MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reify | 2026-01-24 08:16:22+00:00
That may well be.

but please stop with the Anthropomorphism language when referring to a glorified autocomplete machine.

machines are not conscious, dont experience internal conflict nor do they have moral self regulation nor do they engage in dialogue.

It truly is getting rather boring and sounds like made up bollocks

As a retired psychotherapist its like calling myself a human cognitive architect, which sounds like bollocks too.
by Tade0 | 2026-01-24 08:17:46+00:00
How long was the commute from your place?

The rail network in and around Zurich is reliable and punctual, so you can live anywhere along that 30km long lake and still have your commute be 30-40m, without needing to search for a parking spot and whatnot.

I experienced this myself when I was briefly commutung from Pfäffikon(SZ).
by scheeseman486 | 2026-01-24 08:18:58+00:00
If you install a distro that uses KDE Plasma, you're already most of the way there. Not just because of it's design similarities to Windows but it's the desktop environment that's been getting the most financial support lately and has seen the most rapid improvement.

I personally prefer it at this point. Dolphin blows away explorer, window management is more slick and more flexible out of the box and it also happens to be deeply customizable.
by badlibrarian | 2026-01-24 08:20:17+00:00
During the recent power outages in San Francisco, the site repeatedly went down. When a troubled individual set the power pole on fire outside their building, the site went down. Happy to give them the benefit of the doubt on data redundancy, but they publicly celebrate that Brewster himself has to bike down and flip switches to get the site back online. They don't even have employee redundancy.
by dijit | 2026-01-24 08:21:08+00:00
Your credit card analogy is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but it's carrying the wrong cargo. Sending your kid to the shops with your card is temporary delegation, not permanent key escrow to a third party you don't control. It's the difference between lending someone your house key for the weekend and posting a copy to the council "just in case you lose yours". And; you know that you've done it, you have personally weighed the risks and if something happens with your card/key in that window: you can hold them to account. (granted, keys can be copied)

> Nothing else in life works that way. Not your government ID, not your bank account, not your password, not even the nuclear launch codes.

Brilliant examples of why you're wrong:

Government IDs have recovery because the government is the trusted authority that verified you exist in the first place. Microsoft didn't issue your birth certificate.

Nuclear launch codes are literally designed around not giving any single entity complete access, hence the two-person rule and multiple independent key holders. You've just argued for my position.

Banks can reset your PIN because they're heavily regulated entities with legal obligations and actual consequences for breaching trust. Microsoft's legal department is larger than most countries' regulators.

> even having millions of dollars on the line doesn't make regular people capable of being responsible with encryption keys.

Right, so the solution is clearly to hand those keys to a corporation that's subject to government data requests, has been breached multiple times, and whose interests fundamentally don't align with yours? The problem with Bitcoin isn't that keys are hard - it's that the UX is atrocious. The solution is better tooling, not surveillance capitalism with extra steps.

You're not arguing for usability. You're arguing that we should trust a massive corporation more than we trust ourselves, whilst simultaneously claiming users are too thick to keep a recovery key in a drawer. Pick a lane.
by dijit | 2026-01-24 08:22:48+00:00
> So what happens if your motherboard gets fried and you don't have backups of your recovery key or your data?

If you don't have backups of your data, you've already lost regardless of where your recovery key lives. That's not an encryption problem, that's a "you didn't do backups" problem, which, I'll agree is a common issue. I wonder if the largest software company on the planet (with an operating system in practically every home) can help with making that better. Seems like Apple can, weird.

> TPMs do fail on occasion.

So do Microsoft's servers. Except Microsoft's servers are a target worth attacking, whereas your TPM isn't. When was the last time you heard about a targeted nation-state attack on someone's motherboard TPM versus a data breach at a cloud provider?

> A bank PIN you can call and reset, they can already verify your identity through other means.

Banks can do that because they're regulated financial institutions with actual legal obligations and consequences for getting it wrong. They also verified your identity when you opened the account, using government ID and proof of address.

