MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BeetleB | 2026-01-23 17:42:49+00:00
> Adding on to this I think it's bizarre how you need to have a phone to navigate life now and corporations just assume you have one.

I have a VoIP phone line from 2004. I was told yesterday that it was showing up as "Spam" on someone's phone. Sigh.

Also, for 2FA, some services allow phone calls. So I put in the VoIP line and not my cell phone. At some point, any given service switches to text-only for 2FA - but they don't notify me in advance and I'm locked out for good.

Even worse, some 2FA that allow phone calls just will not call my VoIP line. No warnings, etc. But if I put my mobile number it calls.

And QR codes for menus? I try not to eat at such establishments. Paper is cheap. I don't need a fancy menu. If you change your prices, just print new ones.
by b_mutea | 2026-01-23 17:42:56+00:00
Thanks. Substack is hostile, trust me I have had a Substack for about an year. You really need to standout with a lot of convicing to even have atleast 1 person even pay to read your newsletter.

Another reason, Substack payments channels are not available in some regions which means you can't have some premium posts and again just redirecting to a lets say Buy Me Coffee page does not always work to a majority of people there.

Maybe you could have some tips on how to approach this in your experience
by piyh | 2026-01-23 17:43:08+00:00
>I am troubled by people using an LLM at all to write academic research papers.

I'm an outsider to the academic system. I have cool projects that I feel push some niche application to SOTA in my tiny little domain, which is publishable based on many of the papers I've read.

If I can build a system that does a thing, I can benchmark and prove it's better than previous papers, my main blocker is getting all my work and information into the "Arxiv PDF" format and tone. Seems like a good use of LLMs to me.
by sneak | 2026-01-23 17:43:19+00:00
> The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem? The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem?

Docker Desktop, among other things, is not open source and is not free.

Open Core is not something that people who care about software freedoms engage in. It’s what proprietary software makers engaging in open source cosplay do.
by bastienbeurier | 2026-01-23 17:43:58+00:00
I personally think the hard part of building a SaaS app is not coding, it's understanding the complexities of a problem and building good abstractions to solve it. Code/software is the result, but certainly not the main challenge. And I think this reflects the time breakdown of good software engineers (mostly collaborating, brainstorming and designing interfaces vs. coding).
by kennywinker | 2026-01-23 17:44:10+00:00
I put my laptop in my pedalboard, but after i stomped on it a couple times it stopped working.

I jest, but there is a place in the world for pedals with a small amount of latency. As i pointed out in another comment, a codable dsp pedal isn’t a new idea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727231
by chuckadams | 2026-01-23 17:44:22+00:00
I love Kubernetes, but it's still a big leap from docker-compose to k8s, and swarm filled that niche admirably. I'm still in that niche -- k8s is overkill for every one of my projects -- but k3s is pretty lightweight, easy to install, and there's a lot of great tooling for k8s I can use with it. Still wish there were something as simple as "docker-compose plus a couple bits" that was swarm mode -- I'm drowning in YAML files!
by oxguy3 | 2026-01-23 17:44:56+00:00
I am more likely to separate two thoughts with space-endash-space than with an em dash and no spaces. It just feels weird to not type spaces, and I don't want to do space-emdash-space because that would feel like an enormous gap; if the two clauses need that much distance from each other, why not just split them into two sentences?

I'm sure this goes against many style guides, but for everyday use it's what feels most natural to me.
by dexwiz | 2026-01-23 17:45:37+00:00
Below Deck is our guilty pleasure for reality TV. We make predictions on who is going to get with whom, at what stage in the season certain people implode, who will get fired. I think Aesha from Below Deck was on the Australian Amazing Race. Also the show has an upstairs/downstairs dynamic we like. It's similar to shows like Downton Abbey.
by namibj | 2026-01-23 17:46:29+00:00
Ok, `io_uring` (like NVMe but for IO commands from application to kernel) and DBSP (high-grade framework for differential (as in, based on Delta streams/diffs not full updates) compression of "incremental view maintenance", it can keep materialized views synchronously up-to-date with a cost proportional to just the diff (for most typical ones; certain queries can of course be doing things at an intermediate stage that blow up and collapse again right after)).

