MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asveikau | 2026-01-11 16:53:17+00:00
Among the subculture that would be the type to visit Hacker News (or Slashdot back in the day), this attitude emerged around 25 years ago. In the late 90s, there was widespread enthusiasm for the Linux desktop. I remember those days fondly. It was glorious. Then macOS (or OS X as we called it) swept away a lot of people. A lot of them would get hostile or angry or mock people when they would mention they didn't join the Mac bandwagon.
by elthor89 | 2026-01-11 16:53:23+00:00
Good article, sometimes a bit hard to read with all the links to other blog posts.

However there are some good nuggets in this article like this one:
"That’s when I realized: we’d built a dependency on one person’s specialized knowledge. And that knowledge had nothing to do with our actual product."

I see that at more smaller orgs, where they want to have technology X but fail to realize it requires a small team. Not because its a 3 man job to operate but because if 1 leaves or is unavailable the knowledge is gone. The knowledge can be acquired but it takes some time, and that in between period can be painful. When you tell them that and then they start to calculate the costs, it can be sobering.

The advice to keep the tech boring and widely embedded in the organization is something I agree with.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-11 16:53:46+00:00
> Methadone blocks the 'euphoric' effects of other opioids and protects patients who may still be taking other substance outside of their prescribed treatment program from overdose. Getting to a protective dose faster ends up saving patients lives.

How does this work? Naively, I'd expect addicts to up the dose of the "other substances" if they can't reach their high. Or does methadone outright "block" the other substances' effects?
by PropagandaDude | 2026-01-11 16:53:53+00:00
Now I have an explanation for my mental model gap.

As you can see, you don't need to use any special type of characters to mark a URL as such. The tricky part comes when somebody wants to insert a URL with a description text.

I view this as broken. I'm not inserting a URL with description text. I'm inserting text that happens to also point to something else.

Text-followed-by the URL, consistent with text-followed-by a footnote indicator.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-11 16:54:25+00:00
"military grade" isn't a protected phrase. As a consumer you might be able to sue them if the thing breaks and they can't prove that phrase meant anything? But doubtful.

Claiming to conform to a more specific product or process standard would be more specific fraud.

But in general though "military grade" is a red flag for shitty marketing.

Example: pop tarts are military grade! [1]

Though their commercial packaging is likely not.

https://www.dla.mil/Portals/104/Documents/TroopSupport/Subsi...
by echelon | 2026-01-11 16:54:28+00:00
> As an artist you should know that being able to achieve whatever you want with whatever level of effort you want and get the reception you want is often not achievable

I love being told this over and over.

> the reception you want

I'm doing this for me. I live my life for me.

I'm lucky that I get to make friends and meet amazing collaborators in this journey.
by kibwen | 2026-01-11 16:54:28+00:00
What it tells me is that humans are fallible, and that being a competent programmer has no correlation with having strong mental defenses against the brainrot that typifies the modern terminally-online internet user.

I leverage LLMs where it makes sense for me to do so, but let's dispense with this FOMO silliness. People who choose not to aren't missing out on anything, any more than people who choose to use stock Vim rather than VSCode aren't missing out on anything.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2026-01-11 16:54:31+00:00
Awesome - now read it really closely and compare it to the version of reality in your OP. And DON'T paste it or this comment into your normal ChatGPT instance and ask it to respond. Really just think for a moment on your own.

> The goal: replace vague legal and philosophical notions of “manipulation” with a concrete engineering variable. [...] formally define the metric

What's the conclusion? Is this a "concrete engineering paper"? Has anything been "formally proved"? From your link:

> The math is conceptual, not formal.

> This is serious, careful, and intellectually honest work, but it is not conventional science.

> The project would be strongest if positioned explicitly as foundational theory + open design pattern, rather than as something awaiting “validation.”

> it is valid as a design pattern or architectural disclosure, not as experimental systems research

Be careful before immediately dismissing this as just imprecise language or a translation issue. There's a reason I suggested this to you.
by dangus | 2026-01-11 16:54:40+00:00
The thing is, LLMs aren’t redistributing your code. You’d have a minuscule chance of an LLM actually reproducing your code verbatim without major modifications.

Copyright and copyleft only deal with source code distribution. Your last sentence is not really true from a factual perspective.

I think if you really believe in the open source free software mentality that code should be available to help everyone and improvements to it should also be available and not locked up behind a corporate wall (e.g., a company using GPL code and releasing it with modifications without redistributing the source code), LLMs should be the least of your worries since they don’t do that action. On a literal level they don’t violate GPLv2/v3.