Microsoft is not your bank, not your government, and has no such obligations. When they hand your keys to law enforcement, which they're legally compelled to do, you don't get a phone call asking if that's alright.

The solution to TPM failure is a local backup of your recovery key, stored securely. Not uploading it to someone else's computer and hoping for the best.
by mihaaly | 2026-01-24 08:23:30+00:00
I'd argue that the optimum was in long run to migrate to the standard version, that everyone (e.g. new employees) know. Replacing the usually particular (or even weird) way implemented own flavour.

I know, I know, long run does not exists in today's investor dominated scenarios. Code modernization is a fairytale. So far I seen no exception in my limited set of experiences (but with various codebases going back to the early 90's with patchy upgrades here and there, looking like and old coat fixed many many times with diverse size of patches of various materials and colour).
by maurelius2 | 2026-01-24 08:23:58+00:00
Thanks for sharing! Easy to follow instructions.

I can see the PARA structure and perhaps a bit of Zettelkasten in the peripheral (but that might be my own bias).

I'm using a similar system (here's a link)
https://blog.hampusadamsson.com/blog/How%20I%20Manage%20Note...

And also a custom plugin to do parts of the LLM (here's another shameless link) lifting: https://github.com/hampusadamsson/modai
by f1restar | 2026-01-24 08:24:52+00:00
You either haven't seen the post, or are being disingenuous.

In case some readers haven't seen it, the altered image (crying & wailing, instead of calm & resolute) was posted by the official white house account with the following overlay text:

---

ARRESTED
FAR-LEFT AGITATOR NEKIMA LEVY ARMSTRONG FOR ORCHESTRATING CHURCH RIOTS IN MINNESOTA

---

The post is a reply to one made by the same account half an hour earlier, with the following text:

---

MINNESOLA ARRESTS
Attorney General Pamela Bondi @AGPamBondi

Minutes ago at my direction, @HSI_HQ and @FBI agents executed an arrest in Minnesota.

So far, we have arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, who allegedly played a key role in organizing the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

We will share more updates as they become available.

Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP.

UPDATE: A second arrest has been made at my direction. Chauntyll Louisa Allen has been taken into custody.
More to come.

WE WILL PROTECT OUR HOUSES OF WORSHIP

---

Obviously a joke, and we're stupid for not seeing it as one, eh?

This manipulative crap may have worked when you were in high school, but any adult with a "sense of humour and critical thinking skill" (as you put it in your other comment), would see through the ruse.

It's funny, because this exact way of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place. Obviously he was joking when he said he would do all those terrible things!
by lelanthran | 2026-01-24 08:25:03+00:00
> There is this urban myth C is simple, from folks that never read either ISO C manual, can't read legalese, never spent much time browsing the compiler reference manual.

And yet you know from previous discussion with folks like Uecker and myself have done all those things, and still walked away from C++.

In my case, I stepped back even after having a decade of work experience in it. Anything needing more abstraction than C, C++ is not going to be a good fit anyway (there's better languages).

> Yet in such a simple language, I keep waiting to meet the magical developer that never wrote memory corruption errors with pointer arithmetic, string and memory library functions.

Who made that claim? This sounds like a strawman - "If you use C you'll never make this class of errors", which no one said in this conversation.

In any case, the point is even more true of C++ - I have yet to meet this magical C++ programmer that never hits the few dozens of footguns it has that C doesn't.
by LeFantome | 2026-01-24 08:25:50+00:00
ReactOS has delt itself a massive blow by hiding so much of their progress.

The project has insisted on creating Windows Server 2003. Probably very little of the software you want to run works on Windows Server 2003. Certainly no modern web browser will.

There has been some movement in recent months though. They have a 64 bit version. They are implementing NT6 APIs. They are implementing UEFI. They are looking at WDDM drivers. The have synced with Wine 10.