At least notably; not sure about the MVCC `BEGIN CONCURRENT`'s practical relevance though; I am just already familiar enough with the other two big ones to chime in without having to dive into what Turso does about them...
by contingencies | 2026-01-23 17:46:38+00:00
You'd better use the default route and not some random IP, particularly DNS IPs which people often meddle with.

# IPv4 default route only
uname
Darwin$ route -n get 0.0.0.0 | grep interface | cut -d ':' -f2
Linux$ route -nv |grep ^0.0.0.0 | awk '{print $NF}'
by dismalaf | 2026-01-23 17:48:04+00:00
- OSes is easy, Suse and Ubuntu are European. As well as a bunch of smaller ones.

Programming language toolchains? You must be very NPM-brained, stuff like C and C++ is generally quite decentralized with OSes taking care of packaging. There's also plenty of languages that originated in Europe.

Hardware vendors? There's a few. Most hardware vendors in general are Asian though.
Show HN: Claude Tutor – an open source engineering tutor
by mraspuzzi | 2026-01-23 17:48:23+00:00
We used Claude Agent SDK to make Claude Tutor. It's main goal is increase human knowledge, understanding, and agency.

It's an email and CLI agent to help people level up their software engineering skills.

We think there's too much focus on AI agency right now and not enough on human agency.

Open sourced, and curious for feedback! This is v0.1 so it's hella early.

Ps. Next step is to get this working on Open Agent SDK and explore other interfaces.
by palmotea | 2026-01-23 17:48:32+00:00
> The democrats did try to do things like pass a huge expansion in immigration enforcement.

IIRC, Biden hemmed and hawwed on border environment until like a couple months before the election, when he issued some executive orders that actually had an impact. But that was too little, too late.

> Harris promised to have a republican in her cabinet. She campaigned with Liz Cheney. Did republican voters suddenly jump on board? No.

Except that was misunderstanding "republican voters" and the energy Trump was tapping into. Getting Liz Cheney on board was just Dem elitists trying to ally with the dying and unpopular elitist wing of the Republican party.

I'm talking about something far more radical than some warmed over 2000s centrism: jettison the much of the social-justice activist baggage and co-opt some of Trump's populist appeal, like his rejection of neoliberalism and support for effective border enforcement.
by no_time | 2026-01-23 17:48:40+00:00
My current employer (regional O&G multi) loads all laptops with the most horrid mix of itsec garbage known to man. We have both the compliance module of AnyConnect (without using the VPN part) AND Zscaler for VPN.

Upon boot this has a 50/50 chance of triggering a chicken and egg problem where AnyConnect wants to connect to the complience server but can't because of Zscaler is not yet authenticated through PingID, but PingID cannot be reached because of the aforementioned complience check not succeeding. Or atleast that is my theory. Toggling the network adapter in the Windows control panel 1-2-3 times tends to solve it. Not 100% sure about my theory of what's going on, but my tickets about this are getting ignored so theorising is the best I can do. Atleast we as IT staff get local admin, so It's not all bad.

At my previous workplace (mid size SSC) the work machines themselves were less bloated and could do anything other than change UEFI settings, but certain servers we were assigned to maintain were monitored down to the keystroke level. The itsec shift gave me a call at around 3am to chat about my choice for script filenames (suckmydick.PS1) like 30 seconds after I created it.
by sublimefire | 2026-01-23 17:48:56+00:00
It is good to have a dedicated location to find these. The problem is that you want a sufficiently large company when buying the services so that it does not fall apart or get acquired and runs to the ground, and we have a few. Also, putting a country flag to the service is cringe, it might even be odd to some because it implies a specific language/culture. We just all want to consume a proper business staffed with pros and the one which does not resell AWS services.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-23 17:49:27+00:00
> is that these are all different people, and the person toying with Linux desktop is not also buying an mp3 player and paper notebooks and that person isn’t the one who’s building a DVD library.

