MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bachmeier | 2026-01-07 16:49:17+00:00
https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/08/21/stack-exchange-machine...

They were on it in 2012! And no, it didn't help. The site's value was in providing users with answers to their questions, but that was never on the radar of the folks running SO. I guess they just assumed the free labor of the people that built the place would continue forever.

Edit: I even told them at the time that this was not the right way to proceed. They had no reason to close questions or even review them. All they needed was a holding pen where first-time questioners posted questions, and they needed to be promoted by users viewing them as worthy of an answer.

Guess what. They deleted my comment.
by InfiniteMass | 2026-01-07 16:49:50+00:00
This is a small experimental demo exploring stateless convergence in distributed systems.

Instead of relying on logs, replay, or historical coordination, nodes exchange full state and correctness emerges through selection and erasure. Multiple candidate states may exist briefly; one survives, the rest are discarded.

The demo runs five independent nodes over UDP. A node can be severed mid-run and later rejoin without replaying history. The repository includes a short screen capture showing the system running live.

This is not production-ready and intentionally surfaces failure modes like packet loss and jitter rather than hiding them behind retries or buffering.

I’m posting this as an exploration of a primitive, not a finished system. Happy to answer technical questions or hear critiques.

(For longer technical follow-ups, I’ve enabled GitHub Discussions in the repo.)
by raygelogic | 2026-01-07 16:49:52+00:00
if you're actually struggling to get people to interact with you the way you want, I think the real problem is your expectations of other people. if they miss the plot, it might be because you timed the conversation poorly, or because you talked to the wrong person for what you need.

this whole post reads like it's coming from someone who sees people as tools to get what they need. the reason I talk to people when I'm struggling with a problem isn't for reference, but for connection, and to get my own wheels turning.

I'll grant that it's interesting to think about. now that LLMs exist, we're forced to assess what value human brains provide. it's so dystopian. but there's no other choice.
by ux266478 | 2026-01-07 16:49:57+00:00
It's a confluence of various factors. Explosive population growth, for example. The modern economy (of which fiat currency plays a pivotal role) relies on that of course, as the lending system is a bet on future growth. If that fails the whole thing can enter a state of catastrophic failure. But population growth has more precedence. Fiat currency, bureaucratization, etc. were adopted as reactions to increasingly explosive populations and unchecked rationalism developing the absolutely ridiculous modern state system.

If you want demons to point a finger at, you're going to have to look further back in time than the 20th century. Then and now we're just doing a frantic tap dance to keep what we inherited from catching on fire.
by sp4cec0wb0y | 2026-01-07 16:50:04+00:00
A lot of open source projects attempt to become a business in some form or another (or vice versa). Great examples of this include Astral (creators of UV and Ruff), TursoDB, TigerBeetle, etc etc etc. People want to get paid for the project they work on. Some of their business models will fail. This is probably a case of tailwind growing their engineering team faster than they should have when the AI writing was on the wall in 2023.
by tanjtanjtanj | 2026-01-07 16:50:32+00:00
I don’t know what specialty stores you’re talking about but A4 is readily available at most stationary stores, or anything related to letter writing, pens, or paper. I got the A5 notebook I’m currently using at Barnes and Noble, they also have A4.

Heck, I’m pretty sure you could get a sheaf of it at any number of office supply stores right now if you wanted.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-07 16:51:15+00:00
a) that puts an upper cap on how much it makes sense to spend on theft prevention (notably target does not indicate how much money it spends on such activities)

B) such activities can reduce revenues in the first place. For example I don’t even bother going to retailers because they have so many obstacles with locked cabinets that online shopping is just a smoother experience.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-07 16:51:25+00:00
Oh, man. That was kind of the end of the line for me, too. I’d get roped into conversations trying to defend the question, which wasn’t even mine, because I thought it was novel and interesting enough to be worth answering in the first place. And then I asked myself what I was doing getting suckered into these talks. I don’t need that kind of tarpit.
by CPLX | 2026-01-07 16:51:29+00:00
> now it is unfortunately also crawling behind perl into extinction. This is very unfortunate - I still use ruby almost daily as the ultimate glue language. But this can not be denied now that ruby is following the extinction path perl already had going some years before.

