MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robbiex88 | 2026-01-11 01:06:51+00:00
I recently rebuilt my home rig with some hardware upgrades, including a motherboard and cpu upgrade.

I use a MacBook and spend a majority of my workday in Ubuntu Linux.

The absolute only reason I installed windows on the home machine is because gaming is still essentially nonexistent in the Linux sphere.

If a flavor of Linux can catch up and run everything that can be run on windows I’d happily switch. I imagine a good chunk of the windows market would as well.
Show HN: A task-based workflow manager for bspwm – tasks as desktops
by devttyeu | 2026-01-11 01:07:09+00:00
My current role requires me to do insane amounts of context-switching, with many of them being fairly long-running or requiring quite a bit of back-and-forth. This is a quick vibe-coded project which adds a new mode for managing "tasks" (as-in todo-list tasks) as dedicated desktops - the idea is that in times of less focus (e.g. boring meetings) I can do discovery/setup phase of a bunch of things, then later can, much more efficiently execute things which need slightly more focus (think like pulling input docs / conversations first to then write an email; Finding relevant dashboards and user reports to later debug some complex issue).

In principle this model should also work much better with desktop AI agents, but that is not a problem I need to solve now.
by sea-gold | 2026-01-11 01:08:17+00:00
Previous discussions:

July 2024 (133 comments, 162 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40930549

October 2021 (23 comments, 90 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28915865

November 2013 (21 comments, 97 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745991
by dmurray | 2026-01-11 01:09:56+00:00
"Solvers" normally means algorithms which aim to produce some mathematically optimal (given certain assumptions) behaviour.

There are other poker playing programs [0] - what we called AI before large language models were a thing - which achieve superhuman performance in real time in this format. They would crush the LLMs here. I don't know what's publicly available though.

[0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)
by Spivak | 2026-01-11 01:10:28+00:00
I'm not really sure I get the value of these being remotely hosted. We're writing code on super powerful machines with hypervisors built in.

My libvirt setup does this right now, I have a little dumb cli I wrote that lets me create, start, stop, save, restore, and destroy preconfigured machines. I use it for testing provisioning scripts and playbooks. You get the full cloud experience by including a cloud-init ISO so you can ssh to it the moment it boots with my key. Didn't realize I was at the frontier of computing paradigms.

Don't get me wrong the interface fly has is super nice but it feels like the endgame isn't remote hosted computers but a nice user-friendly interface (i.e. what docker did) but it's for persistent local VMs.
by lazarus01 | 2026-01-11 01:12:12+00:00
Agreed.

Methadone is effective because it comes with lower respiratory fatigue.

If you have a nasty addiction, methadone is the gold standard for treatment. It's really all that's available to ween people down.

There are other medications for maintenance like buprenorphine and naltrexone. But you can't take those if you're in the throws of heavy addiction, you can die.
by RickHull | 2026-01-11 01:13:04+00:00
https://ghostty.org/docs/about

> Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.

> In all categories, I am not trying to claim that Ghostty is the best (i.e. the fastest, most feature-rich, or most native). But when I set out to create Ghostty, I felt all terminals made you choose at most two of these categories. I wanted to create a terminal that was competitive in all three categories and I believe Ghostty achieves that goal.

> Before diving into the details, I also want to note that Ghostty is a passion project started by Mitchell Hashimoto (that's me!). It's something I work on in my free time and is a labor of love. Please don't forget this when interacting with the project. I'm doing my best to make something great along with the lovely contributors, but it's not a full-time job for any of us.
by 8organicbits | 2026-01-11 01:13:40+00:00
Sure, I'll do some homework for you. I just took the latest Tranco top million list (7N42X) and scanned the top thousand .cz domains. 61% of the top 100 .cz domains have DS records as do 50.6% of the top thousand .cz domains. That matches what others have been reporting and doesn't seem "quite low" to me.

