MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2026-01-12 07:51:54+00:00
> I think that is partly because enough people consider those addicted to drugs to be subhuman - enough don't care much what happens to the addicted people. IMHO in that's because we a large political movement encourages indifference to those different from us, whether the difference is race, politics, gender/sexuality, nationality, or anything else.

I think this is a false dichotomy: Either you campaign for $SPECIFIC_SOCIAL_CHANGE or you think that addicts are subhuman? There's no in-between? You don't think that casting the conversation in this light ("Anyone not with us thinks $PEOPLE are subhuman") is a bad faith argument?

The most reasonable explanation I can think of is that people just don't care enough about some $SPECIFIC_SOCIAL_CHANGE.

Someone not interested in voicing their opinion on Palestine/Gaza, BLM or addicts doesn't mean that they think the victims in those circumstances are subhuman.
by Humorist2290 | 2026-01-12 07:52:41+00:00
> Why must he have some shady ulterior motive rather than just honestly believing the thing they are are stated?

I wouldn't say it's shady or even untoward. Simon writes prolifically and he seems quite genuinely interested in this. That he has attached his public persona, and what seems like basically all of his time from the last few years, to LLMs and their derivatives is still a vested interest. I wouldn't even say that's bad. Passion about technology is what drives many of us. But it still needs saying.

> This is reductive to the point of absurdity. What other statistical text prediction model can make tool calls to CLI apps and web searches?

It's just a fact that these things are statistical text prediction models. Sure, they're marvels, but they're not deterministic, nor are they reliable. They are like a slot machine with surprisingly good odds: pull the lever and you're almost guaranteed to get something, maybe a jackpot, maybe you'll lose those tokens. For many people it's cheap enough to just keep pulling the lever until they get what they want, or go bankrupt.
by energy123 | 2026-01-12 07:52:59+00:00
I agree with those causes. But climate change is also a cause. It magnifies the consequences of mismanagement, reducing the luxury incompetence margin that an equally incompetent theocrat/autocrat could have relied on 30 years ago.

As climate change gets worse in the future, the margin for error will keep shrinking. More countries will start to experience similar problems. Only the most competent will survive, but eventually regional instability will attack the foundations of that state capacity as a contagion byproduct, making it harder to be the competent outlier.

This all becomes a push driver for migration towards the colder north, as the equator becomes progressively destabilized and uninhabitable. Not only water shortages in dry climates but wet-bulb temperatures in temperate climates that make existing outdoors dangerous for periods of the year.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-12 07:54:26+00:00
By this logic, then we should also create a rule for regular, non-self-driving that says, if you have a car accident that kills someone, all your wealth is taken away and given to the victim's family. If we had a rule like this, then "you'd probably see much safer driving". Are you willing to drive under those circumstances? I am sure you will say yes, but it does not make your suggestion any less ridiculous.
by i_am_a_peasant | 2026-01-12 07:54:32+00:00
This was my first DM, i even put my mother on it on her home laptop. I use i3 nowadays, glazewm on windows, and aerospace on macos. anything that’s not a tiling window manager nowadays just feels wrong to me. Even if sometimes my screen doesn’t look pretty because i randomly threw on virtual screen 7 all the windows i don’t currently use.
by KronisLV | 2026-01-12 07:54:37+00:00
Lovely post, Xfce indeed is what I also reach for, especially when I need something for limited hardware, a small install size or just something quite stable and dependable! It’s probably not the #1 in all of those categories, but does a good enough job across all of them that I’m satisfied.

> I stopped writing posts like this for years, out of fear of how people from specific desktop environments would respond.

I personally also quite liked Cinnamon with Linux Mint, which was similarly pleasant out of the box, but I’m also sorry that the author had to deal with people I guess getting kinda heated over their preferences?
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-12 07:56:08+00:00
> Outside of speech that […] free speech needs to be absolute or it is not free at at all.

“it must be absolute except…”, it's a nice contradiction you have here.

As you acknowledge without even realizing it, free speech cannot be absolute, it's just nonsensical and your sentence above proves it.

> You are very mistaken if you think the current administration is uniquely bad for free speech. Biden and other libs censored a lot of people for his whole administration.

That's a very poor whatabotism. How many representative and senators where prosecuted for their speech under the Biden admin? How many tourists where rejected from the US for their social media tweets criticizing Joe Biden? How many foreign students where deported for having express their opinions online? How many US citizens where arrested in the middle of a TV interview for criticizing the government? All of that against the laws.

That every government will at some point abuse their power, and it's regrettable, must never be an excuse for the egregious behavior from the current administration. It really is unprecedented in the last decades. It's not even close.

> Musk may rub people wrong but he is a free speech advocate for the most part.

