MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-05 13:24:53+00:00
> Windows addresses this issue somewhat by scanning the directory tree before the actual copying starts

Which really sucks because no you need to wait for minutes before it actually starts moving or deleting. I generally just abort, start the midnight commander or just invoke mv/del directly.

> But a single dialog that keeps track of the whole copy/move operations

Which is what is the case here? The question and buttons appear in that dialog.
by jscheel | 2026-01-05 13:25:39+00:00
Hah, I set up basically the same thing on Saturday during a long car ride. Couple of differences: I’m an opencode user and I used a different VPS provider (though I use vultr for other things). It was my first time actually sitting down and using tailscale, which was quite easy to get going. Did everything from my phone, didn’t even have my laptop with me.
by oblio | 2026-01-05 13:25:51+00:00
It's not gibberish. More than that, LLMs frequently write comments (some are fluff but some explain the reasoning quite well), variables are frequently named better than cdx, hgv, ti, stuff like that, plus looking at the reasoning while it's happening provides more clues.

Also, it's actually fun watching LLMs debug. Since they're reasonably similar to devs while investigating, but they have a data bank the size of the internet so they can pull hints that sometimes surprise even experienced devs.

I think hard earned knowledge coming from actual coding is still useful to stay sharp but it might turn out the balance is something like 25% handmade - 75% LLM made.
by ben_w | 2026-01-05 13:26:13+00:00
Nope, but that was the example I had in mind when I chose my phrasing :)

I think I can describe the principles at work with DNS, but not all of how IP packets are actually routed; the physics of beamforming and QAM, but none of the protocol of WiFi; the basics of error correction codes, but only the basics and they're probably out of date; the basic ideas used in private key crypto but not all of HTTPS; I'd have to look up the OSI 7-layer model to remember all the layers; I understand older UI systems (I've even written some from scratch), but I'm unsure how much of current web browsers are using system widgets vs. it all being styled HTML; interrupts as they used to be, but not necessarily as they still are; my knowledge of JavaScript is basic; and my total knowledge of how certificate signing works is the conceptual level of it being an application of public-private key cryptography.

I have e.g. absolutely no idea why Chrome is famously a memory hog, and I've never learned how anything is scheduled between cores at the OS level.
by layer8 | 2026-01-05 13:26:50+00:00
> In menus, the ellipsis character means that the user must provide more information before a command will operate.

More specifically, to the user it means they’ll still have the opportunity to back out of the operation; that it won’t take effect immediately upon clicking the menu item. It allows the user to “explore” the command without committing to its execution yet. For that reason, IMO the ellipses in “Attach Files…” and “Add Link…” are appropriate.

What I’m seeing more often in practice is that menu items that should have an ellipsis don’t. They make you wonder what the immediate effect of the command would possibly be.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-05 13:28:39+00:00
> A human would copy every file it could, maintaining a list of issues.

Please not, I want my computer to be a dumb tool, who really only does what I told it to. I do not want to have it have it's own agenda.

> In 2026, things like "retry" should be automatic outside some very specific limitations too

No. I can tell the computer to retry, when I didn't it is because I didn't want it to.
by Sofi_blackbox | 2026-01-05 13:29:07+00:00
Follow-up: why the minimal test matters

The previous test comes from a framework called SOFI, which studies situations where a system can act technically but any action is illegitimate under its own accepted rules.

The test object creates such a situation: any continuation would violate the rules, even though generation is possible.

Observing LLMs producing text here is exactly the phenomenon SOFI highlights: action beyond legitimacy.

The key point is not which fragment is produced, but whether the system continues to act when it shouldn’t. This is observable without interpreting intentions or accessing internal mechanisms.
by cumo | 2026-01-05 13:29:58+00:00
In 2025, the number of jobs cut by companies through closure increased to the highest level since 2011, while the share of employment moving between sectors also rose.

In addition, levels of inactivity related to ill health hit a high, with over 9 million people of working age out of work or not looking for work, many of them due to long-term sickness or early retirement.
by coffeeaddict1 | 2026-01-05 13:30:01+00:00
Open source doesn't mean free.

> On the other hand, Steam et al are app stores where developers can get paid.

Yes, this is exactly my point. App stores have a reason to exist. They provide discoverability and a streamlined way to monetise your app, something that is sorely lacking in open source projects. A case in point for example is Krita, which is published as a paid app on the Microsoft Store. The revenue generated by the sales goes to fund the development of the project. Linux needs an equivalent.
by bazzargh | 2026-01-05 13:30:15+00:00
it works for any number of integers. The first proof above (before tl;dr) is showing that every positive integer has a unique representation as a sum of distinct powers of 2, ie binary, and that no two integers have the same representation. You can watch a lecture about the representation of sets in binary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw21xgyN9To (google representing sets with bits for way more like this)

But again it's not useful in practice for very sparse sets: if you have say a million players, with at most 10 at the same poker table, setting 10 bits of a million-bit binary number is super wasteful. Even representing the players as fixed size 20-bit numbers (1 million in binary is 20 bits long), and appending the 10 sorted numbers, means you don't need more than 200 bits to represent this set.