If you're interested in talking about something other than DNSSEC, I would be interested in your thoughts here.
by 20after4 | 2026-01-11 01:13:48+00:00
My complaint was about the forced increasing of dosage. They literally would not allow the patient to wean off of it. So yes, it might be an improvement over the shit on the street but it's diabolical that they force patients to continually increase their dose rather than gradually decreasing it.

I have no idea if this is common or just this one shady clinic but my data point of 1 still stands. If there is one, then given that this would be very profitable, it's highly likely that there are other clinics with similarly unethical policies.
by ozempicgandalf | 2026-01-11 01:14:59+00:00
This makes me feel old. I have a ton of windows laptops and really enjoy them. Mac just does almost everything (not gaming) better. Ecosystem (I can text!), battery life (!!!), creative applications and it is genuinely the nicest laptop on the market physically. I hate fan noise, and Apple really edged everyone out in almost every aspect… especially when you look at the total package.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-11 01:15:14+00:00
"Fighting for their existence" and "mercenaries" lol.

The Ukrainian people wanted to align more with the EU. They have a sovereign country which isn't part of Russia. They had no plans to invade Russia and even if they had joined NATO they wouldn't have had because NATO is purely a defense platform and so diverse they can't even agree how to fold their napkins. It is not a credible threat to Russia unless Russia attacks them.

In Putin's own speech before the war he described the Ukrainian people as subservient to Russia, a people who have no legitimacy of their own. Just good enough to be a "crumple zone" for mother Russia.

Are you really surprised they chose to align with the EU instead?

And how is Russia fighting for it's existence in taking over a country that wasn't part of it?
by tootie | 2026-01-11 01:15:18+00:00
Free speech absolutism is not necessary at all. We can be thoughtful about it. Think about the American criminal justice system and the criminal culpability standard of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". We have the concept of being "reasonable" at the core of our justice system for centuries and it works far more often than it fails. And certainly no one has come up with anything better.

I'm also reminded of the last time Matthew Prince was locked in the horns of a free speech issue when there was outcry for Cloudflare to stop platforming Daily Stormer and Kiwi Farms. Sites that were claiming their free speech rights to not only spread hate, but to doxx and threaten and, by extension, chill the speech of people they disliked. Hence, free speech is not unlimited. Some speech restricts the speech of others. And then it is very much the responsibility of regulators to step in and make a judgment.
by bsder | 2026-01-11 01:15:28+00:00
This is old anecdata, but as someone who taught at the CalState system in non-entry technical courses (so most outright failures already washed out before me):

1) 4 year students had my best average, but also my widest standard deviation. My best and my worst students were in this group.

2) Community college transfers had a slightly lower average than my 4 years, but the standard deviation was a lot tighter. They were optimizing time and schedule.

3) Returning professionals had an even slightly lower average than CC transfers, but the standard deviation was super tight. They mostly targeted the low end of the B grade range. They were very strongly optimizing every ounce of their time schedule.
by driggs | 2026-01-11 01:16:05+00:00
While predation by rats is curious news, much more common (here in the US at least) is predation by raccoons.

Conservation-minded management practice is often to build a "bat friendly" gate at the entrance of a significant bat cave or an abandoned mine portal. These gates are the ideal perch for hungry raccoons to pluck bats right out of the air. Bats emerge from entrances like this near the ceiling, when possible, specifically to avoid predators. Poorly designed gates are the opposite of "bat friendly" and turn the safe entrances into buffets for raccoons.

Why do we care about protecting bats? They're the #1 predator for night-flying insects, which are often crop destroying pests. Every bat we lose equals more chemical pesticide that farmers must use to efficiently grow crops.
by cyanydeez | 2026-01-11 01:16:14+00:00
Yeah, but not in ukraine. They brute forced fiber, fly by wire.

Dead reckoning via inertial sensors, cameras, etc are way to complex for the flight controllers without heavier hardware since theyre hugely inefficient.

