MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by msp26 | 2026-01-11 18:44:13+00:00
> because there's already concern that AI models are getting worse. The models are being fed on their own AI slop and synthetic data in an error-magnifying doom-loop known as "model collapse."

Model collapse is a meme that assumes zero agency on the part of the researchers.

I'm unsure how you can have this conclusion when trying any of the new models. In the frontier size bracket we have models like Opus 4.5 that are significantly better at writing code and using tools independently. In the mid tier Gemini 3.0 flash is absurdly good and is crushing the previous baseline for some of my (visual) data extraction projects. And small models are much better overall than they used to be.
by oa335 | 2026-01-11 18:44:29+00:00
https://www.axios.com/authors/barak_ravid

Here’s the coalition agreement, see article 118:

https://main.knesset.gov.il/mk/government/Documents/CA37-RZ....

Here’s another analysis of the coalition agreement that includes that same quote:

https://www.ofekcenter.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/wha...
by kccqzy | 2026-01-11 18:44:37+00:00
> How could it realistically work any other way?

Well for one, what if universities like Harvard publish clear and transparent criteria for their students? For example it could say that the minimum required SAT score is 1580, and students with a lower score will simply not bother to apply, instead of sending in their application in the hope that other parts of their application will stand out enough.

For two, university admissions officers have internal adjustment algorithms to adjust the GPA from different high schools. They could publish that together with a minimum adjusted GPA.

The 50k application problem only exists because under the holistic process, everyone thinks they have a chance.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-11 18:44:45+00:00
> People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X.

I don't give a shit about X. Truly, I wake up and exist for weeks at a time without realizing the website exists or that anything happened on it whatsoever.

What I'm laughing at is Apple, who has had decades to forfeit their App Store monopoly. They didn't, largely because of pants-on-head stupid ideologues like Gruber defending their backwards logic. And then again with the client side scanning controversy, and now again when Gruber is mad that the shoe is on the other foot.

Apple is fascist. That's all there is to it. It's just a long, painful let-down for certain cheerleaders who really, really want to see the App Store used as a cudgel for good, vindicating the bootlicking apologists who put us in this miserable position.
by haar | 2026-01-11 18:44:46+00:00
https://ardent.pet/

My Family recently (in the last couple of years) started to breed Ragdoll cats in the U.K.

In an attempt to support what's involved in this I built Ardent for them. It covers a bunch of the day-to-day concerns (weighing and health tracking), Lineage and Inbreeding prevention, and Owner Pack generation for handovers to new Owners.
by jesenator | 2026-01-11 18:45:17+00:00
I think the stochastic parrot criticism is a bit unfair.

It is, in a way, technically true that LLMs are stochastic parrots, but this undersells their capabilities (winning gold on the international math olympiad, and all that).

It's like saying that human brains are "just a pile of neurons", which is technically true, but not useful for conveying the impressive general intelligence and power of the human brain.
by anfractuosity | 2026-01-11 18:45:47+00:00
Trying to visualise magnetic fields of a floppy disk.

So far I can see magnetic fields on a magstripe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8nM4Z-hkTw with two polarisers (one of which I rotate in the video, which is contained in a 3D printed holder with gears I made).

I'm awaiting some different polariser film, to see if I can get it to work with a floppy disk.
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-11 18:45:50+00:00
AFAICT, the future of software development looks like a lot of unprofessional software development.

Not unlike digital photography and Instagram. Has it killed film-photo divisions of photography companies? Yes. Has it put professional photographers out of business? Hardly, and in fact, the opposite. What the ubiquitous phone camera has done, is expose a lot many more people to the steep challenge of making truly good photographs. It has raised the average population-scale level of photo-erudition and taste to ever-more sophisticated levels. And, it has pushed the envelope on what photography can do.

So---assuming the AI overlords prevail (which I'm deeply skeptical of, but suppose a trillion dollars are right and I'm wrong)---what happens when LLMs allow anyone to vibe-code their own SaaS or Database or IDE or bespoke health-monitoring app or whatever...?

(edit: fix formatting)
by ghaff | 2026-01-11 18:45:58+00:00
When I joined my last company, it would have been politically unpalatable to run Windows which was what I was used to, Linux was sort of frustrating to me at the time (even if I'm sure I could have adapted and it has improved in the last 15 years), and then there were Macs--which I had never used but turned out to be very straightforward.

And I've been mostly in the Mac camp ever since even if I'll use other OSs as needed.
by graemep | 2026-01-11 18:46:01+00:00
> Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds.

This is something that I would expect with Windows over time (not in a few weeks though) but has never happened to me with Linux. I have run less stable rolling release distros, and I have done multiple major version upgrades on the same machine over time over many machines.

its sounds to me as though you are doing some unusual things - few people use Compiz now because DEs like KDE provide those through their default Window managers.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-11 18:46:17+00:00
Can you provide a link with evidence of that? I haven't seen that reported.