Perhaps copyright law needs new concepts to respond to this change in capability compared to the past, but so far there has been very little legal success with companies and individuals trying to litigate AI companies for copyright violations. Direct violations have been rare and only get more rare over time as training methods evolve.
by firefoxd | 2026-01-11 16:54:51+00:00
Slight tangent but I've had my own Pavlovian moment when I taught a loud neighbor how to keep the volume down [0]. It all started when our RF tv remote interfered. He probably thought there was a ghost that turned off the tv whenever his volume went above 15.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/teaching-my-neighbor-to-keep-the-vo...
by formerly_proven | 2026-01-11 16:54:51+00:00
> The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues.

But then this sounds like a bug in that particular compositor rather than the driver(s)?

fwiw, I have a modern nvidia card, and use the proprietary drivers, and Wayland (KDE/KWin), and that box has a few weeks of uptime.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-11 16:54:51+00:00
The deportations are not outside the law. This particular issue is a proposed rule going through the standard process.

Everything is fine. Better than fine -- this is what we voted for, and we're not stopping. If you want to accelerate the attacks on law enforcement, or cheerlead those that do, the responsibility for what happens in response will be on your collective heads.

And while I have zero obligation to -- or interest in --responding to all of your gish-galloped outrage firehose items, I will tackle one:

> ICE agents shooting and killing a mother on the street and labelling her as a "domestic terrorist" (similar to the pattern in Chicago that was dismissed with prejudice).

"Mother on the street" is doing a lot of work here. She was obstructing federal law enforcement. She had been doing so for quite some time, as part of an organized group. She accelerated towards and hit a law enforcement officer after ignoring a lawful order to exit her vehicle. She was shot in self-defense in the process.

She wasn't peacefully protesting. She was actively and regularly violating federal law, threatening law enforcement officers, and eventually, her f'ing around went a step too far, and she found out.

People like you, with your false assertions like "mother on the street" while you simultaneously talk about boots on the neck, nazis, and the importantance of "resistance", are the cheerleaders of this idiotic, ill-informed, self-destructive lawlessness by emotionally disregulated idiots like that woman.

More people are going to get hurt if they keep violating federal law, threatening federal law enforcement officers, and putting themselves in harms way. We're not going to be dissuaded by leftist violence.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-01-11 16:55:09+00:00
This is the rule - with the notable exceptions being the people that that society lionizes as “good” or “empathetic” or “kind.” For example MLK, Fred Rogers, Steve Irwin, Bob Ross etc…. these are people whose avatars demonstrate relational capabilities that transcend transactional.

In day to interactions with people in modern industrial society, 99% of the interaction is transactional by default. However if you look around you’ll notice that again the plurality of relationships are transactional at their root.

This is in contrast to transcendental relationships, like the achievable ideal relationship between parent and child, between siblings or romantic partners.

This is especially true for people who got into a position of power via “climbing the ladder”

The ladder in this case is made up of other people that you step on in order to get to the next rung in the ladder.

Transactionalism is ultimately the foundational basis for capitalism and our existing social order globally, and unfortunately also the root of all evil.
by UncleEntity | 2026-01-11 16:55:20+00:00
>> ...however they are poor utility for non-domain-experts.

IDK, just two days ago I had a bug report/fix accepted by a project which I would have never dreamt of digging into as what it does is way outside my knowledge base. But Claude got right on in there and found the problem after a few rounds of printf debugging which lead to an assertion we would have hit with a debug build which led to the solution. Easy peasy and I still have no idea how the other library does its thing at all as Claude was using it to do this other thing.
by arter45 | 2026-01-11 16:55:21+00:00
I have no idea about DeltaChat, but it's not surprising.

Social media and chat apps are successful because of the network effect.

Let's say I have ten friends. Nine of them use the same app exclusively and one uses another app.

If everyone want to stay in touch with all of them, the two most likely things are 1) the tenth friend migrates to the common app, 2) the tenth friend installs both apps. In both cases, most interactions use the common app, unless the tenth friend is so influential that everyone switches to the other app just for the sake of them.

When you want your app to be popular, you want to discourage people leaving your app for someone else and you want to encourage people to use yours (better features or, more commonly, a larger user base). As a result, unless there's any external force going in the opposite direction (regulations or just people really hating lock-in), you'll build your services so it's not that easy to leave. Better features are an alternative, but at some point new original features are hard to come by and can be expensive.

This is especially true if you want to make money through subscriptions, downloads or selling data, because the more users you have the more you earn, but it could also be true in free apps if the owner wants visibility.

Again, I don't know DeltaChat, but this is unfortunately the general trend.
by ChicagoDave | 2026-01-11 16:55:25+00:00
And that actually might get conservatives on board with universal basic income, which would be a very good thing.

I'm well aware of where wealth is today. There is a massive regressive imbalance.

Historically we've either had a bank systemic failure with depression to curtail it or a civil war. I'm hoping everyone under 40 years old will engage in local, state, and federal politics and reverse this without a depression or war.

