MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dnw | 2026-01-10 19:00:00+00:00
I'd note a couple of things:

Not to nitpick but if we are going to discuss the impact of AI, then I'd argue "AI commoditizes anything you can specify." is not broad enough. My intuition is "AI commoditizes anything you can _evaluate/assess_." For software automation we need reasonably accurate specifications as input and we can more or less predict the output. We spend a lot of time managing the ambiguity on the input. With AI that is flipped.

In AI engineering you can move the ambiguity from input to the output. For problems where there is a clear and cheaper way of evaluating the output the trade-off of moving the ambiguity is worth it. Sometimes we have to reframe the problem as an optimization problem to make it work but same trade-off.

On the business model front: [I am not talking specifically about Tailwind here.] AI is simply amplifying systemic problems most businesses just didn't acknowledge for a while. SEO died the day Google decided to show answer snippets a decade ago. Google as a reliable channel died the day Google started Local Services Advertisement. Businesses that relied on those channels were already bleeding slowly; AI just made it sudden.

On efficiency front, most enterprises could have been so much more efficient if they could actually build internal products to manage their own organizational complexity. They just could not because money was cheap so ROI wasn't quite there and even if ROI was there most of them didn't know how to build a product for themselves. Just saying "AI first" is making ROI work, for now, so everyone is saying AI efficiency. My litmus test is fairly naive: if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix.
by dhussoe | 2026-01-10 19:00:08+00:00
ymmv I guess, I could "afford" much more rent than I pay (I suspect many staff+ big tech employees are in similar situations, especially if you're in a relationship with another SWE...) and when we first rented the apartment we had to submit W2s that showed we could probably buy the building if I wanted to, but rent is still going to be determined by the market
by vladdoster | 2026-01-10 19:01:55+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
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Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
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Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
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to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

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Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
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Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
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by jijijijij | 2026-01-10 19:02:41+00:00
You can probably fit a normal sized car and trailer in the space of an F150. Stupid argument. Or, you know, rent a trailer. It's utterly idiotic to carry around the weight and size of the F150 when you don't need the loading space. I hope American gas prices adjust to reality and people start considering efficiency, cause this mentality is not sustainable and hurts everyone on the planet.
by user2722 | 2026-01-10 19:03:24+00:00
May not have been a fair test. Windows is running the kernel in a kinda VM which older computers have not been optimized for -- newer generations of CPU can smooth out the overhead.

For a fair test against Windows 10 and below, you'll have at least to do this:
"Temporarily turn off your Memory Integrity and VMP" -- https://support.microsoft.com/en-US

Also, it's important to have all bits and pieces of Hyper-V/Windows Virtual Platform off (which the Menory Integrity relies on), thus cutting off WSL functionality.

We don't need flawed tests to tell us Windows 11 sucks -- yesterday my explorer bar didn't respond to clicks nor Windows key. In the past killing explorer.exe and restarting it, or logging off and back on, worked. Yesterday I had to reboot the machine to fix it.
by 9x39 | 2026-01-10 19:05:41+00:00
You can stretch it to religion, if you consider being inculcated in a certain religion a 1-way door.

Circumcision removes nerve endings and results in an exposed glans, which thickens the skin and further dulls its nerve endings. This is a 1-way reduction in sexual capacity, which the child doesn't have any say in. Comparing it to ear piercing isn't the same, which, while cartilage doesn't heal easily, there's no sexual sensation interaction and leaving piercings empty tends to reverse them over time.
by delusional | 2026-01-10 19:06:08+00:00
> We have a system that clearly creates value, but no longer distributes it in a sustainable way.

It does not "create value" it harvests value and redirects the proceeds it accrues towards its owners. The business model is a middleman that arbitrages the content by separating it from the delivery.

Software licensing has been broken for 2 decades. That's why free software isn't financially viable for anybody except a tiny minority. It should be. The entire industry has been operating by charity. The rich mega corporations have decided they're not longer going to be charitable.
by Derbasti | 2026-01-10 19:06:22+00:00
Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX. So for complex things, I'll always fall back to writing HTML or LaTeX directly. Markdown, instead, just falls back to HTML. Whatever I can't express in markdown, I can simply insert the HTML by hand. These markup languages are always fine for simple things, but have a hard time expressing more complicated things.

Perhaps some kind of escape mechanism, like typst, would solve this. But org-mode doesn't.