If ReactOS can produce a version that can run a modern browser and maybe a half-way recent Office suite, I think a lot of people would change their mind about the potential.

If they can support modern GPU drivers, it is possible they could even gain some traction in that space. Lots of work to do but not impossible.
by netsharc | 2026-01-24 08:26:32+00:00
No, even "How to 10x your wealth" is grammatical abuse. "How to double" or "quadruple" is acceptable. "To 10x" is dumb techbro way of saying "to multiply by 10".

I hate hate hate this trend of grammatical fuckery of using "some-number x" as verbs.

It's another dumb shit techbros say, like pinging people...
by iExploder | 2026-01-24 08:26:32+00:00
if we assume no new jobs will be created after AI automates most work (I think there will be new jobs)

living on UBI will be miserable, and as such common folk will become even more and absolutely reliant on the government, especially when services and payments are completely digitalized...

in this kind of world, unless space exploration is a thing, massive oppression of common people and wars will be on the menu
by idontwantthis | 2026-01-24 08:26:51+00:00
I'm seriously trying, but I haven't seen it be all that helpful for complicated stuff. I had a bug where we were running out of database connections and cursor wanted me to create a wrapper class for the connection pool that would count connections and block if there were too many. Obviously that was dumb and I didn't do it.
Turns out I needed to actually understand the problem and then I was able to fix it without too much trouble.
On the other hand, I made a whole website in 2 hours without touching any of the code directly, but it was really simple and had no performance or security concerns to worry about.
by sivanhavkin | 2026-01-24 08:27:26+00:00
that’s a fair critique, and I agree with you on the fundamentals.

I’m not claiming machines are conscious, experience emotions, or possess moral agency in any human sense. The language is intentionally metaphorical — shorthand for architectural patterns inspired by psychology, not literal claims about inner experience.

When I refer to “internal conflict” or “moral self-regulation”, I mean competing objectives, constraints, and evaluation processes interacting over time within a system — not phenomenological states.

I fully understand how anthropomorphic framing can sound inflated or misleading, and I try to be explicit elsewhere that this is an experimental research prototype, not a claim about machine consciousness.

I appreciate the pushback — precision of language matters, especially in this space.
by consumer451 | 2026-01-24 08:27:38+00:00
I appreciate this, however, as a ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Windsurf user... who has tried nearly every single variation of Claude, GPT, and Gemini in those harnesses, and has tested all the those models via API for LLM integrations into my own apps... I just want SOTA, 99% of the time, for myself, and my users.

I have never seen a use case where a "lower" model was useful, for me, and especially my users.

I am about to get almost the exact MacBook that you have, but I still don't want to inflict non-SOTA models on my code, or my users.

This is not a judgement against you, or the downloadable weights, I just don't know when it would be appropriate to use those models.

BTW, I very much wish that I could run Opus 4.5 locally. The best that I can do for my users is the Azure agreement that they will not train on their data. I also have that setting set on my claude.ai sub, but I trust them far less.

Disclaimer: No model is even close to Opus 4.5 for coding agents. In my own apps, I process a lot of text/complex context and I use Azure GPT 4.1 for limited llm tasks... but for my "chat with the data" UX, Opus 4.5 all day long. It has tested so superior.
by dijit | 2026-01-24 08:30:42+00:00
> nobody who is using Windows cares about encryption or even knows what it is!

Right, so the solution is to silently upload their encryption keys to Microsoft's servers without telling them? If users don't understand encryption, they certainly don't understand they've just handed their keys to a third party subject to government data requests.

> otherwise a regular user will happen to mess around with their bios one day and accidentally lock themselves permanently out of their computer.

This is such transparent fear-mongering. How often does this actually happen versus how often are cloud providers breached or served with legal requests? You're solving a hypothetical edge case by creating an actual security vulnerability.

Encryption by default and cloud key escrow are separate decisions. You can have one without the other. The fact that Microsoft chose both doesn't make the second one necessary, it makes it convenient for Microsoft.