Time will tell, and November is closing in on our collective democratic future.
by junaid_97 | 2026-01-11 16:55:35+00:00
I built a free USCIS form-filling tool (no Adobe required) USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.

So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled.

https://fillvisa.com/demo/
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-11 16:56:34+00:00
…and they are?

I don’t doubt there’s been plenty of new features. But are they significant enough that users on older versions or non-MS suites are left longing for the latest version of Excel?

I just don’t think there is much innovation left. Or at least not without changing the UX and/or paradigm significantly. Neither of which have happened.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-11 16:57:05+00:00
"By Carla Schroder - April 8, 2014".

I am all for replacing MS products with Linux, but the article is old. We are not in a time travel capsule; at the least not most of us. I would more expect current topics to match, e. g. replacing Win11 with Linux.

Also, I found WinXP actually better than Win7, Win10, Win11. At the least simpler to use.
by microtonal | 2026-01-11 16:57:17+00:00
Yeah, I think it is naive of the grandparent to believe that iPhones, Android phones with Google Play Services, a lot of cloud services can be replaced overnight. That said, it might not happen overnight, but it will surely happen.

I feel like we are close to a tipping point where governments and companies will move off US services en masse as fast as they reasonably can. I think this movement already started. E.g. our local university has forbidden use of US (well, any non-EU) LLMs for work and are trialing Mistral. Two years ago they would have gone Gemini without thinking (since they are already using Google Workspace). They are also extending support for their Linux workspace, which has primarily been maintained for CS'y groups, but they want to be ready to roll it out when needed.

A lot of organizations (especially non-profits, universities, etc.) have woken up when Microsoft relinquished Microsoft 365 access of the ICC chief prosecutor overnight.

I guess one side effect of the US going rogue is open source getting a lot more traction.

I hope that the EU (and UK) will also invest heavily in iOS and Google Android alternatives, because that will be the hardest bits to replace, but as long as AOSP still exists it will be possible to bootstrap reasonably quickly.
by echelon | 2026-01-11 16:57:29+00:00
I love Antirez.

> However, this technology is far too important to be in the hands of a few companies.

This is the most important assessment and we should all heed this warning with great care.

If we think hyperscalers are bad, imagine what happens if they control and dictate the entire future.

Our cellphones are prisons. The entire internet and all of technology could soon become the same.

We need to bust this open now or face a future where we are truly serfs.

I'm excited by AI and I love what it can do, but we are in a mortally precarious position.
by djeastm | 2026-01-11 16:57:57+00:00
While I don't think the section titles or one-sentence summaries accurately reflect the rather tenuous textual connections, I did find it strangely intriguing to scroll through the paragraphs of the books and just catch different bits of ideas from these writers.

It's like grabbing a half-dozen books off the library shelf, opening to a random page in each, then flit through them, kind of like a "engineering nerd book sample platter".
Show HN: Rick and Morty Inspired Multiverse News
by barelysapient | 2026-01-11 16:58:26+00:00
Over the holiday I wrote an interdimensional / multiverse news aggregator site inspired by Rick and Morty. Actually, I tried it in 2024 but the models weren't there yet. This year I feel like it works.

The site works by scraping news links on "earth prime". It then fits articles and re-writes them against user suggested universes. The LLM is Ollama, nemotron-3-nano on a Nvidia 4090. The images are nano-banana; although I'm thinking to explore using stable diffusion. The site is written in Golang and Templ.

Happy to answer questions and share about how it works.

https://greenportal.news
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 16:58:28+00:00
Thank you for the critique, but your 'sliding door' analogy misses the fundamental distinction between a passive physical constraint and an active agentic intervention.

1. The Illusion of Self-Efficacy:

A physical slot in a sliding door provides immediate haptic feedback. No user opens a sliding door and mistakenly believes they have developed the superhuman ability to move objects in perfectly straight lines regardless of their own force alignment. However, when an AI silently 'polishes' a user’s output, the user often experiences the result as their own. This leads to Agency Misattribution:

the user internalizes the system’s 'mercy' as personal mastery.

2. Behavior vs. Invisible Judgment:

You argue that tools don't make judgments, only exhibit behavior. But in agentic systems, when a system’s 'behavior' involves a probabilistic choice that overrides or refines a user’s raw intent without their perception, it functions as a delegated judgment. If the user cannot perceive this boundary, they 'forget' that a decision was made by the machine, which is a direct violation of Cognitive Sovereignty.

3. The Necessity of a 'Seam':

For a tool to be used responsibly, the model in our minds must match the reality of the tool's intervention. Unlike a transparent physical law like a door slot, an AI’s silent correction is an Ontological Deception. It whispers 'You did this' when you did not. JTP asserts that the 'seams' of these interventions must be perceptible—not because we need to see the gears turn, but because we must remain the sovereign authors of our own actions.

