastructure that is now trivialized by Kubernetes were sci-fi for most. Today people consider all of this and a lot more as table stakes.

It's easy to shit on cloud and kubernetes and yearn for the simpler Linux-on-a-box days, yet unless expectations somehow revert back 20-30 years, that isn't coming back.
by tootie | 2026-01-18 01:32:28+00:00
They're not arguing that AI sucks. Only that OpenAI has no hope of meeting it's financial obligations which seems pretty reasonable. And very on brand for Sam Altman. It seems pretty obvious at this point that model training is extremely expensive and affords very little moat. LLMs will continue to improve and gain adoption, but one or more companies will fall by the wayside regardless of their userbase. Google seems pretty clearly to be in pole position at this point as they have massive revenue, data, expertise and their own chips.
by kace91 | 2026-01-18 01:35:07+00:00
You’re kinda proving the parent’s point.

>There's exactly zero arguments for any kind of flat or minimalistic design outside of art

Here’s one: helping the interface stay out of the way, removing clutter so the actual content of the app takes focus instead.

I can tell you it works because with the new Glass stuff everything is begging for attention again, and I hate it.

And just to be clear, I’m not voting for design overflattened to the point one can’t tell icons apart. For me, around 4 in the diagram is the ideal middle point.
by matthewfcarlson | 2026-01-18 01:35:20+00:00
I know this is my late 1900s American background speaking, but it is insane to me to have a legally binding donation to a religious authority. I would argue a significant portion of the New Testament talks about how much more important it is to do things for the right reason than just doing the thing. Donating to the church because you are forced to seems like it defeating the point of what tithes are about.
by robocat | 2026-01-18 01:35:59+00:00
I apologize... My original comment was poorly thought out and naive, which misled potato and you.

You and potato followed that wrong path and unfortunately didn't correct me or yourselves. I tried to correct myself later (see my sibling comment), but I wouldn't be surprised if I've made another huge cockup with the facts.

> Yes, that bearing only moves a few degrees

It certainly does not move a few degrees (except maybe after a crash).

Thinking back to my one undergrad mechanics paper, I think the design purpose was to make torsions equal zero, so that the mechanical analysis would be tractable.

The torsions should still be extremely low because nothing can rotate (except maybe a tiny amount due to deformations).

If we can't get the engineering facts straight, then our engineering opinions are likely to be even more pointless and flawed.

You seem to have gone off the rails as much as potato.

They seem to be implying that the broken bearing is the cause of the accident. The bearing was still in place after the accident so the bolt didn't shear. If the engine has full acceleration then the engine is pitching upwards against the wing and the force on that bearing is upwards?

How did the broken bearing cause the fire? I think the report implied the fire occurred at the same time as the structural failure.
by karteum | 2026-01-18 01:36:08+00:00
That's great !
FWIW I generated a small web app (I am just starting to experiment with Claude and Devstral and that seemed a good exercise :), and put it online in case it would be useful https://meteo.karteum.ovh (e.g. during my last trips I used the weather forecasts to refine where I would go more precisely within the country. But I was frustrated as many meteo websites are full of ads...)
Tell HN: YouTube disabled advanced subtitling, and is stripping it from old vids
by mister_mort | 2026-01-18 01:37:06+00:00
Youtube supports several basic forms of subtitling for videos, but the most advanced form comes from their YTT / SRV3 file format.

This format supported options not available in any other subtitle format. This includes bold/italic/underline, custom colours and transparency for both the text and the background box, outlines and drop shadows, alternative fonts and font sizes, precise positioning anywhere on the video, vertical text and ruby text for Asian languages. (List taken from this helpful user report post: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1qdvgmc/uploading_srv3_subtitles_got_brokendisabled/ )

The use of this format was necessary to generate subtitling that matched actual text on screen and natively replaced it, generate subtitles that were coloured to match multiple different speakers so they were easily identifiable, and more.

Some examples of use include (horror movie content warning for these vids):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHcHjcV8SNY - "Unconscious Requiem" in which the subtitles flicker and change colour to match the flickering and unfolding text on screen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iUgKH8c7p4 - "Retry Now" in which the subtitles are styled to match the dialogue as it appears in the visual novel text boxes on screen

Users are now report submitting their videos with advanced subtitles does not work.

This doesn't just disable it for new videos - some users are now reporting that old videos are having their custom subtitles removed, including ones with 10M+ views.

Hopefully this change gets reverted, but you should download subtitles off any video you wish to keep.
by Twey | 2026-01-18 01:37:17+00:00
It has constructs for a few different moods/modes[1], but no conjugation: the morphology used to form moods is borrowed from other verb forms (in your example, the bare infinitive) that were never (as far as I know!) dedicated mood conjugations.