> If you want regular FDE without giving Microsoft the key you can go ahead and do it fairly easily!

Then why isn't that the default with cloud backup as opt-in? Oh right, because then Microsoft wouldn't have everyone's keys.
by dijit | 2026-01-24 08:30:52+00:00
> The vast, vast majority of Windows users don't know their laptops are encrypted, don't understand encryption, and don't know what bitlocker is.

Mate, if 99% of users don't understand encryption, they also don't understand that Microsoft now has their keys. You can't simultaneously argue that users are too thick to manage keys but savvy enough to consent to uploading them.

> If their keys weren't stored in the cloud, these users could easily lose access to their data without understanding how or why.

As opposed to losing access when Microsoft gets breached, or when law enforcement requests their keys, or when Microsoft decides to lock them out? You've traded one risk for several others, except now users have zero control.

The solution to "users might lock themselves out" is better UX for local key backup, not "upload everyone's keys to our servers by default and bury the opt-out". One is a design problem, the other is a business decision masquerading as user protection.

> The only thing I would really fault Microsoft for here is making it overly difficult to disable the cloud storage for users who do understand all the implications.

That's not a bug, it's the entire point. If it were easy to disable, people who understand the implications would disable it. Can't have that, can we?
by smt88 | 2026-01-24 08:30:54+00:00
Value for money doesn't matter if people are boycotting them for political reasons.

Tesla only exists today because it got huge subsidies from the government. It has competitors now and the subsidies were spread out before the GOP killed them.

They're way, way behind in SDC and Musk is pitching humanoid robots no one wants that they can't deliver.

Musk doesn't have piles of cash because almost all of his wealth is tied up in things he can't sell (like Tesla stock). He can borrow against it, but not forever.

I don't see any sliver of hope for them.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-24 08:31:01+00:00
I come from the UK and I see this every day. The only way to improve things is for people to stop thinking like this. The article suggests it is a good thing. My opposition to defeatism isn't ideological. Ideology suggests a complex belief system/framework which this isn't. Why should we be glorifying failure? That is not healthy psychologically, and the only good thing about failure is that it can teach us how not to do things. That is not an "ideology", it is the promotion of a healthier mindset.

The linked article, on the other hand, is about the very thing you are complaining about – perpetuating a self-defeating self-image/stereotype – but you do not point that out.
by dante_dev | 2026-01-24 08:31:48+00:00
You're not wrong. Read his profile.

I used to joke about how I used LinkedIn as a dating site, but in the current year this just isn't that funny anymore. The professional managerial class I was mocking is quickly losing its grasp on power, so it's unclear if I'm still punching up.

How many of the messages here even come from real people anymore? How many of those people have pronouns in their bio? Are they GPT/GPT?

We have a big task ahead of us to define what the "new business" looks like. Comparatively, the revolution is the easy part.
by schobi | 2026-01-24 08:32:23+00:00
Oh... Having a local-only voice assistant would be great. Maybe someone can share the practical side of this.

Do you have the GPU running all day at 200W to scan for wake words? Or is that running on the machine you are working on anyway?

Is this running from a headset microphone (while sitting at the desk?) or more like a USB speakerphone? Is there an Alexa jailbreak / alternative firmware as a frontend and run this on a GPU hidden away?
by jjk166 | 2026-01-24 08:34:02+00:00
I'm not arguing anything here, I am trying to help you realize that you aren't talking about what you think you're talking about.

I am not referring to methodology "in the strict sense of science" indeed I don't know what "in the strict sense of science" is supposed to mean. I'm using the dictionary definition of methodology: "a body of methods, rules, and ideas that are important in a science, art, or discipline : a particular procedure or set of procedures."
by skissane | 2026-01-24 08:35:25+00:00
> An example of this is "felon". There is no actual legal definition of what a felony is or isn't in the US. A misdemeanor in one state can be a felony in another. It can be anything from mass murder to traffic infractions. Yet we attach a LOT of moral weight to 'felon'.