He never was, he's just posturing. He is a man child who cannot stand criticism and has been retaliating against critical speech as soon as he gained some power. First it was about canceling Tesla orders, then deleting Twitter accounts (of activists, journalists and even video game streamers when they called his BS on its alleged PoE world first, you can't make that up).

> The only actual censorship the current government seems to be pursuing is censorship and harassment of critics of Israel

No, criticism of Trump himself or his admin get people people see their tourism trip to the US canceled after social media profile scanning.
by proverbialbunny | 2026-01-12 07:56:29+00:00
In Australia Coca-Cola isn't allowed to import coca leaf extract for flavor, so it tastes very similar to one of the 3rd party knock off brands you'll find in the US. In Australia everyone drinks Pepsi because of this. Without the coca leaf Coca-Cola tastes imo pretty terrible.

What makes this video revolutionary is he was able to find an alternative to the coca leaf that has a near identical flavor. If it's as good tasting as advertised this knowledge could empower 3rd party producers to make a coke drink that will finally rival Coca-Cola in popularity.
by sbinnee | 2026-01-12 07:57:55+00:00
I am glad that I restrained myself from buying a macbook and went for a thinkpad. I think I saw icon issue on Tahoe not long ago on HN.

I know that macbook has been crushing laptop market with their M chip. Macbook is amazing for sure. I very much enjoy using it at work. But for personal computing, I need Linux setup.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-12 07:58:05+00:00
This is disingenuous and a way to rationalise your feelings by blaming trump voters.

Firstly, it’s a two party state and choice is limited. People vote for the least worst option, or for a candidate that shares at least some of their values.

Second, many people did not vote.

Third, approval ratings show that many trump voters do not approve of his actions.

Fourth, where did “annex Greenland, abduct Maduro, remove independence of the reserve” appear on his manifesto?
by internet_points | 2026-01-12 07:58:42+00:00
I use Arc-Dark with elementary-xfce-dark icons (but have a script to switch to toggle dark-mode, where light mode is Adwaita with elementary-xfce icons).

TBH I typically run things fullscreen, so the only part of xfce I normally "see" is a thin task bar at the bottom with open windows and clock and such. Well, except for when I use Thunar, which is a nice enough file manager.
by ahtihn | 2026-01-12 07:59:01+00:00
If you start greenfield and ignore the code quality, how do you know you can maintain it long term?

Greenfield is fundamentally easier than maintaining existing software. Once software exists, users expect it to behave a certain way and they expect their data to remain usable in new versions.

The existing software now imposes all sorts of contraints that may not be explicit in the spec. Some of these constraints end up making some changes very hard. Bad assumptions in data modeling can make migrations a nightmare.

You can't just write entirely new software every time the requirements change.
by hboon | 2026-01-12 07:59:21+00:00
I've started working on a tool to automatically generate OG images by just setting 1 line of a HTML meta tag.

It might be trivial for some programmers to use puppeteer or some would want to hand-build some OG images (you can mix and match), but otherwise, this tool is very handy, and set-and-forget.

I just created a Show HN for it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46585378
by Nursie | 2026-01-12 07:59:45+00:00
> The settings feel like you're almost in a config file.

What on earth?

No, the config has dialogues and intuitive controls. There is a settings-editor you can go into if you need to, with a bit more of a regedit kinda feel, but I haven't looked in there in years.

> Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.

In Gnome, can I move the UI elements to locations I want them in? Or are we still in a situation where it's opinionated and you have to seek plugins to get an experience that you actually want?
by dpark | 2026-01-12 07:59:59+00:00
If your concern is philosophical, and you are defining LLMs as not having a “why”, then of course they cannot write down “why” because it doesn’t exist. This is the philosophical discussion I am trying to avoid because I don’t think it’s fruitful.

If your concern is practical and you are worried that the “why” an LLM might produce is arbitrary, then my experience so far says this isn’t a problem. What I’m seeing LLMs record in commit messages and summaries of work is very much the concrete reasons they did things. I’ve yet to see a “why” that seemed like nonsense or arbitrary.

If you have engineers checking in overly complex blobs of code with no “why”, that’s a problem whether they use AI or not. AI tools do not replace engineers and I would not with in any code base where engineers were checking in vibe coded features without understanding them and vetting the results properly.
by frankdenbow | 2026-01-12 08:00:33+00:00
Love this, it is interesting to see the links between topics, with things like father son relationship. I have a long queue of books to read that this year I finally set aside planned time on the calendar to read and walk. There are specific topics I want to read about so even if it just helped with finding some experts from books around a topic, it would help me decide. I think you're onto something here.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-12 08:00:46+00:00
> These are institutions that have mostly been created during the progressive era of the US. The EPA (I believe) is the latest of these organizations.

Wiki tells me that the EPA was created by Richard Nixon in 1970. Also, it matters little when a regulatory body was created. It matters much more how it changes over time -- it is continously adapting to changes in our society and economy. For example, after the 2008 global financial crisis, securites markets regulators changes significantly to strengthen the financial system.