I'd also note in advance there is a big difference in someone figuring out how to jailbreak Gemini or OpenAI, and then the companies responding swiftly to fix that, than what has been reported with Grok where it was basically wide open to create those images.
by jaggederest | 2026-01-11 18:46:38+00:00
Locque is a language designed to both be easy for LLMs to read and write, but also for humans to review, and it's designed along my philosophy that the more structure you can give coding agents, the better, so it's dependently typed and hosted on Haskell at the moment. Feedback eagerly solicited.

https://github.com/jaggederest/locque
by ctoth | 2026-01-11 18:48:09+00:00
This is such a weird issue for me, who is blind. Did Grok undress people, or did Grok show extrapolated images of what people might look like undressed? The "undressed people" framing makes it sound like people physically had their clothes removed. Obviously this did not happen.

But, like.

If I have like ... a mole somewhere under my clothes, Grok cannot know about that right? People will know what they themselves look like naked?

Someone looking at Grok's output learns literally nothing about what the actual person looks like naked, right?

Kinda sounds like somebody should just make something that creates this for every picture ever? Then everybody has a defense -- "fake nudes!"
and the pictures are meaningless?
by jama211 | 2026-01-11 18:48:20+00:00
I actually don’t agree with that. If you don’t want to fully commit (which would help users transition) good effing luck getting an average user through the dual boot process, no distributed ever made that smooth or understandable. Even I have bricked my windows boot record by mistake and I’ve done it 100 times. But for the sake of argument let’s say they go full beans, my most recent install of Linux involved a manual ini file fix because sleep was totally broken, and learning to backport the graphics driver to an older version because the recommended pascal driver forces the wrong resolution on my main screen. This is just stuff that doesn’t happen with windows, which I installed without a hitch the same hardware.

In my opinion, in the best case scenario Linux is equal to windows in usability, but in every other scenario it just isn’t. Yes, windows is shit these days. But the average person would rather be annoyed at copilot than deal with driver issues.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-11 18:48:24+00:00
> In an ideal world, private citizens, even if they have notorious views, have a right to privacy.

Privacy is definitely important, in an ideal world we'd like to have as much of it as possible but we are now in world that's far from ideal.

> The death of privacy is definitely a more fundamental issue here,

Well, my prior comment was about personal security and why it's so easily, and on so many levels, jeopardized by the lack of privacy. In that light, privacy isn't the more fundamental issue for sure.

We know that "security through obscurity" isn't the best way to get there, it's rough analogy but it does apply here too. The fundamental issues are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we'd be in a very rough spot if high levels of secrecy were the only way to secure these.

Even under the best of conditions, secrecy has a limited reach and lifespan, it simply doesn't play well with liberty and happiness. So, there are more fundamental issues than privacy, and while more privacy is definitely an enhancer, it's just a knife in gun fight.
by bndr | 2026-01-11 18:48:30+00:00
Adding a bit of context as well: This started out as a internal linking tool, but grew into something more based on the customer feedback — the database has now reached about 10TB of data about keywords, pages, AI responses etc, where I know who was ranking where and why.

And I'm trying to offer this "data advantage" to website owners, so they can grow, and also this is something that will be hard to replicate (at least quickly) with AI.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-11 18:48:30+00:00
Reddit turned "leftist" because an incredibly small group of people control and engage in strict censorship of all major subreddits. Bluesky started "leftist" because they engage in strict censorship (including shadowbanning) with the same intent.

And anyone claiming there are "summary executions of American citizens in the street" is someone who has clearly spent too much time drinking from those outrage firehoses, because that's not what happened or is happening.

As for your telling misuse of "fascist":

> It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

> .. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
by anishgupta | 2026-01-11 18:48:31+00:00
working on a free mini-game for f1 enthusiasts, completely build by claude sonnet 4 and hosted on AWS

consistently getting traffic of 30k in a month with peaks upto 10k in a day

This has been on for a few months now but I'm thinking to add new features as users are asking for multiplayer support. Would love some feedback

[0]: https://www.hotlapdaily.com
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-11 18:48:31+00:00
Yeah, I'd put myself in this camp. My trust is slowly going up, and coupled with improved guardrails (more tests, static analysis, refactoring to make reviewing easier), that increasing trust is giving me more and more speed at going from thought ("hmm, I should change how this feature works to be like X") to deployment into the hands of my customers.
by jbreckmckye | 2026-01-11 18:48:40+00:00
Nothing as impressive as others here... but I have a few little things

--- Todo or else ---

The main thing is a new Go CLI called "todo or else". It scans your project for TODO comments and checks that they have deadlines

