MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wasmperson | 2026-01-17 23:37:29+00:00
I was never a fan of the "Dark Mode"/"Light Mode" trend. "We've added support to our website/application for a whole TWO themes!"

Meanwhile:

- One of the two themes is always worse, but which one it is is different from application to application

- Despite the above, I'm required to decide globally whether I'm a "dark mode" or "light mode" person, with no option to just let the application or website decide on its own which theme is best.

- Because designers now need to support inverted contrast everywhere, everything has to be monochrome, including icons, text, backgrounds, etc.

I'd honestly rather people just picked one theme and directed their efforts towards making it look as good as possible. Or, you know, add support for real custom theming so I can make it look however I want.
by qudat | 2026-01-17 23:37:38+00:00
> Then you look around and see "startup X gets to $1M ARR a month after launch" and shit like that and I'm feeling terrible about how we're barely growing.

Comparison is the thief of joy. I fall into this trap almost weekly. Success stories are incredibly rare and we only see the splash, not the iceberg of failure just beneath the surface.

I think about my current business constantly even though on paper we are making enough to keep this thing going forever but it never feels enough.

I felt this post and appreciate the honesty.
by piskov | 2026-01-17 23:38:40+00:00
> because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme.

That’s why I mentioned alabaster: the only thing it highlights is comments and constants.

Nowadays I can’t stand “normal” themes even for a minute: they are like blinking Christmas lights for me, too much distraction.

Imaging reading the book where each word has different colors for nouns, verbs, what have you — nuts! :-)
by pedalpete | 2026-01-17 23:38:43+00:00
The author's context of technology seems to be limited to the idea of software and screens.

Let's take a wider view. A pencil is a technology to someone from the 1500s.
A watch is a technology to someone from the 1700s.

The network (web) has already integrated into our lives. The screen is the point of distraction and there are many people actively finding ways to move away from that.

When I look at the proposed principles, I don't see how that makes computing any more "resonant".

Computing will continue to meld into our lives and will continue to be more and more basic. Children today don't think about "going online" like those of us around the birth of the internet did. Those born today won't think twice about an AI assistant that is ever present.

I feel like the goals of this manifesto may be orthogonal to their stated aims. Or maybe I completely miss the point.
by verdverm | 2026-01-17 23:39:45+00:00
> the "DevOps cannot code" part. To me it is a leadership failure

Have you done devops yourself? It sounds like a resounding No. Like you complained ops doesn't like to code (not a core skill for the job), ops complains that devs can't understand basic concepts of how their software runs. Is this also a failure of leadership? Is everyone supposed to know parts of everyone else's jobs?
I built visual search for tattoo artists
by rbaten | 2026-01-17 23:40:02+00:00
Last year I bought an A2000 for my 10" homelab to experiment with LLMs. Spent months tinkering, mostly just learning how things work.

I've been wanting a tattoo, but finding artists sucks. I got a ton of inspiration pics, but every artist I found was in LA or New York.

So I built something different. Upload an image or describe what you want, it finds artists whose work matches and shows you where they are.

The A2000 ended up as the embedding server. CLIP for visual similarity, pgvector for search, trained style classifier. So far 22k artists, 175k images, 147 cities.

https://inkdex.io
by nxobject | 2026-01-17 23:40:20+00:00
I'm playing with a related problem in my spare time - braille character-based color graphics; while we have enough precision for sharp edges, the fundamental issues with color are the still the same: if we begin with a supersampling pass for assignment, we lack precision, so we may need to do some contrast fixups afterward. I think some contrast enhancement based on your sampling schemes might be useful :) Thank you so much for posting this!

(I've previously tried pre-transforming on the image side to do color contrast enhancement, but without success: I take the Sobel filter of an image, and use it to identify regions where I boost contrast. However, since this is a step preceding "rasterization", the results don't align well with character grids.)
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-01-17 23:40:22+00:00
CSAM is not an overstated problem. If anything the amount of child abuse behavior online is an epidemic. The world's richest man sells a CSAM generator, the most popular game for kids under 12, Roblox, is besieged with predators.