> Since roughly Reagan, the US has been either fully dismantling, defunding, or privatizing these institutions.

Clinton, Obama, and Biden were doing this? If so, please provide examples.
by matwood | 2026-01-12 08:01:25+00:00
> If the business can get rid of their engineers, then why can't the user get rid of the business providing the software?

I have't checked the stats lately, but at one point most software written was in non-tech companies for the single business. The first 1/2 of my career was spent writing in-house software for a company that did everything from custom reporting and performance tracking to scraping data of automated phone dialers. There's so much software out there that effectively has a user base of a single company.
by Balinares | 2026-01-12 08:01:29+00:00
That's been pretty much exactly my experience too.

For what it's worth, multiple times in my career, I've worked at shops that once thought they could do it quick and cheap and it would be good enough, and then had to hire someone 'picky' like me to sort out the inevitable money-losing mess.

From what I've seen even Opus 4.5 spit, the 'picky' are going to remain in demand for a little while longer still. Will that last? No clue. We'll see.
by dpark | 2026-01-12 08:03:14+00:00
I need to play with this more. I’ve had AI generate a bunch of small summaries that it could theoretically use to optimize future work. I haven’t asked it specifically to just dump info as it’s doing other work yet.

The files I had it generate were interesting but I’m not convinced looking at them that they contain the real info the AI needs to be more efficient. I should look into what kind of context analysis agents are passing back because that seems like what I want to save for later.
by malwrar | 2026-01-12 08:04:37+00:00
> It feels like containerfiles are an easier approach but they(at least docker does) sort of feel designed around describing application environments as opposed to full system environments.

They absolutely are! I actually originally just wanted a base container image for running services on my hosts that a.) I could produce a full source code listing for and b.) have full visibility over the BoM, and realized I could just ‘FROM scratch’ & pull in gentoo’s stage3 to basically achieve that. That also happens to be the first thing you do in a new gentoo chroot, and I realized that pretty much every step in the gentoo install media that you run after (installing software, building the kernel, setting up users, etc) could also be run in the container. What are containers if not “portable executable chroots” after all? My first version of this build system was literally to then copy / on the container to a mounted disk I manually formatted. Writing to disk is actually the most unnatural part of this whole setup since no one really has a good solution for doing this without using the kernel; I used to format and mount devices directly in a privileged container but now I just boot a qemu VM in an unprivileged container and do it in an initramfs since I was already building those manually too. I found while iterating on this that all of the advantages you get from Containerfiles (portability, repeatability, caching, minimal host runtime, etc) naturally translated over to the OS builder project, and since I like deploying services as containers anyways there’s a high degree of reuse going on vs needing separate tools and paradigms everywhere.

I’ll definitely write it up and post it to HN at some point, trying to compact the whole project in just that blurb felt painful.
by troad | 2026-01-12 08:04:41+00:00
> it's something zealots tell themselves

Don't be like this. Don't spit bile at people because they have different needs and preferences to you.

As I understand it, the TS compiler can translate newer JS features/syntax into backwards-compatible polyfills for you, automatically. I don't really use TS myself, but I'm not going to pretend like that isn't a useful feature.
by Animats | 2026-01-12 08:05:09+00:00
It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way.
What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy?

Here's a small US-based PCB board and assembly facility in the US, in Hesperia, California.[1]
Looks like it might have 20 to 30 employees from the building picture.
This is probably about as small as a viable business of this type gets. It doesn't have to be done in a huge plant like JLCPCB in Shenzhen.

Here's a company in India, Invariance, which makes low-cost semi-automatic machines to do exactly the same operations 39c3 is doing.[2] They have three machines - a solder paste spreader, a pick and place machine, and a mini tunnel reflow oven. They make all three machines.
These machines intended for small companies who want to assemble their own boards in house. The solder paste spreader is just automated enough to do a consistent job, with pressure and timing controlled. The pick and place machine uses their own feeder design which runs off strips of component tape. The tunnel oven is small, only about a meter long.

That's close to a viable minimum production solution.

[1] https://mermarinc.com/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VCJyeqa-A
by matwood | 2026-01-12 08:05:29+00:00
These types of comments are interesting to me. Pre-chatGPT there were tons of posts how so many software people were terrible at their jobs. Bugs were/are rampant. Software bugs caused high profile issues, but likely so many more we never heard about.

Today we have chatGPT and only now will teams be uninsurable and sued into oblivion? LOL
by unwind | 2026-01-12 08:05:34+00:00
Interesting! According to [1] it's labelled as "less sugar" though, so it's not as if the original/standard Coke is different. There seems to be some widespread thinking that Singapore has issues with sugar consumption so I guess this is Coke's response (or perhaps they were forced by authorities).