That said, org-mode-the-program (not org-mode-the-syntax) is just fantastic, and nothing else comes close. For me, this doesn't outweigh its problems. Obsidian is a good-enough alternative.

I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup. Last year, I did the same for my journal. I'm a bit sad to "leave", but it does simplify things.
by palata | 2026-01-10 19:07:38+00:00
> Unfortunately instead of engaging in a healthy debate

Take it from my point of view: I said that I don't believe that Europe has no software industry at all. And I said that I don't believe that regulations are the reason Europe's software industry stuggles against the US monopolies.

What the US monopolies have been doing to maintain their position is very well documented, and has nothing to do with regulations.

You claim that it's possible to compete with a monopoly if you are not regulated, and you call it a fact. I disagree. I believe that we as a society should prevent monopolies, and the way to do that is regulations. And of course, if you prevent monopolies in Europe but play against monopolies who are allowed in other countries, it's hard.
by throw__away7391 | 2026-01-10 19:08:13+00:00
A) I'm aware and B) so what? Markdown is popular enough now that even people who aren't very technical and don't know that they're reading/writing Markdown are familiar with it. This is incredibly valuable and not something you can replicate through purely technical means, there are so many places where having a ubiquitous way to express in plain text is helpful. Markdown has grown into this role at the same time that the environment developed. You will not be able to recreate this situation.
by kachapopopow | 2026-01-10 19:08:13+00:00
GPL however, does put restrictions on it, even the tokenizer. It was specifically crafted in a way where even if you do not have any GPL licensed sourcecode in your project, but it was built on top of it you are still binded by GPL limitations.

the only reason usermode is not affected is because they have an exclusion for it and only via defined communication protocol, if you go around it or attempt to put a workaround in the kernel guess what: it still violates the license - point is: it is very restrictive.
by speedgoose | 2026-01-10 19:08:17+00:00
Sorry to go against the C15 French circle jerk, but a good modern SUV is safer for everyone despite being heavier, and a SUV.

First, a good SUV is an electric SUV. Whoever had the experience to be behind a C15 without HEPA filters, something you can find in a good SUV, knows that the C15 will kill you with its air pollution.

It’s worse if you are doing sport on a bike or running. And trail running may not save you from those C15, as they are pretty capable off road vehicles and are used by hunters and farmers.

Also, the C15 has no ABS and ESP. Pierre is a lot less likely to crash into you with a modern SUV than a C15.

Finally, the C15 has no active security. It will drive full speed into toddlers playing on the road while a good modern SUV will stop automatically. Same for cyclists and other vehicles.

Visibility is indeed worse because the industry decided that a solid A pilar was more important.
by eadwu | 2026-01-10 19:09:08+00:00
I think you are expecting some kind of collaborative OSS type of library.

For LLMs to have replaced Tailwind - in part by using it themselves - this does not have mean that there _will_ be another library to reuse. In the context of LLMs, it becomes so "cheap" to customize the webpage that a library is no longer needed.

Tailwind in and of itself can be considered a "highly structured LLM" - if they so took it that far.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-10 19:09:10+00:00
Coupling falls off rapidly with distance. It's why a thick enough phone case will interfere with magnetic charging, and that's only on the scale of a few millimeters.

Drones consume a lot of power while in flight. You can get a little bit of power out of powerlines standing underneath them with some tricks, but it's not enough to keep a drone in flight. At least not without something prohibitively large to couple to the line.

It's also risky to hover near a stationary object because the longer you hover, the more you're exposed to the risk of a wind gust knocking you into the nearby obstacle.
by heliumtera | 2026-01-10 19:09:12+00:00
From the developer perspective not much changes despite organization structure being completely different in this comparison (trillion dollar company vs 10 individual contributors).

