MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ggm | 2026-01-11 02:40:52+00:00
As part of the ageing, boomer, get off my lawn cohort, watching flared jeans on their fifth cycle round, I heartily echo the sentiment of this blog post. After all, it's the same threnody my grandparents made, as their kids explored Oxford bags and plus fours, listening to truly awful atonal modern music. What do these women think they'd get, cutting their hair short, wearing beach pajamas and smoking? They got old.

Anyway. Come up and see my etchings, after you've got off my lawn. Filthy, filthy etchings. The ones my great grandparents doubtless enjoyed too. Except nowadays, the etchings are photos by Andres Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe.

"Midnight in Paris" is one of Owen Wilson's finest performances. Everybody harks back to a better time, and always has.

Even second time round Goth and Emo kids have a point to make.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-11 02:41:41+00:00
All these comments, and no one has mentioned the classic “What’s the Worst That Can Happen?” Meme?

I won’t link to it, because all the sources are not so nice for techs, but just search for “10000 years later”, or “what’s the worst that can happen?”. The thumbnail previews will be fine. No need to open X or Facebook.
by amrocha | 2026-01-11 02:41:51+00:00
You’re kinda late to the party. 15 years ago that was the way to build UIs, but componentization changed that. Now we reason about UIs as blocks, not as pages, so collocation of logic, markup, and style makes the most sense.

Not to say that every component should be unique, generic components can be built in an extensible way, and users can extend those components while applying unique styling.

Theming is also a solved issue through contexts.

Reducing coupling was never a good idea. Markup and styling are intrinsically linked, making any change to the markup most likely will require changes to the styling, and vice versa. Instead of pretending we can separate the two, modern UI tools embrace the coupling and make building as efficient as possible.
by golem14 | 2026-01-11 02:42:45+00:00
Btw, which other note taking apps worth talking about exist? I am aware of org-roam and scimax (?) and both look promising but I find that (at least for org-roam) there’s not enough big picture explaining what is going on behind the curtains. That somewhat discouraged me from spending a lot of time with it, but a quick glance did look promising.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-11 02:43:04+00:00
Since you support merging fields you likely would want to track provenance (including timestamp) on a per-field basis. Perhaps via an ID for the originating request.

Although I would suggest that rather than merge (and discard) on initial lookup it might be better to remember each individual request. That way when you inevitably decide to fix or improve things later you could also regenerate all the existing records. If the excess data becomes an issue you can always throw it out later.

I say all this because I've been frustrated by the quantity of subtle inaccuracies encountered when looking things up with these services in the past. Depending on the work sometimes the entries feel less like authoritative records and more like best effort educated guesses.
by 20after4 | 2026-01-11 02:43:15+00:00
It's possible my friend wasn't telling me the whole story or just misunderstood the program. I don't think he was actually trying to stay addicted though because after a few weeks on methadone (with increasing doses and doctors telling him that he would always be an addict for life) he decided to take the more extreme route of getting clean by quitting cold turkey. He moved to a different state and cut ties with every possible source he had to acquire the drugs.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-11 02:43:20+00:00
Much like there is a water cycle on earth, we are discovering there are element transportation cycles in galaxies. Anton Petrov did an episode on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjToE8XJaL4

The early star were huge and exploded extremely fast, like a few million years. It's likely they did this in rapid succession many times priming the universe with a lot of building blocks. The early universe was wildly energetic.
by CompoundEyes | 2026-01-11 02:43:27+00:00
Recently I was using docling to transform some support site html into markdown and replacing UI images with inline descriptive text. An LLM created all the descriptions. My hope was descriptions like “a two pane..below the hamburger…input field with the value $1.42…” would allow an LLM to understand the UI when given as context in a prompt. Maybe I could just put ASCII renderings inline instead.
by al_borland | 2026-01-11 02:44:19+00:00
My dad used ChatGPT to guide him through testing, diagnosis, preparation, and recovery from a quadruple bypass. He never mentioned it refusing to talk about anything, just about how indispensable it was in the process and saved him months of time over skipping it and relying on the medical system alone, without help.