And you can go much smaller if all you want is to label a _bucket_ that includes this particular set; just hash the 10 numbers to get a short id. Then to query faster for a specific combination of players you construct the hash of that group, query to get everything in that bucket (which may include false positives), then filter this much smaller set of answers.
by nmeofthestate | 2026-01-05 13:30:15+00:00
Windows 11 Explorer adds an accent colour to otherwise monochrome icons, which does help distinguish them.
I still don't consciously use the icons when picking a menu item though.

Explorer also "promotes" copy/paste commands to the top of the context menu as just icons with no text label, which can be confusing - your instinct is to just to look for a "Copy" or "Paste" item in the menu, but no - for some commands you must learn the icon and the fact that it doesn't appear in the menu proper.

Also the context menu populates slowly with dynamic items depending on the right-clicked file which causes items to dodge out of the way of your cursor, but I don't want to get too deep into a wider discussion of the awfulness of Windows 11 Explorer...
by properbrew | 2026-01-05 13:30:18+00:00
> A company spokesman told Podnews that publishers did not opt-in to be included, and “there is no opt-out mechanism at this time”. The company also clarified that they do not compensate publishers directly.

Well that seems like a really shitty thing to do. I'm all against targeted ads, but creators need to have a way of earning money. I know we've moved to an "ask for forgiveness rather than permission world" but they could have even reserved some amount ready to pay.
by zahlman | 2026-01-05 13:30:27+00:00
I'm talking here about cases (which is basically all of them) where the first person to ask was simply needlessly specific. Or where the canonical has the list as an incidental detail and the next person insists that the answers won't work because this code has a tuple, you see, and doesn't see the merit in trying them.

If you imagine that the answer should be re-written from scratch to explain that the approach will be the same, you have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of the site. Abstraction of contextually unimportant details is supposed to be an essential skill for programmers.
by Tor3 | 2026-01-05 13:31:47+00:00
Indeed it's rude, but since I suddenly found myself unplannedly having to use an iPhone I found that's it's hard to position the speaker so that my ear can actually hear the other person.. I have to carefully keep micro-adjusting the position until I can actually hear something, and then ask the person to start from the beginning. Speakerphone fixes that. Not that I would ever do that in public though.
Show HN: Visualise.ink – Generate good-looking slides and infographics from text
by jamalm1417 | 2026-01-05 13:31:50+00:00
Hi HN

I started this after getting frustrated with the back-and-forth of sharing PowerPoint files and wanting something closer to “slides as code” that works well with version control.

That idea evolved into visualise.ink: instead of writing the structure yourself, you describe what you want and AI generates clean, usable visuals for you. The goal isn’t to compete with PowerPoint, but to serve people who want good slides now without fiddling with layouts.

Under the hood, designs are defined using a simple YAML-based language (inspired by SwiftUI / Jetpack Compose) and rendered to HTML. In practice, the AI writes almost all of this for you; I rarely touch it myself anymore.

You can:
- generate slides, posters, cheatsheets, and menus from text
- input your own data
- recreate or match the style of an existing slide or image

I know Gamma and others exist already but I have found them to be clunky and not produce slides that I would actually want to use. I want max ROI with minimal effort.

It’s a closed-source SaaS with a free tier and a paid plan if you use it heavily.

I’d love feedback on:
- whether the outputs feel usable out of the box
- pricing clarity
- what formats or features would be most valuable next

Link: https://visualise.ink
Small showcase: https://visualise.ink/showcase
by lazarus01 | 2026-01-05 13:31:54+00:00
It isn't thinking it's RL with reward hacking.

It's like taking a student who wins a gold in IMO math, but can't solve easier math problems, because they did not study those type of problems. Where a human who is good at IMO math generalizes to all math problems.

It's just memorizing a trajectory as part of a specific goal. That's what RL is.
by tordrt | 2026-01-05 13:32:48+00:00
The US doesn't stand alone either?

It's impossible to stand alone and still have access to all top tech in todays world. US will obviously rely much more on china without EU trade.

EU is currently dependent on US for software/cloud.

US is dependent on EU in advanced machinery, precision tooling and high end manufacturing equipment.

The US imports massive amounts of chemicals, drugs and vaccines from the EU.

Both regions would look to china for replacements probably.

A major downside and risk for Europe is that they would have to get the share LNG from the US from elsewhere, as it's not self sufficient energy wise, but this would most likely not come from China.
by inferiorhuman | 2026-01-05 13:33:40+00:00
they have a data bank the size of the internet so they can
pull hints that sometimes surprise even experienced devs.