I'm pretty sure that can be denied.

Rails and Ruby (both separately and as a unit) is still absolutely huge. It's launching massive new releases regularly and still underpins a healthy chunk of the top websites on the planet (Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb, Twitch, Hulu, Kickstarter, Zendesk, Basecamp, Crunchbase, Dribbble etc etc) and is still taught to new developers as well.
by alc90 | 2026-01-07 16:51:30+00:00
Last year I tracked my days in a spreadsheet. Not in a done / not-done way, but with a 0–100 score based on effort and intent.

Reading 10 pages still mattered even if the goal was 30.
That small shift actually helped me stay consistent.

I wanted to do the same thing in 2026, but just rebuilding that spreadsheet (again) was a pain so I stopped fighting it and vibe coded a tiny app instead.

Zilnic is just that: rate your day, add a note, see some simple stats over time.
No streak anxiety. No guilt. No “you failed today” energy.

It works with or without an account if you want to try it.
by bilbo0s | 2026-01-07 16:51:33+00:00
To be fair, Dell has bigger, more fundamental threats out on the horizon right now than consumers not wanting AI.

Making consumers want things is fixable in any number of ways.

Tariffs?..

Supply chain issues in a fracturing global order?..

.. not so much. Only a couple ways to fix those things, and they all involve nontrivial investments.

Even longer term threats are starting to look more plausible these days.

Lot of unpredictability out there at the moment.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-07 16:51:34+00:00
The datasets going into LLMs have to have an element of human-ness to it.

For example I can’t just feed it weather data from the past decade and expect it to understand weather. It needs input and output pairs with the output being human language. So you can feed it weather data but it has to be paired with human description of said data. So if we give it data of a rain storm there has to be an english description paired with it saying it’s a rainstorm.
by InfiniteMass | 2026-01-07 16:51:41+00:00
A quick note to orient readers: this demo is intentionally small and exploratory.

The core idea is not to hide network messiness, but to make it visible early. The system does not rely on logs, replay, or historical coordination for correctness; instead, candidate states compete briefly and one survives via selection and erasure.

I’ve enabled GitHub Discussions in the repo for longer technical follow-ups if that’s useful.
by mjr00 | 2026-01-07 16:51:45+00:00
> At around 1 PM Pacific yesterday, Adam called someone who had just been laid off from Laracasts an idiot. The person was lamenting about being replaced by AI.

This is totally untrue. The person who got laid off from Laracasts is @simonswiss, the person Adam is calling an idiot is @benjamincrozat.
by MarsIronPI | 2026-01-07 16:51:54+00:00
> Even better, start getting the feel for local models. Current gen home hardware is getting good enough and the local models smart enough so you can, with the correct tooling, use them for suprisingly many things.

Are there any local models that are at least somewhat comparable to the latest-and-greatest (e.g. Opus 4.5, Gemini 3), especially in terms of coding?
by gumboshoes | 2026-01-07 16:52:35+00:00
FWIW, for recently released books (<5 years) with more than a few hundred reviews, I find a 4.2 or above rating on Goodreads to be a fairly accurate indicator of whether a book Wil be a pleasurable read. The types of books mentioned in TFA have classic saddle curves - high on both ends, low in the middle. These controversial books may offer high engagement in a classroom or book club environment but for my time and money, the wide variety of possible negatives that cause the low-end of the saddle are sufficient to remove a book from my consideration no matter how high the other end of the saddle. Time is short, books are many, and although I am a very fast reader, I'm going to focus on reading writing that hits more positives rather than one that is split. The ends of a saddle-shaped vote curve can be discarded leaving, still, a middling rating.
by slowmovintarget | 2026-01-07 16:52:55+00:00
Ha... Ha haha haha... Ha!

Valve saw exactly this scenario, because you're right: Windows isn't good for stability any more. Windows isn't good for driver compatibility anymore. Windows isn't good for being easy to do your own thing. It's only good for gaming...