This allows you to hold yourself accountable for completing them

You can verify other things like whether TODOs have owners

I'm using Tree Sitter which means it can handle most programming languages (although, I'm shipping with a subset, as the grammars can get quite big)

I'm hoping to release this cross platform in a couple of weeks

--- Video: How PSX games were developed ---

A ten minute YouTube video about how PlayStation 1 games were developed

The tools, languages, and practices that were common in this era

Also the computers, software, programs used for creating assets (eg Irix Framethrower for SGI)

I'm hoping to produce a 10 minute video on my YT channel (jbreckmckye). Currently in the writing stage

--- Black Noise ---

A small, command line program for playing white noise

I think it would be a nice utility to have for focus sessions... maybe to double as a sort of pomodoro timer
by microtonal | 2026-01-11 18:48:48+00:00
Its going to be a very long time before it changes enough to do without US tech. How many European governments are encouraging the use of apps that only run on iOS and Android? How many critically important businesses like banks require customers run unrooted Android or IOS? HSBC's app will not even work if you install apps from F-Droid!

Step by step. For example, most Dutch banking apps work fine on GrapheneOS. Yes, still with Google Play Services, but at least they are sandboxed. It shows that there is a path to removing dependence incrementally. There are also a bunch of European phone brands (yes, most manufactured in China), like Nothing, Fairphone, Gigaset, HMD, etc. and at least one of them already supports alternative Android versions. Yes, I know they have issues, but you need to start somewhere.

Its good your university is trying, but that sounds like a limited response. Do they use Windows? MS Teams? Google Drive?

Yes, but they also have an official Linux workplace, last time I was there, you could choose to re-image a machine to run Linux on every machine. They are also trialing ownCloud.

The migration won't happen overnight, but it's good that they are setting up the alternatives, trialing them with small user groups, etc. It's the best way to prepare yourself.

I know of no government making serious attempts to get the private sector of US dependence. Just check how many things you use regularly run on AWS. Desktop Linux is great but is any government actually making consistent attempts to persuade businesses to switch to it?

I agree, not enough persuasion is done. But being gloomy is not going to help. Best is to trust in our own strength (we can do it), accept that the solutions are going to be worse (at least initially), make people aware of the risks and alternatives.

The whole situation sucks, but big changes also give rise to big opportunities and it is an opportunity to change to a more open, more privacy-friendly, more user-oriented, etc. ecosystem.
by BiteCode_dev | 2026-01-11 18:49:00+00:00
Also window.document.forms gets you direct access to all forms, "name" automatically attach an attribute to the parents and "this" rebind to the current element on inline event handler.

The DOM API may have been very messy at creation, but it is also very handy and powerful, especially for binding to a live programming visual environment with instant remote update capabilities.
by sensecall | 2026-01-11 18:49:01+00:00
I’m building https://tradeyhq.com/

It’s a super simple job management app for busy tradespeople to keep track of jobs.

The main use case is time pressed tradespeople who do most of their admin in the evenings.

The app makes capturing leads incredibly easy and quick. Lots of scope for extending functionality in the future in various directions.

(Not launched yet, squashing bugs and refining a few bits and pieces)
by tmerc | 2026-01-11 18:49:13+00:00
If the industry was actually good at figuring out what the customer wanted, gm wouldn't be cancelling carplay.

The industry makes cars more expense because it makes them more money. Some consumers want big and flashy. Some want cheap and reliable with enough space for cargo and passengers. Only one of those is being served currently. The rest of the industry is drifting to the up market with even the base trim being too expensive for many consumers.

Looking at current sales trends isn't adequate to gauge consumer demand for products that don't exist because they can't be purchased and something else has to take it's place.
by FourierSerious | 2026-01-11 18:49:28+00:00
If @tombert worked for me at BigCo, I'd give them a big raise for doing the exact right thing. This is Employee of the Year performance.

@tombert recognized that the homegrown tech was awful (*) and proposed a mature, reliable, well documented and supported, low-cost, utterly mainstream and mature replacement. That's not resume packing, that's pragmatic, rational software design.

@tombert also knows that every tech professional must routinely learn new things, otherwise they'll be unemployable dinosaurs long before retirement age. Tech dinosaurs aren't a pretty thing in the workplace.

(*) Especially awful because these are mutex and concurrency bugs, and @tombert knew that nondeterministic bugs cost expensive resources to investigate, find, and fix, simply because these bugs are unreproducible. Unlike straightforward deterministic bugs, concurrency bugs are open-ended tar pits that managers and engineers despise. These kind of bugs can eat up a project's schedule and energy.

edited: formatting bug. Fortunately it was reproducible!
Ask HN: Why are there always new agent platforms?
by ZeroAurora | 2026-01-11 18:49:46+00:00
Once again I'm seeing an agent development platform in GitHub Trending. Dify, RAGFlow, Flowise, Sim, Coze, countless to name, yet implementing the exact same goal. And there are still more emerging.