Are governments good at regulating technology? Generally no. Is there a real problem that needs to be regulated: Oh my God, yes.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-17 23:40:47+00:00
> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.

Interesting how experiences differ. I've found dark mode contrast to generally be a bit better than that of light mode because for some reason designers tend to employ a wider spread of colors with a higher delta between the lightest and darkest in those, whereas light mode themes tend to be stark white and two grays tops with those grays barely getting used at all.

So for example it's common for group boxes in dark mode to get a dedicated background color where under light mode they won't have a background and all and fall through the the parent's white background, causing content to all kind of blur together.
by minimaxir | 2026-01-17 23:41:57+00:00
Update: I tested a port of the OP's methodology using Claude Code/Claude Opus 4.5 with some specific performance optimizations, and per the benchmarks, converting a 1024x1024 image to ASCII takes 16 microseconds. I suspect that will decrease after some more polish/iteration but that's enough for potentially real-time generation even on mobile hardware.
by AlienRobot | 2026-01-17 23:42:17+00:00
My hypothesis is that this has to do with the whitening of the UI.

Personally I love Windows XP because it's so colorful. The taskbar is blue. The start button is green. The window frame is blue, the close button is red. The sidebars are tinted yellow. Even icons like CD-roms aren't greyscale, but tinted purple instead.

Since then, people started removing color from everything. Colorful icons became monochrome, perhaps only so it could be easily switched from "light mode" to "dark mode" by switching their colors from black to white and vice-versa. Everything is now harder to see.

On Linux, most attempts to mimic retro GUIs fail because they can't tint different parts internal of a window of different colors, such as tinting only the sidebar a shade of yellow. This is rather ironic given that GTK's CSS theoretically could allow this. But in practice there is no stable public "API" for the classses used inside an application to allow users to re-style them easily with CSS. Even if I could do .sidebar { color: #ff0; }, I don't know the class name that my file manager used for its sidebar, for example, so I can't really do that.

In my opinion this the main reason modern UI's feel so bland and lifeless.
by lateforwork | 2026-01-17 23:43:27+00:00
Exposing children to pornography is illegal federally and in all states, treated as distribution of obscene material or child exploitation with no parental exemptions. Federal law (18 U.S.C. § 2252) prohibits such exhibition to minors under 18, carrying severe penalties like imprisonment.

So precedent exists. Social media is at least as harmful as porn.
by imiric | 2026-01-17 23:43:32+00:00
> You need to know what competitors shipped, what research dropped, what patterns are emerging across 50+ sources continuously. Generic ChatGPT can't do that.

You're saying that a pattern recognition tool that can access the web can't do all of this better than a human? This is quintessentially what they're good at.

> The real question is how do you build personal AI that learns YOUR priorities and filters the noise? That's where the leverage is now.

Sounds like another Markdown document—sorry, "skill"—to me.

It's interesting to see people praising this technology and enjoying this new "high-level" labor, without realizing that the goal of these companies is to replace all cognitive labor. I strongly doubt that they will actually succeed at that, and I don't even think they've managed to replace "low-level" labor, but pretending that some cognitive labor is safe in a world where they do succeed is wishful thinking.
by netsharc | 2026-01-17 23:43:35+00:00
Hah, 30 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...

It uses meta HTML tags and correct configuration of the browser to block/allow different ratings. I suppose one could use wget, curl, or lynx to bypass that stuff and download the HTML files, and then find the links to the the JPEGs in them...
by analogpixel | 2026-01-17 23:43:51+00:00
Some people like the making and tinkering with 3D printers, but have no actual projects they want to make with them, nor do they have the skills to use CAD to design them. On the other side are the people that have no interest in 3D printers, and just use them to implement their ideas.

I'm starting to think programming might become the same thing; people that program will be the people that just like to tinker with code and have no real ideas to implement, while the people that have ideas will use LLMs to implement the code so they can just work on their idea.