So: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
by ashleyn | 2026-01-07 16:52:57+00:00
If the AI-based product is suitable for purpose (whatever "for purpose" may mean), then it doesn't need to be marketed first and foremost as "AI". This strikes me as pandering more to investors than consumers, and even signaling that you don't value the consumers you sell to, or that you regard the company's stock as more of the product than the actual product.

I can see a trend of companies continuing to use AI, but instead portraying it to consumers as "advanced search", "nondeterministic analysis", "context-aware completion", etc - the things you'd actually find useful that AI does very well.
by xpe | 2026-01-07 16:53:28+00:00
A nice coincidence to read this; I was just telling some friends the following (lightly edited):

Nushell is amazing and a total pleasure to use. I cannot yet discern any limit to how much thought has been put into it.

I’m stunned in a good way. I’m writing shell scripts without any pain — actually I much prefer them to Python! With the language-server integration – I use Zed, but I'm sure they exist in VS Code and others too – I can see errors in scripts as I write them! (Including typos in pathnames! Amazing.)

I have to admit Nushell didn’t become my daily driver right away; it took a few years for me to switch fully. I don't know exactly why, but it probably had to do with its lack of POSIX compatibility. I now see this as a necessary break for Nushell to pursue its vision.

About expectations: some people will be delighted immediately and get hooked, but not all. We're all busy and adopting a new tool can feel like a leap of faith. For me, it has been worth it. Nushell has felt like planting a garden that gives back way more than you put into it.

I wrote up a quick gist [1] that shows how nice the experience is to write a new command (i.e. function) in Nushell.

[1]: "Building Argsort with Nushell" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528644
by hopelite | 2026-01-07 16:53:30+00:00
It’s an aside but why is…

>“Somalia’s piracy afflicted waters”

…acceptable racist language?

So Somalis don’t actually have human agency with accompanying responsibilities and who should equally be held accountable for their actions equally like all humans? It is the piracy that is afflicting them, being acted upon them, not that they are perpetrating the piracy like a human with agency?

It’s the most pernicious type of racism, paternalistic racism that is endemic and even pathological all through the West. They aren’t responsible for their actions like a human. They’re just beast burdened by their nature, don’t you know? It’s depraved and evil. It’s exactly the same depraved and racist mentality that is also leading to hundreds of thousands of young girls and women being gang raped all over Europe because the racist mind of officials makes excuses for the nature of the perpetrators and does not see them as humans with responsibility and accountability. It’s pure vile evil.
by lunias | 2026-01-07 16:53:32+00:00
Because AI is not actually autonomous, it can't join the workforce. You have to bring it to work with you. Once you've brought it to work, you need to tell it what to work on. This is the hardest part.

My AI usage exploded in 2025, but a lot of this stuff still requires a decent amount of technical know-how to set up and operate effectively. It also costs money, or requires hardware that many don't possess.
by bkorte | 2026-01-07 16:53:38+00:00
When I saw this on HN, I instantly felt terrible for Adam & the team. Happy to see that these comments are mostly supportive, they could have easily piled on the pain.

Listen to his podcast episode if you want his raw feelings on this - https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...

Very happy Tailwind Plus and Insiders customer here.
by everdrive | 2026-01-07 16:53:46+00:00
There doesn't really seem to be much to this article: the work is physically demanding, has a lot of up-front cost, and the path to good pay is not certain. Although it's sort of implied, the article really doesn't touch on the increasing complexity of automotive repairs.

Like so much else that's going wrong with cars these days, they're getting more and more difficult to repair, and there seems to be no way to back off from the precipice. I visited a corn maze with my kids late last year, and they had an old fire engine there. The inside of the doors were just a flat sheet of metal held in place by normal-sized Phillips screws. Anyone could have serviced that door without specialized tools or knowledge.

We should be able to build cars like this these days. Obvious, exposed bolts and screws, designed intended to allow for repair-ability. But like so many other trends, forces are sending us in the wrong direction.