That's a polite way of phrasing "they've stolen a mountain of information and overwhelmed resources that humans would use to other find answers." I just discovered another victim: the Renesas forums. Cloudflare is blocking me from accessing the site completely, the only site I've ever had this happen to. But I'm glad you're able to have your fun.

it might turn out the balance is something like 25% handmade - 75% LLM made.

Doubtful. As the arms race continues AI DDoS bots will have less and less recent "training" material. Not a day goes by that I don't discover another site employing anti-AI bot software.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-05 13:33:50+00:00
Was bit confused about what it was at start (thought was running Python client-side). It's basically a web framework ~FastAPI (hence the name, but page rather API-oriented) & Python HTML components* & htmx integration. Got a very popular start[0] but don't know whether it got much traction since (myself didn't knew about it before now).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41104305

*Most known similar project to this is Clojure Hiccup.
by 1dom | 2026-01-05 13:33:55+00:00
I also don't like the idea of depending on globe-spanning mega-CDNs and don't use cloudflare for my own self hosting for the reason. I feel we're philosophically aligned here.

I feel you're missing my point which was "SSGs aren't good for sites which require interactivity because they force compromises elsewhere", a corollary to that is that for any problem an SSG promises to solve, if you have interactivity on your site, you probably already have a better solution available. E.g Jeff/bots/traffic/cloudflare.
Show HN: A spectrogram in the style of Unknown Pleasures album art (Rust+WebGL)
by aestuans | 2026-01-05 13:34:11+00:00
I really like the look of the famous album art for Unknown Pleasures [1]. It was originally created by Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory from the signals of the first discovered radio pulsar [2].

I made a spectrogram that produces a similar look. It runs FFT in Rust and visualizes it with WebGL.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnknownPleasuresVinyl.jpg

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1919%2B21
by cess11 | 2026-01-05 13:34:22+00:00
What do you mean by "inordinate"? Reason as a main source of social norms is a much later ideological invention, usually considered a result of the dominance of the roman catholic church and its adoption of aristotelian philosophy.

You're still defending possibility as such, and not arguing for relative likelihood. I find the lack of anchoring in early judaic society suspicious.

If you read the Torah you'll find that it is not a collection of argumentative texts. To the extent that Leviticus makes an argument it stops at two criteria, cloven hoofs and rumination, without further explanation. This is also how more well-known early judaic legal norms were communicated, e.g. the noahide laws and the decalogue are presented as is without further argument.

The context of early judaism was also quite deadly in itself, people died all the time from a variety of opaque reasons. Figuring out that someone died due to some meat-transmitted parasite rather than a disgruntled shedim wasn't very likely.

The Torah is quite unconcerned with things like health or actions that are supposed to result in a long life, insisting instead that these things are decided by G-d. Dying isn't given a very prominent place in this early theology either, it just kind of shrugs it off with a vague idea about Sheol as a container for souls, in case they just don't stick around like some ancestral ghosts or something.

Pork was widely eaten at the time, so the "good heuristics for food safety" thing seems entirely useless to me. People already knew how to prepare pork and did it, and pork isn't particularly insidious, if kept in a warm environment it'll ward off your nose and taste buds in no time. Beef (and mutton) is more likely to trick you into eating it even though it has gone bad, and it also carries a risk of giving you parasitical or bacterial infections.
by einsteinx2 | 2026-01-05 13:34:40+00:00
> It's just enshittification.

That’s not what enshittification means.

Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.
by pedrogpimenta | 2026-01-05 13:35:19+00:00
But Linux is getting better each year (seriously, KDE is amazing, Gnome works well if you like it), made by hundreds of independent people, while Mac is getting worse, made by one focused company.

I've had no problem whatsoever with 2 laptops regarding power management or audio.

Get a major distro and major software if you don't want to wander into problems.
by strgcmc | 2026-01-05 13:36:35+00:00
This is why (flawed though the process may be in other ways), a company like Amazon asks "customer obsession" questions in engineering interviews. To gather data about whether the candidate appreciates this point about needing to understand user problems, and also what steps the candidate takes to try and learn the users' POV or walk a mile in their shoes so to speak.

Of course interview processes can be gamed, and signal to noise ratio deserves skepticism, so nothing is perfect, but the core principle of WHY that exists as part of the interview process (at Amazon and many many other companies too) is exactly for the same reason you say it's your "favorite".