For example, it told him to go out and get a test on his own before meeting with a certain specialist, so the specialist didn’t order it during the first meeting and then need to wait for a follow up after reviewing it. He did this, gave the results to ChatGPT, which sounded the alarm. He sent a message with the results to his doctor and his appointment with the specialist was moved up to the same week, instead of 3 months out.
by karlding | 2026-01-11 02:44:30+00:00
Do you handle books with no ISBN?

I’ve recently acquired some photo books that don’t appear to have any ISBN but are listed on WorldCat and have OCLC Numbers and are catalogued in the Japanese National Diet Library. Not sure if they actually don't have ISBNs or if I just haven't been able to find them, but from what I got from some research it's quite common for self-published books.
by lovich | 2026-01-11 02:44:30+00:00
If user agents didn’t exist and were invented today, with the same implementation and use pattern that they currently do, would anyone call them a user agent?

I’m fairly confident that 95%+ of human users on the internet don’t even know what a user agent is, and it’s controlled by parties other than the user.

It’s not a win for user control if only a extremely small niche of users are able to take advantage of it
by aw1621107 | 2026-01-11 02:45:02+00:00
> I think the main part of Ghostty's design mentioned here that - as a Rust programmer - I think is probably a mistake is the choice to use a linked list. To me this looks exactly like it needs VecDeque, a circular buffer backed by a growable array type.

This comment [0] by mitchellh on the corresponding lobste.rs submission discusses the choice of data structure a bit more:

> Circular buffer is a pretty standard approach to this problem. I think it's what most terminal emulators do.

> The reason I went with this doubly linked list approach with Ghostty is because architecturally it makes it easier for us to support some other features that either exist or are planned.

> As an example of planned, one of the most upvoted feature requests is the ability for Ghostty to persist scroll back across relaunch (macOS built-in terminal does this and maybe iTerm2). By using a paged linked list architecture, we can take pages that no longer contain the active area (and therefore are read-only) and archive them off the IO thread during destroy when we need to prune scroll back. We don't need to ever worry that the IO thread might circle around and produce a read/write data race.

> Or another example that we don't do yet, we can convert the format of scroll back history into a much more compressed form (maybe literally compressed memory using something like zstd) so we can trade off memory for cpu if users are willing to pay a [small, probably imperceptible] CPU time cost when you scroll up.

[0]: https://lobste.rs/s/vlzg2m/finding_fixing_ghostty_s_largest_...
by keeda | 2026-01-11 02:45:38+00:00
Yeah unfortunately the hype is overwhelming and it needs real work to figure out what the real impact is. At this point the gains are modest but still compelling.

On the other hand, we are still going through a period of discovering how to effectively use AI in all kinds of work, so the long-term impact is hard to extrapolate at this point. Fully AI-native workflows may look every different from what we are used to.

Looking at something like the Beads and Gas Town repos, which are apparently fully vibe-coded, is instructive because the workflow is very different... but the volume of (apparently very useful) code produced there by mostly one dude with Claude is insane.

As such, I can also see how this can become a significant disruptor of human labor. As the parent of a teen who's into software engineering, I am actually a bit concerned for his immediate future.
by rendaw | 2026-01-11 02:46:01+00:00
Looking at the screenshots, Dark Sky does something bad that I think most other weather apps do badly as well.

Specifically: each day has a range (low and high) but it's not clear whether the low is for the morning or evening, and they could be vastly different. You could have 10-15 one day then 0-10 the next day, and think "Ok, I'll go out tonight and bring a jacket but no hat since the lowest it'll get today is 10 and whoops, actually it's freezing by the time dinner's over.