Tailwind Labs revenue stream was tied to documentation visit, that was the funnel.
The author's argument was this revenue stream was destroyed by a slight quality of life improvement (having llms fill in css classes).
Tailwind Labs benefits from:
a) documentation visit
b) inability to implement desired layout using the framework (and CSS being unpleasant).
It seems there is a conflict of interest between the developer expecting the best possible experience and the main revenue stream. Given that a slight accidental improvement in quality of life and autonomy for users destroyed the initiative main revenue stream, it would be fair to say it doesn't just "seems like a conflict of interest".
Definitely disagree with it being the "pinnacle" of how open source should function but I also won't provide any examples because it is besides the point. I will point out that fsf is fine for many decades now, and a foundation with completely different structure like zig foundation seems to be ok with a somewhat proportional revenue (orders of magnitude less influence, adoption and users, maybe 10-20x less funding)
by cornholio | 2026-01-10 19:09:25+00:00
Alaska received statehood a century after it was acquired, and only after being substantially colonized by Americans. It's entirely laughable to suggest that US will grant 2 seats ~= 4% of the Senate (plus one representative and 3 electors) to basically a small city of Inuits and Danes, most of which won't even speak English for a good many years to come.
by yolovoe | 2026-01-10 19:09:30+00:00
I will have forgotten almost everything by the time something inevitably breaks in a few years. Unless I am constantly recalling the knowledge and applying it, I don't find it worth it. And I _don't_ want to be constantly recalling this knowledge. I want it to just work.

OMZ has been working steadily for me for the past 8+ years. Autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and a concise prompt--really all I need.
by u8080 | 2026-01-10 19:09:37+00:00
Why should Linus renounce US citizenship, not finnish? He is living with family in Oregon for 20+ years.

This is my main point here - not much things connecting Linus and Linux to EU. In question of US and EU tensions I am not really sure US citizen BDFL will party with EU, also because companies who spend money and contribute to kernel are located in US mainly.
by Culonavirus | 2026-01-10 19:10:33+00:00
If "99.95% uptime on Black Friday", and "keeping a site secure, updated, and running" can ever be automated (by which I mean not a toy site and not relying on sheer luck), not only 99.99% of people in IT are out of a job, but humans as intelligent beings are done. This is such a doomsday scenario that there's not even a point in discussing it.
by tptacek | 2026-01-10 19:11:16+00:00
This is a tangential point (this post is not really about TUIs; sort of the opposite) and I think lots of people know it already but I only figured it out last week and so can't resist sharing it: agents are good at driving tmux, and with tmux as a "browser", can verify TUI layouts.

So you can draw layouts like this and prompt Claude or Gemini with them, and get back working versions, which to me is space alien technology.
by josefx | 2026-01-10 19:13:08+00:00
> Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.

From my own experience things tend to keep working on Linux if you package your own userland libraries instead of depending on the ever changing system libraries. More or less how you would do it on Windows.

Except Windows isn't perfect either, I had to deal with countless programs that required an ancient version of the c runtime, some weird database libraries that weren't installed by default and countless other Microsoft dependencies that somehow weren't part of the ever growing bloat.
by stackghost | 2026-01-10 19:13:21+00:00
>I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown.

Me too. I went to Jekyll and I thought I'd miss org but it turns out I don't. Plus I still get a slow lisp-like language (ruby) just like elisp.

Org is a neat idea but nothing supports it. You can get a jupyter-like experience with src blocks but have fun sharing it with anyone unless you only interact with other emacs users.

Markdown is merely acceptable, IMHO, but everything supports it, so it's the clear choice in my book.
by heliumtera | 2026-01-10 19:13:46+00:00
Gh actions runners had a dubious implementation of sleep that would cause runners to hang on 100% usage for weeks/months. A simple fix was proposed and neglected for 10 years.
This discussion resurfaced recently with zig abandoning GitHub entirely and criticizing this specific issue.
A fix was them merged following an announcement that self hosted runners will now be charged by the minute. Of course this two facts are totally independent but yeah, yeah, sure.
by marcosdumay | 2026-01-10 19:13:51+00:00
I tried this when Win 7 was new, and it worked great. Then I tried it when Win 10 was new, and it was a complete useless waste of time. In a week it was too slow to use again.

I still haven't used Windows since Win 10 support ended, and have no idea how bad Windows 11 is for people to declare Win 10 "super fast" all over the internet. But I don't have any hope it will accept any setup I want. Win 10 already didn't.
by leptons | 2026-01-10 19:13:52+00:00
If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.
by rendx | 2026-01-10 19:14:03+00:00
Are you asking how much was done with pen and paper, and how much of it was done on a computer, i.e. machine assisted? Where do you draw the line? How is "hands-on" in contrast to anything? Is it only "hands-on" when you don't use any tool to assist you?