AI at the sophistication to do this stuff is essentially bloatware. Like running electron instead of a bare metal gui.
by ggm | 2026-01-11 01:16:46+00:00
It seems to me there's lots of evidence they fear this and little evidence it's justified.

I think modern systems are viewed as constrained platforms and the fear at a structural level is people doing interesting unconstrained things with then. For apple that's an opportunity loss: if ableton on Linux is better they can't monetise ableton on OSX as successfully, is about as bad as it gets.

Nobody sues dell or lenovo because a PC runs Linux and the bits rot.
by 0xmattf | 2026-01-11 01:18:23+00:00
I feel like I'll be in your position soon, as well. 3 years at this company, but have been feeling the darkness pouring in. (in the last year, top sales people quit/got fired, and the CTO just quit.)

Absolutely no idea how I'm going to get another job. The area I live in is horrible. Hope for the best.
by lukev | 2026-01-11 01:18:35+00:00
Oh, trust me, I would absolutely love for a lot more of the US to be socialized (certainly healthcare, housing, and transportation.)

Unfortunately that is virtually impossible in the current political climate, so I didn't include it.

What I was trying to say is that, as it stands, PE is the end of an entity's life. Once it's been strip-mined for all value, of course nobody wants it.
by tptacek | 2026-01-11 01:19:19+00:00
Oh, if the Tranco list is interesting to you, you don't ever have to do any homework again; I continuously do it for you:

https://dnssecmenot.fly.dev/

A funny note here: I track changes, and in the last 150 days, there has been one (1) (someone turned DNSSEC off.)
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-11 01:20:01+00:00
> you can result in them then needing to sell, for much less than they'd like most likely

I’m imagining harder. Forced divestiture. Good amount of the hospitals and nursing homes would be bought of out bankruptcy.

But they still need to be bought and funded. And I think nobody wants to have a conversation about how much that costs and who winds up paying for it, particularly with many of PE’s hospitals being in rural America.
by xp84 | 2026-01-11 01:20:02+00:00
The government-owned things still suck too, they just give sweetheart contracts to whoever greases the right palms even though they suck. The money still flows to bad people, no matter what. Having it be tax money in the first place just increases the possible money available to be stolen, since government budgets can in practice only go up, plus the feds can print money.
by Ekaros | 2026-01-11 01:20:11+00:00
Issue to me is that I or someone else bought those books. Or in case of local libraries the authors got money for my borrowing copy.

And I can not copy paste myself to discuss with thousands or millions of users at time.

To me clear solution is to make some large payment to each author of material used in traing per training of model say 10k to 100k range.
by dripdry45 | 2026-01-11 01:20:36+00:00
it’s that first paragraph which is really the bugaboo. In an ideal world that first paragraph is 100% true. In reality, what you get is the government getting its own people on the inside, raking in tons of contract money and doing very little for that, then squeeze the services on the inside to win political points from their constituents by drumming up hatred for the system in which they work. While they take in "campaign contributions" from private entities who benefit from people falling out of the system or being fed up with it.

so I agree with you in theory, but in practice, there was a whole host of other issues that would need to be dealt with somehow. I don’t know that more bureaucracy is the solution, but I would like to think it can be handled.
by Muromec | 2026-01-11 01:20:40+00:00
Ukraine an interesting moment with the recent (as in less than 10 years ago) health reform. The change was not in the ownership regime, but in funding (preallicated fixed amount vs post payment for itemised coded services).

Once the incetives got changed, a lot of doctors opened up their own practices as PE. The government still foots the bill, but the corrupt middleman of the local variety got cut from the flow
by 0xmattf | 2026-01-11 01:21:39+00:00
> I've identified the reason to be how intellectually unstimulating coding has become

I've felt the same, so I went low-level. Logic gates, assembly, reversing, etc. It's a whole other world. I'm not quite sure how good LLMs are in this area though. Perhaps they're really good and I'm wasting my time (again). But it's fun; it felt like learning how to program for the first time again.
by greygoo222 | 2026-01-11 01:21:53+00:00
The claim that fentanyl death rates are decreasing because fentanyl products are less pure does not make much sense. Even on their provided charts, deaths dropped months before purity did.