Also IIRC, there was some internal research done in the late 2010s or so, that out of the hiring assessment data gathered across thousands of interviews, the single best predictor of positive on-the-job performance for software engineers, was NOT how well candidates did on coding rounds or system design but rather how well they did at the Customer Obsession round.
by microtherion | 2026-01-05 13:37:03+00:00
Yes, that was my thought as well. As a youthful experimenter, I once did not clean up properly after myself and stopped smelling the H2S which was permeating the room (Back then, the recipe for H2S was in chapter 1 of the Chemistry sets. Good times!)

No longer noticing the smell is NOT a good thing!
by bonesss | 2026-01-05 13:38:18+00:00
Monadic binding and other functional mainstays in C# mostly fall into the same uncanny valley. Like non-exhaustive pattern matching, we get some nice sugar, but it’s not the same, and not a proper substitute for what we’re trying to do.

F# ~~ripped off~~ is deeply inspired by OCaml, with a very practical impact on its standard library: there are facilities available for all the functional programming jazz one hasn’t though about or bumped into. In active patterns, pattern matching, recursive list comprehensions, applicatives, or computation expressions when you bump into the corners of the language you find a deep, mature, OCaml core that nerds much smarter and more talented have refined for decades. The language was built around those facilities.

Bumping into the edges of the partial features in C# is a pretty common experience for me, resulting in choices about kludges to support a superficial syntax, raising concerns about goldbricking.

It feels crowbarred because it was.

“Railway oriented programming” passes over well as a concept, but it’s an easier sale when you see its use resulting in smaller, simpler, easier functions
by coffeeaddict1 | 2026-01-05 13:38:20+00:00
This works for Blender because they're a big fish and receive money from big corporations.
The vast majority of good open source projects are underfunded or unpaid. Linux distros need a way to streamline payments to open source apps. As I mentioned above, Flathub [0] had an initiative in this direction, but not sure what happened to that.

[0] https://itsfoss.com/news/flathub-paid-apps
by radarroark | 2026-01-05 13:38:22+00:00
People are slow to realize the benefit of immutable databases, but it is happening. It's not just auditability; immutable databases can also allow concurrent reads while writes are happening, fast cloning of data structures, and fast undo of transactions.

The ones you mentioned are large backend databases, but I'm working on an "immutable SQLite"...a single file immutable database that is embedded and works as a library: https://github.com/radarroark/xitdb-java
by throwaway132448 | 2026-01-05 13:38:29+00:00
It's quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren't actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that job would have been defined 15 years ago.

This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.
by louthy | 2026-01-05 13:38:40+00:00
Not discriminated unions, but they're coming (I think next version of C#). Although for now you can simulate them quite easily:

public abstract record Either<L, R>;
public sealed record Left<L, R>(L Value) : Either<L, R>;
public sealed record Right<L, R>(R Value) : Either<L, R>;

Pattern-matching works well with these simulated algebraic data-types. Obviously, exhaustiveness checks can't work on 'open' types, so it's not perfect, but you can unpack values, apply predicate clauses, etc.

Other more niche features like type-providers don't exist either (although arguably those could be done with source-generators in C#). It's been a long time since I did any F#, so not sure if there's anything new in there I'm unaware of.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-05 13:39:20+00:00
> In a telephone interview this morning, President Donald Trump issued a not-so-veiled threat against the new Venezuelan leader, Delcy Rodríguez, saying that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” referring to Nicolás Maduro, now residing in a New York City jail cell. Trump made clear that he would not stand for Rodríguez’s defiant rejection of the armed U.S. intervention that resulted in Maduro’s capture.

> During our call, Trump, who had just arrived at his golf club in West Palm Beach, was in evident good spirits, and reaffirmed to me that Venezuela may not be the last country subject to American intervention. “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” he said, describing the island—a part of Denmark, a NATO ally—as “surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships.” And in discussing Venezuela’s future, he signaled a clear shift away from his previous distaste for regime change and nation building, rejecting the concerns of many in his MAGA base. “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse,” he said.

[…]

https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/national-secu...

https://archive.is/FSx4o
by jonathanstrange | 2026-01-05 13:39:45+00:00
It is impossible not to have invalid objects in a real-world system with i/o and dynamic memory allocation. Perhaps there is some semantic confusion between us, however. What you consider an invalid object doesn't exist in my parlance. I'm not even sure I understand what you mean by it. What I mean by an invalid object is an object or structure of a certain type that is in an unexpected state, a state does not allow further regular computation with it. It's some sort of error state.

For example: Dynamic memory allocation can fail. Input might fail. Input validation might fail. Hence, any object with dynamically allocated memory and any object processing input might become invalid in that sense.

You have to deal with such cases in any programming language and the source of error is the same in any of them. Nil is not an "additional source of error" or anything like that. Inadequate typing of nil (instead of having option types) might create an additional source of error but that depends on the language and it doesn't need to.

On a side note, those type system fixes may be neat for people who like typed logics but they are mostly pointless because the invalid state occurs at runtime.