I've seen the same thing with Linux. There are people that like to tinker with Linux, playing with every setting and every window manager, but don't actually use the computer to DO anything, and then there are people that don't care what the OS is, and are just using the computer as an actual tool to get something done.
by lordnacho | 2026-01-17 23:44:43+00:00
I have a similar background, and I largely agree.

What's dying is the programmer-first job. That guy whose main use is that he knows how computers work, and secondly that he is a human who can understand how some business works, and can do the translation.

The other type of programmer is the business programmer. I started on this end before an incredibly long rabbit hole swallowed up my life. This is the person who thinks he's a finance guy, or an academic, or an accountant, or any number of things, who realizes that he can get a computer to help him.

This type of person is grounded in the specific business they come from, and has business-level abstractions for what he wants the computer to do.

AI is still imperfect, so it is still in your interest to know how the computer works, especially as you dive into things where your model of the machine actually matters. But it allows the person with the business view to generate code that would previously be their second job. He can QA the code on a business level. This used to just be called Excel, which would generate horrors for anyone who could actually program, but it is still the glue behind a huge number of business systems, and it still works because ugly often works.

I liken this to previous revolutions in IT. At one point schools had begun churning out literate people, and they started spilling out into the business world as clerks. You could learn how to read and write, and that would get you a job sending correspondence to India, that sort of thing. And that would be your way into the organization, and maybe you'd eventually learn the business itself.

People who typed stuff had a similar fate. There used to be rooms of people who would type letters and send them. Now the executive just types the letters and sends them off by email.

If you're a translator first, AI is not great for you. If you managed to turn your translation skills into executive skills, then you are happy to pull the ladder up.
by maxbond | 2026-01-17 23:44:44+00:00
I have no affiliation, I'm just a commenter.

The standard library requires a heap and such, but you can enable the no_std attribute to work in environments where they don't exist. https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/intro/no-std.html

Rust's safety model only applies to code you write in your program, and there's a lot that's unsafe (cannot be verified by the compiler) about writing a kernel or a firmware, agreed. You could have similar problems when doing FFI as well.
by blutoot | 2026-01-17 23:45:36+00:00
The key is that at the end of the day productivity is king which is a polite term for cutting head count and/or delivering at a ridiculously higher velocity.

You can deterministically always get good results at your pace. But most likely, you won't achieve that at the speed and scale that a coding agent running in 4-5 worktrees, 24/7 without food or toilet breaks, especially if the latter will mostly help achieve the product/business goals at an "OK" quality (in which case you will perhaps be measured by how good you can steer these agents to elevate that quality from "OK" without sacrificing scale too much).
by listenallyall | 2026-01-17 23:45:48+00:00
Its cowardly because he had plenty of opportunities to write this piece or to criticize Adams in other ways while he was alive and could respond. The bulk of the essay is about books over a decade old, which Alexander had read long ago. The comments make it clear Adams respected Alexander and linked to his work - surely he would have invited him on to his podcast to debate. As Alexander notes, they had plenty in common and were peers in a way.

It's cowardly to go to a restaurant, smile, eat your meal, say nothing, and then decide not to leave a tip because you thought the service sucked - without ever speaking up or allowing the restaurant to fix the problem. Its just as lame to leave a 1-star review because you perecived the food to be awful without mentioning it and giving the kitchen a chance to prepare the food in a manner you'd like.

And to respond to your initial confusion, an obituary is about the dead person. This essay is about Alexander, his interpretation of Adams' work and how Adams' work affected his life.

Is this an obituary? I think we'd both agree it is not. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1157241415688...
by spliffedr | 2026-01-17 23:45:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I *built Spliff, a high-performance L7 sniffing and correlation engine in pure C23. The goal is to build a fully working, Linux-native EDR that isn't a resource-hogging black box.