[1]: https://www.coca-cola.com/sg/en/brands/coca-cola
by raducu | 2026-01-12 08:06:14+00:00
> I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.

I'm envious of those true believer kind of people.

My father is one of them and he's held absurd ideas as 100% facts and we've had many nasty quarrels about it, BUT it also means he 100% believes in whatever his current goal is and he's achieved a lot more than I ever will because he's unwavering in his beliefs and goals, whereas I'm always doubting and second guessing.
by Galanwe | 2026-01-12 08:07:13+00:00
> BTW, why are people acting like accessing a server from a phone is a 2025 innovation?

> SSH clients on Android/iOS have existed for 15 years

That is not the point, Tailscale is not just about having a network connection, it's everything that goes with. I used to have OpenVPN, and there's a world of difference.

- The tailscale client is much nicer and convenient to use on Android than anything I have seen.

- The auth plane is simpler, especially for non tech users (parents, wife) whom I wish to access my photo album. They are basically independent with tailscale.

- The simplicity also allows me to recommend it to friends and we can link between our tailnet, e.g. to cross backup our NAS.

- Tailscale can terminate SSH publicly, so I can selectively expose services on the internet (e.g. VaultWarden) without exposing my server and hosting a reverse proxy.

- ACLs are simple and user friendly.
by alkonaut | 2026-01-12 08:07:43+00:00
I don't think _software_ is very interesting in the whole AI debate. It's perhaps interesting from a jobs perspective or an economical perspective. But the whole "anti AI" thing is much deeper than that. My main objections to AI is the evaporation of truth, and of art.

We now have top chart hits which are soulless AI songs. It's perhaps a testament to the fact that some of these genres where this happens a lot, were already trending towards industrially produced songs with little soul in them (you know what genres these are, and it's hilarious that one of them). But most concerning to me is the idea that we'll never trust our eyes with what's true starting now.

We can't trust that someone who calls us is human, or that a photo or recording is of a real event. This was always true in some sense, but it required a ton of effort to pull off at least. Now it's going to be trivial. And for every photo depicting an actual event, there will be a thousand depicting non-events. What does that do to the most important thing we have as a society: the "shared truth"? The decay of traditional media already put a big dent in this - with catastrophic results. Ai will make it 10x worse.
by rurban | 2026-01-12 08:07:57+00:00
Turning it off and on again is risky. I recently upgraded a robot in Australia, had problems with systemd, so I turned it off. And had to wait a few weeks until it could be turned on again, because tailscaled was not setup persistently, the routing was not setup properly (over a phone), the machine had some problems,...

High risk, low reward. But of course the ultimate test if it's properly setup.
by lnsru | 2026-01-12 08:08:42+00:00
Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it.

Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a contractor I designed few boards and optimized for production in China. In my dayjob colleagues are stuck in the last century. No recent knowledge about parts, design rules, testing principles… No willingness to learn and talk to Chinese manufacturers about optimization. Just copy paste bad decisions from old boards to new designs.

Honestly I wouldn’t even try to revive anything in Europe. Chinese electronics factories are way too far in the future. The suppliers for my workplace are all stuck in the past. Even the ones with new equipment struggle to use full potential due to worker’s shortage. Which is probably a problem in whole western world. Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
by alexanderameye | 2026-01-12 08:09:08+00:00
Interesting! I’ve been working on a tracker for the Belgian parliament [0]. Similar story: very old site + data mostly gets published as a weekly pdf report (including votes and discussions).

I have

1. A scraper/parser that ingests the data daily and transforms it into .parquet files.

2. A LLM summarizer to summarize larger discussions.

3. A static site that gets automatically generated (based on the .parquet files) to provide insight.

What makes your tracker ‘real-time’? Does it ingest the livestream of a parliamentary session while it is happening?

[0]: https://zijwerkenvooru.be/
by 4k93n2 | 2026-01-12 08:09:40+00:00
syncthing might be worth looking into. ive been using that more and more the last few years for anything that i use daily, things like keepass, plain-text notes, calendars/contacts, rss feeds, then everything else that im "self hosting" are just things that i might only use a few times a week so its no big deal if i lose access.

its so much simpler when you have the files stored locally, then syncing between devices is just something that can happen whenever. anything that is running on a server needs user permissions, wifi, a router etc etc, its just a lot of complexity for very little gain.

although keep in mind im the only one using all of this stuff. if i needed to share things with other people then syncthing gets a bit trickier and a central server starts to make more sense
by acdha | 2026-01-12 08:10:29+00:00
That’s not a bad thing (user experience is important) but remember that Liquid Glass was designed by someone without a UI background. Alan Dye designed the boxes iPhones come in and was installed by Jony Ive, an industrial designer. Neither of them had training or experience in usability, and all of the UX people I know are basically complaining non-stop about how many basic UX principles the 26 releases violate.