The article points to a 50% decrease in purity, which a habitual user would compensate for by taking twice as much. Lower average purity also increases the risk of inconsistent purity, where rare batches are unexpectedly strong and carry high accidental overdose risk. Less pure fentanyl floating around might mean lower chances of unsuspecting non-fentanyl drug users being poisoned with it, but it's hard to see how this could cut into overall overdose cases.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-11 01:22:07+00:00
> The point is that PE should never have purchased these things in the first place

You can change the present. Not the past. Private equity owns these things. If you want them to not own it, you have to buy it back. Even if out of bankruptcy. Even if via eminent domain. Then you have to run it. All of that costs money.
by poor_frog | 2026-01-11 01:22:23+00:00
I'll give my guess - it's because of rhe "fullstack" bullshit.

I am a backend developer. I like being a backend developer. I can of course do more than that, and I do. Monitoring, testing, analysis, metrics, etc.

I can do frontend development, of course I can. But I don't like it, I don't approach it with any measure of care. It's something I "unfortunately have to do because someone who is not a developer thought that declaring everyone should be doing everything was a good idea".

I don't know how to do things properly on the front end, but I definitely can hammer them down to a shape that more or less looks like it should. For me, shit like Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever is nice. I have to spend less time fiddling with something I think is a waste of my time.

I love working with people that are proper front end developers for that reason, and I always imagined they would prefer things more native such as plain CSS.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-11 01:22:57+00:00
Money is imaginary. Health is health. Sacrificing your health and your life in order to hedge against a completely hypothetical situation is not a dignified existence.

Bankruptcy is of course much preferable to not having your health. Even having to argue this is bizarre. We are not human batteries in the Matrix. Our purpose is not to please institutions or destroy our own lives for fear of hypothetical situations.

Don't you understand that you only have one life and one body. That's it. You have 70 or 80 years with one body and one mind. That is the only thing which matters.
by goose0004 | 2026-01-11 01:23:09+00:00
The collision point is interesting, but I'd argue context disambiguates. If I'm understanding you correctly, I don't think the models are confused about whether or not it's looking at an email when `@` appears before a route pattern. These symbols are heavily represented in programming contexts (e.g. Python decorators, shell scripts, etc.), so LLMs have seen them plenty of times in code. I'd be interested if you shared your findings though! Definitely an issue I would like to see if I could avoid or at least mitigate somewhat.

That's an absolutely fair point that vocabularies differ regarding the tokenizer variance, but the symbols GlyphLang uses are ASCII characters that tokenize as single tokens across GPT4, Claude, and Gemini tokenizers. THe optimization isn't model-specific, but rather it's targeting the common case of "ASCII char = 1 token". I could definitely reword my post though - looking at it more closely, it does read more as "fix-all" rather than "fix-most".

Regardless, I'd genuinely be interested in seeing failure cases. It would be incredibly useful data to see if there are specific patterns where symbol density hurts comprehension.
by seec | 2026-01-11 01:23:20+00:00
Yeah but I would argue that they just used cheaper ressources since historically has been cheaper than compute.

It's not clear if compute can be cheaper than storage still today.

On one hand you can afford to use less storage but you have to use GPU power everytime to draw graphics, if the chip can support the compute requirement you can save on storage, but you pay with higher power draw at every interraction.

On the other hand you can just put more storage, chip assest that are rendered for the device they'll be used on and be ok.

Outside of crisis like now, storage should be cheaper in the long term I think. I doubt there is that much benefit in having assets being able to resize to any arbitrary resolution. The definition used in phones isn't that far away than what is used in laptops, monitors and now even TVs.