Hey! That's (almost) me!

My desktop has been Linux for multiple decades.

I buy paper notebooks and write with pen. Always have.

mp3 player: You got me on that one. Although I did buy a Yoto (https://us.yotoplay.com/) and perhaps I should just use it as an mp3 player, but to be honest it's a poor player (no shuffle without app, etc). On the flip side, what I like about it is putting podcasts on cards. I can assign a card to any podcast feed and it will let me choose which episode to listen to.

DVD library: Nah - I used to have one and gave in to Plex. I don't know how many of my 20 year old DVDs will work now. Video files have more longevity. But someone did once post on HN how he had set up a physical card + NFC for his kids. A given card has a particular movie/TV show. They insert the card, and the TV plays just the movie on the card and turns off after. I'd definitely pay for that if I could buy it. I'm sure many parents would.
by Terretta | 2026-01-23 17:49:34+00:00
Tracking versions is easy. Controlling versions is hard. Knowing what the actual semantic deltas are in binary files (what your doc examples claimed) is hard.

Now you say you're not tackling that problem, so the docs are doubly weird.

Would also imagine less of this is a SQL-shaped problem, per se, so plenty tech is better for tracking and controlling changes than SQL. The shape of the problem seems less theory of querying sets, more branching journal with proof chain, or hash tree.
by ndriscoll | 2026-01-23 17:49:48+00:00
$60k/yr still seems like a good deal for the productivity multiplier you get on an experienced engineer making several times that. Actually, I'm fairly certain that some optimizations I had codex do this week would already pay for that from being able to scale down pod resource requirements, and that's just from me telling it to profile our code and find high ROI things to fix, taking only part of my focus away from planned work.

Another data point: I gave codex a 2 sentence description (being intentionally vague and actually slightly misleading) of a problem that another engineer spent ~1 week root causing a couple months ago, and it found the bug in 3.5 minutes.
by sneak | 2026-01-23 17:50:20+00:00
Unsigned binaries on macOS have slowly but surely been marginalized more and more with scarier and scarier warnings and harder hoops to jump through. You can enable execution in the system settings “Privacy and Security” pane.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with Apple’s subscription-based (and government ID requiring) developer program membership which is the only way to get such signatures.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-23 17:50:24+00:00
> What is the edge that docker provides these days?

hub.docker.com mainly, the centralized docker registry. A bit like Github, there are plenty of alternatives. But that's where you find most people pushing their containers.

And then there is Docker Desktop which a lot of users seem to like.

I switched to colima myself recently (on a mac). I think people overthink all this stuff a bit. Colima doesn't have a UI; but that's fine for me. I mainly use it to run stuff from the command line or from scripts. I wasn't using the Docker Desktop UI very much either.

Colima is a simple wrapper around Lima, which is a simple wrapper around qemu or Apple's virtualization layer. The resulting vm runs a simple Linux distribution with some file mounts and network tunneling to give you a similar experience as Docker Desktop. Which does exactly the same thing in the end of course.

Linux runs containers just fine. The main thing you need for containerization is a Linux kernel. People have actually hacked together docker alternatives with just bash and namespaces. I used a plain qemu vm for a while with the docker socket pointing to an ssh tunnel on my mac. Works amazingly well but it has some limitations. Colima is easier to manage.

People have mentioned several of the other alternatives already. They all can work with the same command line tooling. If you need a UI, colima is probably too barebones. But otherwise, things like IDEs and other tools work (e.g. lazydocker, vs code, intellij, etc.) just fine with it. So the added value of extra UI is limited to me at least.