I suspect you're inquiring about the use of LLMs, and about that I wonder: Why does it matter? Why are you asking?
by simion314 | 2026-01-10 19:14:09+00:00
>You would never use the cd lol, it would auto install - and if it didn’t you’d download the drivers online though if it’s such a piece of junk as to need that then it’s a junk piece of hardware anyway.

Sure, sure , so all hardware that does not autoinstall on Windows directly without a driver or internet is junk. AFAIK Windows can't install the correct nvidia or AMD drivers and you need to use special steps to prepare a windows install USB since the installer for some reason starts from the stick but doe's not have the drivers to complete the installation from the stick
by tonfa | 2026-01-10 19:14:33+00:00
Meteoswiss has timeserie histogram with of amount of rain with confidence intervals (10th and 90th quantile)

It tells you all you need to know at a glance :)

e.g. see
https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/images/1904/website/weather/...

(from https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/weather/weather-and-climate-...)
by nh2 | 2026-01-10 19:15:12+00:00
I'm using Linux on the desktop for 15 years and I still sometimes cannot connect to Wifi.

This is because the list of network refreshes (and disappears) before I can find and click the correct Wifi:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/issu...

This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes.

I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if anybody wants to give it a shot. (Given that AI is supposed to replace 90% of programmers last year, making the Wifi list stay visible should be easy, right?)

This worked fine 10 years ago.

Most of my gripes are around some UI garbage behaviour like that. I have a file manager on one PC (I think it's the Ubuntu one where some "GUI in Snap" stuff breaks the GUI) breaks the file picker dialogue, so that when pasting a directory path in to navigate there, at the exact instant you press Enter, it autocompletes the first file so that that gets selected, leading you to upload a file you didn't want to upload.

That said, all of that feels like really high quality compared to when once per year I click the Wifi menu on some Windows and it take 20 seconds to appear at all.
by peregrinus1 | 2026-01-10 19:15:27+00:00
Regarding Langan, you wrote:

"circumstances related to his poverty and uneducated single mom"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32414837

Wrong. You did not do the necessary reading, she studied philosophy:

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/mary-la...

"During the late 1960s she studied philosophy at MSU and was known by many young students as 'Mother Mary'"

I am really sick of such comments, simply claiming stuff that isn't true. I survived a hanging attempt at age 23 in 2010, became a Christian almost exactly seven years later and would totally do it again had I not become a Christian. I would _so_ love to put a sawed off shotgun in my mouth and blow my depression-riddled brain out of my silly head.

This world sucks, Job is right. The net is even worse; Tyler "Thamster" Hamilton also retreated because he couldn't take the awful news anymore every day due to our dysfunctional civilization.
by roywiggins | 2026-01-10 19:15:44+00:00
Goes back a long way:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nikola_Tesla_holding...

> The bulb is a prototype "fluorescent" light he invented consisting of a partially evacuated glass bulb with a single metal electrode. Nearby, probably behind the curtain, there is one of his Tesla coil high voltage oscillators which produces a radio frequency electric field. The electric field ionizes the gas in the bulb, causing it to glow similar to a neon light. This photo is a 2 second time exposure taken by the light of the bulb
by kubanczyk | 2026-01-10 19:15:46+00:00
> imbued with a GPL style license

GPL died.
Licenses died.

Exnation: LLMs were trained also on GPL code. The fact that all the previously-paranoid businesses that used to warn SWEs not to touch GPL code with a ten foot pole are now fearlessly embracing LLMs' outputs, means that de facto they consider an LLM their license-washing machine. Courts are going to rubber stamp it because billions of dollars, etc.
by b40d-48b2-979e | 2026-01-10 19:16:32+00:00
I had a 2010s Civic and moved to a Model 3. The curb weight difference was only ~3-400 lbs (about 10%), but the larger battery capacity, large SUV offerings are significantly heavier than ICE options (the F150 Lightning is about 2,000 pounds heavier than an ICE F150, for example, 5,000 -> 7,000 lbs.).
by a-dub | 2026-01-10 19:16:40+00:00
it always felt to me like the major innovation behind darksky was the clever exploitation of newly broadly available precision gps. prior to darksky, i'd look at the radar picture on my smartphone and the pin where i was to try and figure out when it would start raining, darksky seemed to just package this really nicely with visualizations and notifications.

(and yes, the visualizations were beautiful, but the real key was being able to see exactly where one was with respect to the radar picture and to be able to use already existing forward predictions of the radar picture in conjunction with precise gps to generate timeseries/events.)