It is currently 2:00 AM in Japan. I'm not even sure if this discussion will survive the "flagged" status to reach you, but I need to get some sleep. I look forward to continuing this discussion—if the thread is still here—when I am back online.
by mirror_neuron | 2026-01-11 16:58:47+00:00
I’m a “LLM believer” in a sense, and not someone who derives joy from actually typing out the tokens in my code, but I also agree with you about the hype surrounding Claude Code and “agentic” systems in general. I have found the three positive use cases you mentioned to be transformative to my workflow on its own. I’m grateful that they exist even if they never get better than they are today.
by KarlVoit | 2026-01-11 16:58:48+00:00
My thing? ;-) My things are pretty much safe because I usually do risk analysis before I'm using new tools according to https://karl-voit.at/2021/01/18/tool-choices/

The purpose of the article is to make it a bit more transparent for people using Markdown-based tools that they still have some lock-in effects in place - depending how they are using one of the MD variants.

You're certainly right about the low level of popularity of orgdown. However, this was not the main purpose of the article and I made it very clear that there are many LMLs out there that do not come with the downsides of MD mentioned in the article. So even when you never ever touch org-mode or orgdown, this article is highly relevant to MD users. From that perspective, it's quite irrelevant if orgdown has caught on even though there are plenty of applications outside of Emacs that are able to use that syntax: https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool...
by kstrauser | 2026-01-11 16:58:59+00:00
I tried using XHTML when we were told, loudly and repeatedly, that it was the inevitable future. Thank god it wasn’t.

You should close your tags. It’s good hygiene. It helps IDEs help you. But. Trust me, you do not want the browser enforcing it at runtime, lest your idea of fun is end users getting helpful error messages like an otherwise blank screen saying “Invalid syntax”.

For fun, imagine that various browsers are not 100.00% compatible (“Inconceivable!”), so that it wasn’t possible to write HTML that every browser agreed was completely valid. Now it’s guaranteed that some of your users will get the error page, even when you’re sure your page is valid.

Conceptually, XHTML and its analogs are better. In practice, they’re much, much worse.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-11 17:00:49+00:00
> While FL Studio and Logic, Cubase and Ableton are what most people know. There’s ways of running ALL of them on Linux.

As I just managed to get VR working with HP Reverb G2 in my Linux environment, quite literally the only reason I have Windows still installed on my computer is because of Ableton, and not being able to run that properly on even workstation hardware.

How exactly do I get Ableton running with an external USB soundcard and everything running exactly like it runs on Linux? I'm quite literally ready to give you money if you manage to give me an answer that actually leads to me being able to run Ableton on Arch Linux, because for years I have tried, and waited for the moment it's possible. So please do tell, how do I get it running?
by topspin | 2026-01-11 17:01:35+00:00
> this relies on the idea that the purity numbers are based on "time of test" not "date of seizure"

No, the idea doesn't rely on "time of test" vs "date of seizure". There is no real provenance for any of this. There is no auditable trail for when any given batch of narcotics was manufactured, when it appeared in the US, how long it took to disseminate to domestic dealers, when it may have been further cut by domestic dealers, when it was sold, and when it was actually used. Even the seizure dates are dubious, given haphazard and inconsistent law enforcement handling and record keeping. There are also sampling biases, because some legal jurisdictions and law enforcement organizations are more or less cooperative than others.

All I claimed was that a delay was plausible. I am not obligated to become a narcotics market researcher in defense of my modest claim, and given the nature of all this, no amount of such effort is likely to be sufficient for you in any case.
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-11 17:02:13+00:00
My intention was to say: you won't get left behind you will just get left slightly behind the curve until things reach a point where you feel you have no choice but to join the dark side. Like gcc/assembly: sure maybe there were some hardcore assembly holdouts but any day they could and probably did jump on the bandwagon. This is also speculation, I agree, but my point is: not using LLMs/coding agents today is very very reasonable, and the limitations that people often bring up are also very reasonable and believable.

> No matter how good LLMs get at translating english into programs, they will still be limited by the fact that their input (natural language) isn't a programming language.

Right but engineers routinely convert natural language + business context into formal programs, arguably an enormously important part of creating a software product. What's any different here? Like a programmer, the creation process is two-way. The agent iteratively retrieves additional information, asks questions, checks their approach, etc etc.

> [0] This is another red flag I would hope programmers would have learned to recognize. Good technology doesn't need to try to threaten people into adopting it.

I think I was either not clear or you misread my comment: you're not going to get left behind any more than you want to. Jump in when you feel good about where the technology is and use it where you feel it should be used. Again: if you don't see value in your own personal situation with coding agents, that is objectively a reasonable stance to hold today.