There are so many ways apps could do this better. Like showing a vertical line graph rather than discrete bars, with the lows inbetween days. Or if you want to keep the bars, make them angled, so the low is closer to the morning/night it's associated with. Or even show 3 temperatures, not just two! (one being the low for the previous or next day or whatever)
by mr_toad | 2026-01-11 02:46:24+00:00
I don’t buy this hypothesis, because we’ve had complex life on land for 250 million years. Evolution is not a steady upwards path (especially when you take into account mass extinctions). There’s no reason an intelligent species couldn’t have evolved on Earth any time in the mesozoic. Just a single million year head start would be huge for a civilization.

Seems highly unlikely that the resolution to the Fermi paradox is just that we’re the first intelligent species in the galaxy.
by phil21 | 2026-01-11 02:46:33+00:00
The "I have nothing to hide" argument doesn't work for security, and it doesn't work for health care records either.

You might not have anything to hide now, but you might in the future. Someone you are closest to gets murdered or into a horrific violent accident right in front of you. Despite your best efforts this gives you crippling PTSD and you are committed involuntarily for a 72 hour hold. Now your future employer (legally or not) runs a quick records check and sees you have mental health concerns and really doesn't care about the context. Why roll the dice? Go with the candidate who was in a close 2nd and already a coin flip who doesn't have such a thing in their history.

Plenty of other scenarios that can happen to anyone even if they live the most perfect boring life imaginable and never do anything interesting ever. Plenty more for folks who step off the reservation of "acceptable social/corporate behavior" even a little bit.

Plus, if you want to protect folks like in your example of having an abortion on their record - you need to vehemently defend their right as a boring person yourself as that's the only way such individuals will ever be protected. It's like herd immunity but for privacy.

It's not about the people who have nothing to hide. It's about the people who do.
by jgrodman | 2026-01-11 02:47:19+00:00
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Email me (CTO)
jesse (at) wayward.com
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-11 02:48:18+00:00
Apple Pay. Why would I use anything else? I used it in four countries last year outside of the US - Costa Rica, Canada, UK and France without a problem.

Even my barber takes Apple Pay right from his Android Phone by tapping.

The only difference is outside of the US and the UK, Amex isn’t frequently accepted.
by amrocha | 2026-01-11 02:49:17+00:00
You’re right that it’s not much more than a css in js library, but I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised at how efficient I am using it, despite also having years of css experience.

Things like remembering what the flex syntax is, or coming up with a padding system or a colour scheme become very very easy.

I think the editor tooling for tailwind is where most of the benefit comes from.

I also prefer the syntax over direct css in js systems. It’s less characters, which means it’s easier to parse.

Give it a try, you might be surprised!
by pixl97 | 2026-01-11 02:50:54+00:00
>then the concept provides a false sense of security. Even if the immoral behaviours are not common, they will eventually appear if you run chains of though long enough, or if many people use the model approaching it from different angles or situations.

Correct, this is also why humans have a non-zero crime/murder rate.

>Under these conditions, the concept of alignment is severely less helpful than expected.

Why? What you're asking for is a machine that never breaks. If you want that build yourself a finite state machine, just don't expect you'll ever get anything that looks like intelligence from it.
by 9x39 | 2026-01-11 02:51:03+00:00
Respectfully, this is a case where a lack of "field experience" combines with asking AI about peepees, and it gets weird after that.

Like another commenter said, this is a small (62) group of men tested for stimuli that don't appear to resemble sex.

To be blunt, I think it is apparent to those with experience that uncircumcised penises are significantly more sensitive than circumcised ones. If you wanted to test this - get a big sample size and simulate the 3 common types of copulation in a standard way (lol).
by MarkusAllen | 2026-01-11 02:51:22+00:00
I name names. (Mostly.)

When I get sued (and I will), I'll employ "roman a clef" and slightly fictionalize the names.

By the way, VCs are not exactly any better than PE firms.