I think the container runtime inside the vm (podman, containerd, whatever) is mostly not that relevant for developers. It's a bit of an implementation detail. As long as docker and docker compose work on the command line, I'm happy.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-23 17:50:34+00:00
As I understand it, the difference between that and the pedal above, is that “patches” on the line6 are describing a chain of pre-existing effects. So like, phaser->delay->reverb. The polyend pedal you’re actually able to write custom dsp - so you’re able to build new units to chain together.

But there are other pedals that do custom code, rather than just custom patching, see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727231
by bko | 2026-01-23 17:50:36+00:00
Weekend projects are fun and a great way to experiment with new technologies. AI is this new technology and most engineer should be familiar with how useful it is and it's limitations.

Sure, if you hate coding it's prob not worth it. But I don't see it as an expense. In fact I value it so I would even not go as far as to deem a failure as a loss.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-23 17:50:41+00:00
In the US most Americans just don't matter to the economy like they once did
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298862)

We have reached not just Dead internet theory, but also Dead Civilization theory. The top feel like they don't need half of civilization, and in fact half of civilization are now a weight/burden on society.

Liberal democracy was able to take power from authority because it was supported by enough people with enough power. Authority has finally reached a point where that power has been taken away. And power to fight back is being further eroded with strategic placement of constant, automated surveillance.

https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2026/01/22/ksu-students-exp...
by WesolyKubeczek | 2026-01-23 17:50:42+00:00
> Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it.

Not really new. Back in the day companies used to outsource their stuff to the lowest bidder agencies in proverbial Elbonia, never looked at the code, and then panickedly hired another agency when the things visibly were not what was ordered. Case studies are abound on TheDailyWTF for the last two decades.

Doing the same with agents will give you the same disastrous results for comparably the same money, just faster. Oh and you can't sue them, really.

Maybe it's better, who knows.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-23 17:50:42+00:00
For the OS stuff wouldn't a European distribution of Linux do. Worst case if Europe could no longer get access to patches it could fork it. OK Europe might get behind, but that doesn't seem like an immediate issue, in the same way that not having AWS would be?

On programming languages it is a concern how popular .net and Java are in Europe. However being stuck on the current state of Python is less of a worry. I feel like I was always 10 years behind on needing new features.
by Ronsenshi | 2026-01-23 17:51:22+00:00
I agree that he probably has a lot of fun. What he's doing is an equivalent of throwing a hand grenade into a crowd and enjoying the chaos of it all - he's set in life, can comfortably retire while the rest of the industry tries to deal with that hand grenade. Where some people are fighting to get the safety pin out while others are trying to stop them.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-23 17:51:44+00:00
1980s: 1 packet per keystroke is too much, we must find a solution to bundle them together, for efficiency (see Nagle's algorithm, delayed ACK), also let's send everything in plaintext, including passwords

2020s: ha! with some advanced probabilistic models, we may be able to deduce something about what is being typed behind one of our layers of encryption, let's sent 100 packets per keystroke to mitigate that
by threetonesun | 2026-01-23 17:51:46+00:00
It was $99 for a specific version which (maybe) got updates. If you wanted the next version, it was another $99 (or maybe it was $129 now, or $149...).

Some software essentially maintains this model, and I think it's fine. If something is going to charge monthly I expect it to either be much cheaper, or have some web service that they need to keep up.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-23 17:51:46+00:00
> What I find particularly ironic is that the title make it feel like Rust gives a 5x performance improvement when it actually slows thing down.

Rust didn't slow them down. The inefficient design of the external library did.

Calling into C libraries from Rust is extremely easy. It takes some work to create a safer wrapper around C libraries, but it's been done for many popular libraries.

This is the first and only time I've seen an external library connected via a Rube Goldberg like contraption with protobufs in the middle. That's the problem.

Sadly they went with the "rewrite to Rust" meme in the headline for more clickability.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-23 17:52:15+00:00
This sounds so much more appealing to me than github and co. Unfortunately I guess there's no multibillion dollar exit in the cards in this case.