It seems like anything AI can be a trending, despite their repetitive works.
by ch_123 | 2026-01-11 18:50:30+00:00
I remember switching my Windows computers from XP to the alpha releases of Windows 7, and noticing improved stability. I remember needing to reinstall Windows at least once a year with XP, which was something I never needed to do with Windows 7 and onwards. This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it.

Your mileage may have varied, and all that.
Ask HN: Has macOS Tahoe been fixed enough to update to?
by ls612 | 2026-01-11 18:50:47+00:00
When it was first released in September the consensus was that it was one of the least stable MacOS versions in recent memory and so I have stuck on MacOS 15 so far. I'm curious if this has been improved enough with 26.2 to be worth updating to? Or should I hold off for 26.4 when the major Siri overhaul comes?
by MarkusAllen | 2026-01-11 18:50:59+00:00
The proliferation of PE firms is real - and the terminology they use obscures what's happening.

When there were fewer PE firms, they focused on "turnarounds" and "growth equity." Now with 15,000+ firms competing for deals, the
playbook shifted to pure extraction:

- Roll-Up Strategy: Buy all competitors in a region, eliminate choice
- Debt Loading: Make acquired companies pay for their own acquisition
- Sale-Leaseback: Sell the company's real estate back to itself
- Management Fees: Charge companies 2-3% annually for "managing" them
- Exit in 3-5 years regardless of long-term viability

I made a video breaking down the PE playbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOhtZNJs_bE
by thevivekshukla | 2026-01-11 18:51:11+00:00
I'm working on Daestro[0] - a job orchestrator that can directly integrate with cloud providers like AWS, Vultr, DigitalOcean and Linode to create instances for jobs to run on and destroy when done.

Currently I'm working on following features:
- Multi user support (Team) on project level
- Then I'll look into whether to add support for OIDC/SSO now or not
- Alert on slack
- Webhook support

0: https://daestro.com/
by koeng | 2026-01-11 18:51:27+00:00
I’m genetically engineering yeasts to make subtly flavored breads. I’ve already done grape aroma, now working on wintergreen.

Also working on a red chamomile (using beat red biosynthesis). Just for fun. Red chamomile tea!

The idea is to have niche invite-only genetically engineered flavors that I can bring to parties around SF :) what’s more special than a genetically engineered organism that you can ONLY get if I’m there? Good calling card
by d4mi3n | 2026-01-11 18:51:28+00:00
What you describe sounds a lot like Diátaxis[1], which is a strategy for writing and organizing technical documentation. It categorizes docs into one of four categories: tutorials, explanations, how-tos, and references.

Category is derived from a fairly simple heuristic: whether the content informs action or cognition, and whether the content serves the reader’s application or acquisition of a skill[2]. I’m a fan and it’s simple enough that most anyone can learn it in an afternoon.

1. https://diataxis.fr/

2. https://diataxis.fr/compass/
by nadams5755 | 2026-01-11 18:51:43+00:00
next i'd take a look at the network equipment's transceiver signal strengths. ideally over time to see if this has degraded. additionally, take a look at ethernet errors, retransmits, etc.

if you're using 25gbps/sfp28 transceivers, you probably have FEC. if so, you probably have both correctable and uncorrectable error counters to look at.
by dpark | 2026-01-11 18:51:49+00:00
> Are you trying to use LLMs to fool yourself into thinking this still isn't the game of humans needing to understand what's going on?

This is a key question. If you look at all the anti-AI stuff around software engineering, the pervading sentiment is “this will never be a senior engineer”. Setting aside the possibility of future models actually bridging this gap (this would be AGI), let’s accept this as true.

You don’t need an LLM to be a senior engineer to be an effective tool, though. If an LLM can turn your design into concrete code more quickly than you could, that gives you more time to reason over the design, the potential side effects, etc. If you use the LLM well, it allows you to give more time to the things the LLM can’t do well.
by Version467 | 2026-01-11 18:52:14+00:00
I'm working on Increader, an incremental reading platform.

You put in all your bookmarks (also pdfs or epubs) and it puts them in a queue and tracks your progress. Read for as long as you want to and if you get bored with an article you just move on to the next one. Supports highlights and annotations as well as creating spaced repetition cards out of those annotations.

Really reduces the friction for me to start reading and it has made a noticeable difference to my media consumption throughout last year.

Started out as an exploration into the incremental reading concept, but it's become my primary interface for reading and I use it every day.

I haven't really talked about this to anyone yet, but it's getting to a point where it's polished enough for others to use.

It's currently completely free and you can try it without entering your email.

https://www.increader.com/