I've tried to reach out Marc Andreesen to see if he can 100% pivot to building instead of extracting. I'm encouraged by his latest fund.
by jart | 2026-01-11 02:51:54+00:00
Inflation benefits people like your landlord, because his property value increases while his mortgage fees go negative. The bank is basically paying him to lord over you. So maybe he's a nice guy and doesn't make life harder for you when he's doing so well. Equities have concomitantly appreciated in value, keeping the overall economy worth about the same, but the gains get redistributed to more modern companies while everyone else gets washed away in the rising tide. Everything else it needs some time to trickle down and cause some pain before vendors wise up. That arbitrage opportunity is what incentivizes the folks who get the printed money to do it in the first place.
by jbmsf | 2026-01-11 02:52:23+00:00
I like the idea but I think it's going to be hard to put this particular genie back in the bottle. As an engineering leader, I prefer low fidelity designs early on, but practically no one else in my company wants that.

Designers have learned figma and it's the de facto tool for them; doing something else is risky for them.

Product leaders want high fidelity. They love the AI tools that let them produce high fidelity prototypes.

Some (but not all) engineers prefer it because it means less decision making for them.
by porkloin | 2026-01-11 02:52:24+00:00
Yep - exactly. Ops isn't immune to LLMs stealing your customers. Given that most of the "open source product with premium hosting" models are just reselling hyperscaler compute at a huge markup, the customers are going to realize pretty quickly that they can use an LLM to setup some basic devops and get the same uptime. Most of these companies are offering a middleman service that becomes a bad deal the moment the customer has access to expertise they previously lacked.

I also think he's glossing over the fact that one of the reasons why companies choose to pay for "ops" to run their software for them is because it's built by amateurs or amateurs-playing-professional and runs like shit. I happen to know this first hand from years of working at a company selling hosting and ops for the exact same CMS that Dries' business hosts (Drupal, a PHP-based CMS) and the absolute garbage that some people are able to put together in frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal is truly astounding. I'm not even talking about the janky local businesses where their nephew who was handy with computers made them a Wordpress site - big multinational companies have sites in these frameworks that can barely handle 1x their normal traffic and more or less explode at 1.5x.

The business of hosting these customers' poorly optimized garbage remains a big business. But we're entering into an era where the people who produce poorly optimized software have a different path to take rather than throwing it to a SaaS platform that can through sheer force of will make their lead-weight airplane fly. They can spend orders of magnitude less money to pay an LLM to make the software actually just not run like shit in the first place. Throwing scaling at the problem of 99.95% is a blunt instrument that only works if the person paying doesn't have the time, money, or knowledge to do it themselves.

Companies like these (including the one I work for currently) are absolutely going to get squeezed from both directions. The ceiling is coming down as more realize they can do their own devops, and the floor is rising as customer code quality gets better. Eventually you have to try your best to be 3 ft tall instead of 6.
by compounding_it | 2026-01-11 02:54:51+00:00
My personal experience with using macOS (m1 2020-) Windows 10 (2018-2020) and Linux (for the last 16-17 years on off) -

If you want to do basic stuff like browsing streaming learning video calls etc, get a non Linux computer with decent specs with some headroom. These operating systems are for people who just want to use that ecosystem and not need to manage anything themselves. Battery life is exceptional. Most people I know need a one or two step process to do things (like backup photos contacts documents etc) and Apple google Microsoft offer you that. It’s not perfect but it’s easy to manage. People really have gotten used to someone managing it for them and these things do fine in that regard. It’s better than people having 5 hard drives with photos and misplacing them imo. I’ve had people in 2000s connect drives to my computers and find private pictures and contacts and files etc I need not be having access to. iCloud and Google Photos offer you that peace of mind. With 2FA you’d rather lose it all than fall into the wrong hands. People have all kinds of stuff on their phones and computers that should not leave their computers and accounts. Imagine having your kids classmates find your intimate pictures on some drive they used to copy something your kid gave them. All this has reduced with cloud managed services with activation locks and 2FA and password mangers built into them. Yes they can lock you out one day, but it’s better than people having access to it.

If you are serious about your personal computer, switch to Linux before you start hating those companies. You are not the target audience anymore and you shouldn’t be disappointed about it.