Something to think about is that icons/assets often need to change shape slightly as they become smaller or bigger for optical reasons. So even if you manage a fully vector scaled UI, you might still need to have difference depending on DPI to reading distance ratio. Rasterized assests might still be the real answer for a very long time.

Considering how bad is the iOS 26 release on performance, because of its dynamically computed interface, I'm not sure it's worth pursuing vector UIs, it doesn't make a lot of sense to make a more powerfull chip just to draw prettier or more "pure" interfaces...
by Proofread0592 | 2026-01-11 01:23:44+00:00
> Nobody wants a computer. They want what it does.

This is exactly why we have AI assistants in the first place.

The typical person wants the damn phone / computer / tablet out of their life, they just want to say "Siri, make my dentist appointment for 9:30 Monday morning" or "Copilot, find all the pictures of my dad and put them together in a collage for his birthday".

The biggest problem with AI assistants and this thought process in general is that they do not work.

As the article states, if the AI assistants actually did things we wanted, these companies wouldn't need to shove them down our throats so much. We would just... use them.
by just6979 | 2026-01-11 01:25:50+00:00
There are really any ads in Android itself, even with Google Apps installed. Which, by the way, you don't need to use even if they are installed (except, for example, Chrome to get a different app store or whatnot-, just like a fresh Windows install needing to use Edge to get Firefox or Chrome).

And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.
by 0_____0 | 2026-01-11 01:25:56+00:00
Yes. I have briefly encountered the real coffee nerds. They are extremely serious and meticulous about their coffee, do actual science, and, I am sad to say, the coffee was better than any coffee I have had before or since.

You will not get coffee that good from a coffee shop, it isn't economically viable. But the technology exists.
by tombert | 2026-01-11 01:26:19+00:00
I think he's actively lying with this to have some amount of plausible deniability.

If you look at pseudoscience "alternative health" treatments on YouTube, they always have some disclaimer saying "This is not medical advice, I am not a physician, please consult your doctor", and then immediately go on to tell you about how injecting yourself with ozone or drinking paint thinner will cure all your diseases. I think it's just a legal disclaimer, not like they are actually aware that what they're doing is bullshit.
by ajross | 2026-01-11 01:27:06+00:00
> This also meant that bidders could not edit the specifications.

But they can! That's the bug, PDF is a mutable file format owing to Adobe's muckery. And you made the same mistake that every government redactor and censor (up to and including the ?!@$! NSA per the linked article) has in the intervening decades.

The file format you thought you were using was a great fit for your problem, and better than MS Word. The software Adobe shipped was, in fact, something else.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-01-11 01:28:37+00:00
No. He's not comparing US vs France, you read that into it. He's comparing a car from 1985 (which happens to be French) to a car from 2025 (which happens to be made in the US).

You're attributing the difference to different countries, but everyone else here sees it's mostly it's from a different era.
by Plasmoid | 2026-01-11 01:28:47+00:00
I think you're over-estimating how much slack there is in the organization.

A rule of thumb is that benefits cost an employer 25-30% of salary. So you're already pushing to 50% of revenue going to direct salary costs. Then there are employees in revenue roles (HR, legal, accounting, IT, etc...) and employees doing non-revenue work.

Finally, you have rent, licensing, insurance, and all the other fixed costs.
by seec | 2026-01-11 01:29:23+00:00
It's pretty much the results of inter-platform competition. None of the actors want to use what the others are making for various reasons which I think are valid. For example, history has showned that being completly dependant on Apple tooling/frameworks/APIs isn't really a good idea because they are not a trustworthy player.
The same thing could be said about the reverse I guess and about most companies in general.

Software really has a big dependency problem because the sellers always bundle it with a service or a hardware in order to make money. I doubt it can be solved, since one has to make money somehow.
by ahussain | 2026-01-11 01:30:01+00:00
People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load.

With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles.

With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.