[1]: pedantically they are ‘modes’ in the linguistic jargon, but often referred to as ‘moods’ in discussions of English grammar: linguistically a mood is the grammatical morphology used to signify a mode, which English lacks.
by gumby271 | 2026-01-18 01:37:41+00:00
Microsoft's icons (until their most recent Liquid Glass redesign) were probably the best attempt at abstract but still useful to a new user. The Excel icon looked like a grid, Word had lines, PowerPoint a pie chart. They're not perfect, but it's interesting to see the new ones that have just less detailed and are a little more blobby, or melted.
by jleyank | 2026-01-18 01:38:37+00:00
Linus was a Finn and Tim was a Brit. So Europe can claim those two innovators - their work's turned out to be pretty useful. Don't know where you can stuff Elon, but he's mostly non-US as I recall (3 citizenships?). I'm too lazy to look up whether any of the Bell Lab people weren't natives, and I think the MIT hackers were US-born. But, perhaps, innovation moved worldwide in the 80's or 90's?
by rudedogg | 2026-01-18 01:40:13+00:00
If these things can ever actually think and understand a codebase this mindset makes sense, but as of now it's a short-sighted way to work. The quality of the output is usually not great, and in some cases terrible. If you're just blindly accepting code with no review, eventually things are going to implode, and the AI is more limited than you are in understanding why. It's not going to save you in it's current form.
by miladyincontrol | 2026-01-18 01:40:22+00:00
I'd argue JXL is fairly used, least in the photography circles I involve myself in. DNG 1.7 added JXL compression and at least for sharing raws around on the web it's been a boon.
Lightroom will output 16 bit ones but you can go up to 32 bit far as I'm aware.

Of course normal JXL files support similar as well, with meaningful progressive decoding at better ratios.
by BurningFrog | 2026-01-18 01:40:52+00:00
> Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing?

Not automatically, no.

How it affects employment depends on the shapes of the relevant supply/demand curves, and I don't think those are possible to know well for things like this.

For the world as a whole, it should be a very positive thing if creating usable software becomes an order of magnitude cheaper, and millions of smart people become available for other work.
by EGreg | 2026-01-18 01:41:03+00:00
I remember growing up with Apple computers, even the black-and-white Macs were easier to understand than today's nonsense, with its "liquid glass" and hidden modes like scrollbars that suddenly appear.

Kid Pix was for kids. Kids could understand it. Easily.

Macs were easy to use and understand. What happened? Steve Jobs passed away, that's what happened... and everyone stepped up to "make their mark", first of all Jony Ive.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-18 01:42:38+00:00
> A coder will write... or opt for different variations.

Agreed.

> People are inherently nondeterministic.

We are getting into the realm of philosophy here. I, for one, believe in the idea of living organisms having no free will (or limited will to be more precise. but can also go so far as to say "dependent will"). So one can philosophically explain that people are deterministic, via concepts of Karma and rebirth. Of course none of this can be proven. So your argument can be true too.

> The code they (and AI) writes, once written, executes deterministically.

Yes. Execution is deterministic. I am however talking only about determinism in terms of being able to know the entire path: input to output. Not just the outputs characteristic (which is always going to be deterministic). It is the path from input to output that is not deterministic due to presence of a black box - the model.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-18 01:42:38+00:00
> after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac

Even classic Mac OS (pre OS X) had thousands of third party themes via the very popular extension Kaleidoscope and later the built in Appearance Manager. Kaleidoscope schemes especially ran the gamut, with looks ranging from cloning other OSes to green on black “Hollywood hacker” to Star Trek LCARS to shiny chrome to a pair of blue jeans. A great number of those themes were dark.

The loss of user control over appearance like that is tragic.
by saagarjha | 2026-01-18 01:42:48+00:00
> An OS has no business dictating implementation language.

As opposed to all those OSes that only publish headers in one language right that require everyone to go through heroic effort to interoperate with it?

> This mechanism seems ripe for squatting attacks. How do I know I'm talking to the service I want to contact instead of somebody squatting the name?

Nobody is going to stop you from typosquatting yourself, no
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-18 01:42:52+00:00
> English has ... subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»)

That isn't the English subjunctive.

You're correct that this construction expresses the same thing that another language might express by marking a non-indicative mood on the verb, but it would not conventionally be said to use a non-indicative mood. That went is a normal past-tense indicative verb and the modality is expressed by the whole structure of the clause, not just by the inflection of the verb.

In linguistics there's a whole set of parallel vocabulary where one set is for grammatical forms and the mirror set is for the semantics usually expressed by those forms. So you have grammatical "tense" and semantic "time" or grammatical "mood" and semantic "modality". You got the modality right, but not the mood.

Compare the conventional analysis that he will be there tomorrow expresses future time, but is not in future tense because there is no English future tense.
by nickjantz | 2026-01-18 01:43:45+00:00
> "- It was easier to find a link to where you worked at than your repo (https://github.com/skaldlabs/skald?tab=readme-ov-file), you should have linked it visibly"

Genuinely curious, can I ask why this is relevant to point out? This seems like just a general blog post, about raising money for a startup and personal reflections on it. Why would a link to a github repo be an important part of that?