Also, the article offers a helpful explanation of what a transmission is, just in case you didn't know:

> "transmissions, the duffel-bag-shaped, 300-pound machines that transfer power to the vehicles’ wheels."
by burkaman | 2026-01-07 16:54:28+00:00
Yes, keep this in mind when you see corporations pushing news stories about surging epidemics of shoplifting (https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/former-home-depot-ceo-org...). Shoplifting is not growing, and external theft generally accounts for about a third of retail inventory losses. See for example: https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statis...
by utopiah | 2026-01-07 16:54:32+00:00
That's the whole point of Tailscale or just any VPN really : it doesn't matter what your ISP says, as long as you can establish a connection to the outside, the outside can connect back. Tailscale just makes that easier if you are not familiar with VPN setup.

FWIW typically ISP blocks port related to spamming, so usually they block ports related to emails, e.g. SMTP, I believe DNS too, but other ports no problem.

That being said it's quite a silly use case IMHO. If you want to work on a project from "anywhere" then put your project on your server accessible from anywhere, that's literally what servers are for and they cost the price of a coffee per month.
by paul7986 | 2026-01-07 16:54:37+00:00
AI is only going to reduce jobs further.

My own personal example working at a small govt contractor in which we had a team of 12 working on an app for 10 years. We lost the re-bid to a smaller team (5 to 6)/budget using AI. We have been informed going forward the company will be following the competition (small teams using AI and bidding like the competition via smaller budget needs).
by milesvp | 2026-01-07 16:54:52+00:00
Raising taxes should never be seen as a way to raise revenue. Even if the Laffer curve has come under attack, there is still some profit maximizing rate which I’m positive most modern countries are beyond both at a static rate and at a growth and future revenue maximizing rate. No we don’t tax at this point to increase tax revenue. We do tax to shape what society looks like.

Right now society doesn’t look very good to so many people in the US it’s almost hard to talk about. Job growth is literally people saying, “hey, tomorrow, I can see it look better. We can spend time and resources to create something we all want more than today.” When job growth is low, that vision must also be low.

Taxation can turn that around in an industry. It can turn that around in aggregate. It does thay by both signaling to players, and by changing the game tree payout structure.

I think much of the taxation conversation right now is unfortunate because it keeps getting couched in terms of tax brackets, and that is almost a strawman at this point (even if many people think it’s important). I would say we need to tax the 1% differently. For instance, stock buy backs are currently a hugely distorting effect on the world economy. You can start by greatly taxing that.

The real thing people are talking about when talking about taxing the 1% isn’t just about tax brackets, it’s more about how taxes don’t materially effect people once they reach certain thresholds. It’s the same fundamental problem with traffic tickets. They are not proportional to general wealth so that means it’s a set of laws that apply less and less as one gains wealth which not only feels unfair, it is arguably a corrupting influence undermining the rule of law.
by aziaziazi | 2026-01-07 16:55:16+00:00
> Butter is favoured because it tastes unctuous

Oily stuff tastes unctuous.

Butter is favored because most people had it in their youth. Some regions loves Nato and Chicken feet, others cheese and oysters. What's the most delicious? It depends of your own history.

I spread olive oil on my toast and prefer the croissants made with that as well. My favorite dish is fried tempeh.
by jldugger | 2026-01-07 16:55:53+00:00
Related, yes. US DoT wants non-dom CDLs revoked[1]:

> The decision comes amid pressure from the U.S. Department of Transportation, which announced in November 2025 that it would compel California to revoke thousands of what it calls “illegally issued” non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses.

[1]: https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/california-cancellati...
by masklinn | 2026-01-07 16:56:10+00:00
> A major difference is: there is an economic incentive to not leak methane since a leak is wasted fuel

That economic incentive only goes so far given the entire point of the discussion: LNG is cheap. Per the IEA's recent "Assessing Emissions from LNG Supply and Abatement Options":

> Our analysis estimates total GHG emissions from the LNG supply chain are around 350 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2-eq) (this excludes emissions from combustion of the natural gas at the point of use). Around 70% of this is in the form of CO2 emissions which are either combusted or vented, and the remaining 30% is methane that escapes, unburnt, into the atmosphere.

> ...