The core innovation – "Golden Thread" correlation:

Most eBPF sniffers capture SSL data OR packets. Spliff correlates both:

XDP (NIC) → sock_ops (socket cookies) → Uprobes (SSL buffers)
↓ ↓ ↓
packets TCP 5-tuple decrypted data
↘ ↓ ↙
unified per-flow view

This maps raw decrypted TLS data back to the exact TCP flow, PID, and process—something commercial EDRs struggle with.

Technical highlights:

• XDP + sock_ops + Uprobes – Three BPF program types working together via shared maps

• Lock-free threading – Dispatcher/Worker model with Concurrency Kit SPSC queues

• Full HTTP/2 – HPACK decompression, stream multiplexing, request-response correlation

• No MITM – Hooks OpenSSL, GnuTLS, NSS, WolfSSL, BoringSSL directly via uprobes

• Static binary fingerprinting – Build ID matching for stripped binaries (Chrome)

• BPF-level filtering – AF_UNIX IPC filtered in kernel, not userspace

Current status: Working L7 visibility engine. Captures and correlates HTTPS traffic in real-time.

What's next: Process behavior tracking, file/network anomaly detection, event streaming (NATS/Kafka), threat intel integration.

Linux-only – Requires kernel 5.x+ with BTF, XDP, libbpf.

---

The project is GPL-3.0 and we're inviting anyone interested to contribute—whether it's code, architecture feedback, security research, or ideas for EDR features that actually matter (not compliance theater).

GitHub: https://github.com/NoFear0411/spliff

*Note: The codebase was written with Claude Opus. I provide the research, architecture decisions, and review every line.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-17 23:46:05+00:00
Too late to edit, but:

> I wonder if Europe and Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the world know what they're missing by not having LEO as qualified as ICE running their streets.

"Europe" is of course not a place, but maybe you'd be surprised to know this does happen in "Europe" and other countries. In fact France specifically legalized police shooting vehicles fleeing traffic stops even if the police themselves are not in danger, and about a dozen people are killed that way every year.
by spuz | 2026-01-17 23:47:06+00:00
Why can't we just call it "play". That is what we used to call doing things without a purpose.

I wish people would disclose when they used an LLM to write for them. This comes across as so clearly written by ChatGPT (I don't know if it is) that it seriously devalues any potential insights contained within. At least if the author was honest, I'd be able to judge their writing accordingly.
by ajb | 2026-01-17 23:47:55+00:00
From the talk linked above, they went to considerable effort to design a system with a cheap processor which nevertheless contains an mmu, and so most other embedded kernels, which assume the lack of one, are not applicable. So the point of writing in rust is that they can ensure that some of the guarantees of rust are enforced by the hardware. (It's been a while since I watched that talk, so I don't recall exactly which ones). And this is a microkernel, not a monolithic kernel, so they will be using hardware guarantees even between kernel components.
by barishnamazov | 2026-01-17 23:48:08+00:00
> "I wrote 0 lines of code. I reviewed 0 lines of code."

This is the part that terrifies me. Generating code has never been the bottleneck; understanding it has. If you aren't reviewing the code, you are effectively introducing a black box into your stack that you are responsible for but do not understand.

While on point, I like the patterns Effect is introducing, but I have already been using them pre- and post-AI for a long time now (especially in TypeScript). It's not an innovation. We shouldn't be surprised when LLMs are better at working on robust code bases with modular design.
by lll-o-lll | 2026-01-17 23:48:53+00:00
> the "silo breaking" philosophy that looks at complex fields and says "well these should all just be lumped together as one thing, the important stuff is simple,

I don’t think this is the right take. “Silo’s” is an ill-defined term, but let’s look at a couple of the negative aspects. “Lack of communication”, and “Lack of shared understanding” (or different models of the world). I’m going to use a different industry example, as I think it helps think about the problem more abstractly.

In the world of biomedical engineering, the types of products you are making require the expertise of two very different groups of people. Engineers and Doctors. A member of either of these groups have an in-group language, and there is an inherent power differential between them. Doctors are more “important” than engineers. But to get anything made, you need the expertise of both.