Has there been any thought about how this might interact with centralized-ish hosting? For example. Suppose a large project chose to use a radicle repo as its "blessed" point of coordination. Being a major project of course there's a mirror on (at minimum) github that points back to a web page (presumably the radicle app) for filing issues, collab, wiki, whatever.

So a user that doesn't have any interest in learning about radicle wants to file an issue using the web app. When I glanced at the heartwood repo it seems to be read only with no indication of being able to log in (that's entirely unsurprising ofc). How much work / community welcome / etc is there likely to be for a project to offer a usable web front end, presumably leveraging a solution such as OIDC? Basically being able to "guest" users of centralized platforms in to the project so that they can collaborate with near zero overhead.

As a motivating example consider outfits that want to self host a git forge but also want to offer centralized services to users. Communities such as KDE and SDL come to mind. Many of them have ended up migrating to github or gitlab over the years for various reasons but in an alternate reality it didn't have to be that way!

I realize I'm effectively asking "do you have thoughts about implementing a partially federated model" but hopefully you can see the real world usecase that's motivating the (otherwise seemingly unreasonable) question.
by shykes | 2026-01-23 17:52:31+00:00
Exactly. The LLM primitives will remain - we were careful to never compromise the modular, lego-like design of the system. But now we have clarity on the primary use case.

Thanks for giving us another chance! Come say hi on our discord, if you ever want to ask questions or discuss your use case. We have a friendly group of CI nerds who love to help.
by kbelder | 2026-01-23 17:52:32+00:00
But the orbit is a minimum of about 50,000 kilometers, and the satellite is maybe a meter across. That's a very low probability of a collision per crossing.

I get that 'probably safe' or '0.001% chance of destruction per day' is not very satisfying for an investment that cost millions, but everything always comes down to odds. None of these satellites are eternal, even if they're the only thing in their orbit.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-23 17:52:44+00:00
An interface isn't enough. Even if you never look at the code, the results are going to be influenced significantly by having the vocabulary to accurately describe what you want. The less sufficient your technical vocabulary, the more ambiguous your prompts will be and the less likely it is that the Polecats will be able to deliver anything resembling your unspoken imagination. To say nothing of being able to guide the lost critters when they run into problems.
by moron4hire | 2026-01-23 17:53:23+00:00
I don't anything about Mega, but BitTorrent was not designed for stealing other's art. That's an unfair claim to make.

Yes, Napster was specifically started for sharing files people didn't have the rights to share, but I still don't think it's a fair comparison because nobody sharing files on Napster ever tried to claim it was their music they were sharing. If people were taking Metallica's music and recording their own versions of it that were 99% identical and then claiming they were the original artist, that would be a closer analogy. Napster also didn't receive the massive PR campaigns, huge institutional investment, the government blind-eye-turning, etc. that AI is enjoying today. Napster was also successfully sued for promoting copyright infringement.
by aanet | 2026-01-23 17:53:24+00:00
Ah I see.

It is still cool though.

I'd LOVE to try it out, or see a demo in person.

My wishlist includes asking the platform to "generate a pedal that sounds like the lead guitar in Comfortably Numb" and it generates that.

I'd pay good $$$ for it.

(It might still not make a Gilmour out of me though :-( )
by Pulcinella | 2026-01-23 17:53:52+00:00
Swift definitely has problems. For example, the result builder syntax was just bolted onto the language by order of Apple without any input or desire from the community just to support SwiftUI. (SwiftUI, despite its name, is not part of the open source Swift project but it is awful and 6+ years in still lags very far behind where UIKit was 6 years into it's public release). Swift concurrency was designed by language astronauts and it's only thanks to people like Holly Borla that the astronauts are being reigned in ("assume all Swift 6 code is multithreaded and concurrent by default and have the compiler emit a zillion warnings and errors to enforce that" is a crazy default when most Swift developers are using it to write single threaded UI code and have been since Swift 1.0.)

But everything sounds ridiculously complicated when your pedantic and break down single integrated concepts into as many small pieces as possible ("16 rules of Swift initialization").