I use Linux for most things, macOS for streaming and surfing the web (private relay and 4k native works great on M1) and windows when I have to deal with others having windows only accounting software sometime.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-11 02:55:11+00:00
> People on Hacker News mostly get that already

It’s super easy to stop fact checking these AIs and just trust they’re reading the sources correctly. I caught myself doing it, went back and fact checked past conversations, and lo and behold in two cases shit was made up.

These models are built to engage. They’re going to reinforce your biases, even without evidence, because that’s flattering and triggers a dopamine hit.
by godzillafarts | 2026-01-11 02:55:46+00:00
> When you start a feature branch on your own, do you create an entirely new development environment to do it?

… yes? We have a few wrapper scripts around worktree operations that copy some docker volumes (pg data, bundle cache, etc.) from the base and spins up an entirely new stack on different ports with a host alias. We don’t have to install any deps beyond that because we copied over the ruby gems bundle cache and we’re using Yarn PnP + “zero installs” for client-side deps.
by 20after4 | 2026-01-11 02:56:26+00:00
I really didn't mean to imply that one TSMC plant in AZ could replace Taiwan, nor that we should only care about semiconductor wafer output or worse to discount the desires of the Taiwanese people. Presumably, at least some large fraction of them wish to remain independent from China.

From a US strategic perspective, there are a lot of other things made in Taiwan other than just semiconductors. They make a lot of machine tools, for example, and tend to have better quality than what we can get imported from China directly. The castings are likely made in China mainland but then finished in Taiwan. You can get nearly identical machines from either source but the Taiwan-made version is generally superior.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-11 02:57:01+00:00
Im adding a second comment for the frogs thing, since its really a separate issue.

I'm very liberal and never made fun of the researcher who identified that atrazine makes frogs gay. It does objectively mess with amphibian development.

I did, and still do, mock Alex Jones for insisting that it was government conspiracy "chemical warfare operation" designed to do... something. That makes exactly as much sense as his Sandy Hook nonsense or pizzagate.
Show HN: VAM Seek – 2D video navigation grid, 15KB, zero server load
by haasiy | 2026-01-11 02:57:34+00:00
Hi HN! I built VAM Seek because I was frustrated with 1D seek bars – you never know where you're going until you get there.

VAM Seek renders a 2D thumbnail grid next to your video. Click any cell to jump. All frame extraction happens client-side via canvas – no server processing, no pre-generated thumbnails.

- 15KB, zero dependencies
- One-line integration
- Works with any <video> element

Live demo: https://haasiy.main.jp/vam_web/deploy/lolipop/index.html

Would love feedback!
by DBNO | 2026-01-11 02:58:20+00:00
I definitely agree that ChatGPT can be incorrect. I’ve seen that myself. In my experience, though, it’s more often right than wrong.

So when you say “in nearly every question on complex topics", I’m curious what specific examples you’re seeing.

Would you be open to sharing a concrete example?

Specifically: the question you asked, the part of the answer you know is wrong, and what the correct answer should be.

I have a hypothesis (not a claim) that some of these failures you are seeing might be prompt-sensitive, and I’d be curious to try it as a small experiment if you’re willing.
by rendaw | 2026-01-11 02:58:38+00:00
The post says "hardware isolated" but below in the sandbox it says firecracker, which I thought were supposed to be a secure way to run containers from multiple tenants on a single host. Also I thought Fly machines were already using firecracker.

I'm having trouble understanding the difference to Fly machines. If you spin up a Debian container on a machine with a persistent volume, doesn't that have everything this does? Is this about providing a layer of useful configuration/management software on top?
by stormy | 2026-01-11 02:58:48+00:00
Most ascii/unicode based diagrams spit out by AI have misaligned boxes, similar to the ones generated in the article.

I’m not affiliated, but to clean them up you can use something like ascii-guard (https://github.com/fxstein/ascii-guard) which is a linter that will clean it up. Beats doing it by hand after multiple attempts telling AI to do it and repeatedly fail.