The US is an outlier here; the distinction between felonies and misdemeanours has been abolished in most other common law jurisdictions.

Often it is replaced by a similar distinction, such as indictable versus summary offences-but even if conceptually similar to the felony-misdemeanour distinction, it hasn’t entered the popular consciousness.

As to your point about law influencing culture-is that really an example of this, or actually the reverse? Why does the US largely retain this historical legal distinction when most comparable international jurisdictions have abolished it? Maybe, the US resists that reform because this distinction has acquired a cultural significance which it never had elsewhere, or at least never to the same degree.

> Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.

On the immigration issue: Many Americans seem to view immigration enforcement as somehow morally problematic in itself; an attitude much less common in many other Western countries (including many popularly conceived as less “right wing”). Again, I think your point looks less clear if you approach it from a more global perspective
Making changing assumptions explicit during development
by Tobiahao | 2026-01-24 08:38:17+00:00
Requirements change all the time. What often doesn’t change explicitly are the assumptions behind them.

An API detail shifts, a dependency appears, and everyone adapts — but there’s no clear signal that the rules changed. I’m exploring whether making assumptions and “contracts” between roles (analysis → backend → frontend → tests) explicit would help, or if this just adds overhead.

Curious if this resonates, or how teams handle this today.
by reerdna | 2026-01-24 08:39:12+00:00
No, not beyond what I already put in the twitter thread. I wanted to wait until I had some cool distributed software running on it too, but then I ran into trouble with the plan 9 wifi drivers for the rpi being unstable and so I'm still working on fixing that. It does serve as a great test bed for that purpose too, as with 8 nodes I can get much more reliable data about how often the driver gets stuck
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-24 08:39:15+00:00
Nope.

For some people, like this article, technology is just a wave of trends and fashions. For other people there is an actual utility to the tech.

For example consider why so much digital media is pirated. It’s not because most of those people refuse to pay for content. It’s because they reject to pay for limited access. Why bother with all the platform lock-in and limited rights when you can download it for free and achieve maximum portability. The people that pay for streaming do so because it’s the fashion/trend and there is a cost of increased effort to try out individual liberty.
by timwis | 2026-01-24 08:40:42+00:00
Home Assistant have a fully local voice assistant experience that's very pluggable and customisable. I believe it uses a fast whisper model for STT and piper for TTS.

You can run it on a raspberry pi (or ideally an N100+), and for the microphone/speaker part, you can make your own or buy their off the shelf voice hardware, which works really well.

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
by somat | 2026-01-24 08:40:51+00:00
> OTOH namespaces, XSD, XSLT were great

I don't know, the few times I have had to XML, I went "This is not so bad, I don't know what all the fuss is about" until I hit namespaces. I don't know if I was just using an inferior library but namespaces sucked. The minute namespaces came into the picture all the joy left the project. And XSLT... I only ever did one thing with it "use the browser to turn demarc XML records into a webpage" and that was pretty cool. but it also firmly convinced me that XML is very much the wrong form factor for a programing language.

My personal thought is that css is not a sgml-like as a sort of rebellion against the way XML was taking over the world. It feels like author had written one too many XSLT's and said "Nope, it ends here, we are not doing that again." Because really, it is very weird that css does not use an XML syntax.

On the topic of the wrong form factor for a programing language. Another good contender is ansible when you try to use it's YAML looping constructs.
by habinero | 2026-01-24 08:41:16+00:00
Yeah, and those claims are made up to scare people who don't know how it works.

The government knows who is a citizen and who isn't lol, they literally have the records.

Voter rolls are very closely scrutinized. Dead people are, in fact, taken off the rolls. There is essentially ~no voter fraud and ~no instance of non-citizens voting in this country. Yes, it's audited and studied. Yes, they keep the data and you can audit it.

You're literally complaining about it being easier for people to participate in democracy, and you should stop.

Everything's a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.