One way to handle this is to keep the engineers and doctors separate and to communicate primarily via documents. The doctor will attempt to detail exactly how a certain component should work. The engineer will attempt to detail the constraints and request clarifications.

The problem with this approach is that the engineer cannot speak “doctorese” nor can the doctor speak “engineerese”; and the consequence is a model in each person’s head that differs significantly from the other. There is no shared model; and the real world product suffers as a result.

The alternative is to attempt to “break the silos”; force the engineers and doctors to sit with each other, learn each other’s language, and build a shared mental model of what is being created. This creates a far better product; one that is much closer to the “physical reality” it must inhabit.

The same is true across all kinds of business groups. If different groups of people are required to collaborate, in order to do something, those people are well served by learning each other’s languages and building a shared mental model. That’s what breaking silos is about. It is not “everyone is the same”, it’s “breaking down the communication barriers”.
by barishnamazov | 2026-01-17 23:49:38+00:00
Calling a Polymarket dashboard a "Bloomberg Terminal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

The value of a Bloomberg Terminal isn't the UI (which is famously terrible/efficient); it's the latency, the hardware, the proprietary data feeds, the chat network, and the reliability.

Building a React frontend that fetches some JSON from an API in 2 hours is impressive, sure, but it’s not the hard part of fintech. We need to stop conflating "I built a UI that looks like X" with "I rebuilt the business value of X."
by ravenstine | 2026-01-17 23:50:24+00:00
> There’s only one problem with the Bloomberg Terminal — it’s fucking expensive. And old. And clunky.

Yes and no.

Obviously I have nowhere near the wealth to afford a Bloomberg Terminal, but an ex of mine had a father who has one. He told me that the terminal itself is kinda bullshit but the real value from it came from the fact that it essentially provides a way for you to network with other wealthy investors. The terminal itself, according to him, is pretty ornamental these days.

I won't actively defend his opinion if someone here knows better, but what he said made sense based on what I saw of it.
by araes | 2026-01-17 23:50:35+00:00
> bad meetings will probably push the level of (bad) meetings even higher

bad meetings beget bad meetings

> If they got value from those meetings, they wouldn't be complaining.

This part actually felt quite relevant. Several years in the govt, and there was definitely a difference. Many meetings that felt inane, or meaningless to even attend, where you constantly questioned why you're even there, or bothered to show. Much phone swiping, and social media browsing. Often 10x+ attendance to people that ever participated. I often felt weird even asking anything, cause nobody was participating, and it felt wrong to even try to understand the endless charts on-screen.

However, a rare few that honestly felt quite worthwhile. We arrived, discussed what needed to said, and left with a better comprehension of the situation and the tasks necessary.
by roenxi | 2026-01-17 23:50:36+00:00
Yes with the important caveat that a lot of the time people don't have a crystal ball, can't see the far future, don't know if their intents will materialise in practice 12 months down the line and should therefore store information in Postures until that isn't a feasible option any more.

A consequence of there being no generally superior storage mechanism is that technologists as a community should have an agreed default standard for storage - which happens to be relational.
by lostmsu | 2026-01-17 23:50:37+00:00
Bro is clueless. The opposite of what he believes is true: process barely changes outcomes comparatively to the models. No matter your process, you can't make Claude 3.5 do what 4.5 is capable of. There are tasks that you'd have to reroll 3.5 til the end of the universe that 4.5 would one shot.
by furyofantares | 2026-01-17 23:50:42+00:00
Yep. There's at least 4 posts on the front page which are slop. I'm getting very sick of this, it's almost all I comment about anymore.

Right now most AI-related posts are themselves slop, but most other posts aren't, so I could get by with ignoring all the AI-related posts. Unfortunately I'm quite interested in LLMs, and what other people think about them and are doing with them.
by westurner | 2026-01-17 23:50:59+00:00
ScholarlyArticle: "Recursive Language Models" (2025)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24601

/? recursive language models:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Recursive+Language+Models :

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45596059

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46475395