> Globally, the average GHG emissions intensity of delivered LNG is just under 20 g CO2-eq/MJ, compared with an average of 12 g CO2/MJ for natural gas supply overall.
by hollowturtle | 2026-01-07 16:56:11+00:00
Your argument falls a little flat considering that you mention "hire a dev or two" while the whole narrative is "we don't need software engineers anymore" and Anthropic alone declares that "Although engineers use Claude frequently, more than half said they can “fully delegate” only between 0-20% of their work to Claude" https://www.anthropic.com/research/how-ai-is-transforming-wo...
by larkost | 2026-01-07 16:56:14+00:00
This is a longstanding problem. I worked at the receiving dock of a retailer long ago, and the amount of procedure and double-verification involved was a bit of a drag, all of it obviously aimed at making sure that neither I nor the guy driving the truck could make things "fall off the truck" without it being obvious.

But even then, it was common knowledge that most "shrinkage" (generic term for stolen/damaged/expired/destroyed merchandise) was from employee theft (except in grocery stores... there it is second to expired goods).
by vjerancrnjak | 2026-01-07 16:56:19+00:00
I am doubtful of the scientific validity and am definitively not dismissive of cultures that use meditations for inquiry into Self.

Strength training is a good example because it is an immensley stressful activity with adaptations that sometimes go into tics.

I believe I’ve read accounts of experienced meditators also stressing themselves to the verge of lunacy. Some even deal with panic attacks , unannounced, despite lecturing on inner peace.
by eevmanu | 2026-01-07 16:56:57+00:00
When I have that need, this is what I do.

I use the info from here as context:

https://github.com/InteractionDesignFoundation/add-event-to-...

I load it via a custom system prompt or skill, then pass my specific need, thought, or anything I want to remember in the future, including events with a certain frequency, as part of the prompt.

From that, I render the URLs needed to create the events directly in my personal calendar via the browser. This part could probably be automated better, but honestly I'm lazy sometimes.

And that's it.

I also try not to overdo it with high-frequency reminders, since that tends to de-incentivize actually using your personal calendar, which kind of defeats the purpose.

On top of that, Telegram 'Saved Messages' with the reminder feature is really useful. The native app makes it very fast to navigate. Obviously not as fast as searching local plain text files, but definitely faster than WhatsApp.
by dloss | 2026-01-07 16:57:16+00:00
> "simply taking time to feel your body and put your attention into latched tissues can release them."

That has been my experience as well. I have developed my own little technique around this idea, where you invite tight areas of your body to soften and spontaneously make tiny stretching or unwinding movements - without forcing, bracing, or following a scripted routine. I call it Intuitive Release.

https://dirk-loss.de/intuitive-release/
by reify | 2026-01-07 16:57:36+00:00
looks like the lowly shoplifter is going to bring down capitalism.

All that theft! no more profits. fuck me.

All major businesses have insurance to cover all losses from internal and external theft. Those same lossses are tax right-offs. in other words, the amount of money lost to shoplifting is less money they pay in tax.

I wonder of all the cctv, facial recognition and monitoring costs work out more than the actual shoplifted losses.

there is more to meet the eye than a lowly shoplifter here.
by reaperducer | 2026-01-07 16:58:02+00:00
Can you upload code to be executed on a stock 1541/1571?

Yes. There were disk duplicators that ran entirely on the drives.

You'd upload the program to a pair of daisy-chained drives, put the source disk in one, and the destination disk in the other and they'd go about their business.

You could then disconnect the computer and do other things with it while making all the disk copies you wanted.

I've always wanted a modern equivalent. I thought FireWire might make it happen, but it didn't. And it's my understanding is that USB doesn't allow this kind of independent device linking.

The closest thing I've seen in modern times was a small box I got from B&H that would burn the contents of a CF card onto a DVD-RW.
by sib | 2026-01-07 16:58:26+00:00
I'd put Tesla and GM on pretty opposite sides of this. In the case of Tesla, they actually know how to build good UX and software (and integrate them deeply with the vehicle), so I've never missed CarPlay having owned and daily driven a Tesla since 2018. (I get to use CarPlay frequently in rental cars for work.)

Whereas with GM, I'd rather poke my eyes out than use their software (similar to Toyota's or BMW's).