MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-12 17:09:55+00:00
It's hard to fault Microsoft for doing what they did with WP7, though. They needed to make a statement that they were still committed to phones since WinCE was truly dead. So they made an MVP "Preview" of what the next Phone OS would be.

WP7 was sold to me in more like that language of "this is a quick MVP on the way to the next phone". It was exciting at that time in that way, seeing it as the hail mary pass of "What if we replaced WinCE with all the things we learned from the Zune? How quickly can we do a version of that which will give the right impression and set us up for the next 'real' version?"

Unfortunately yes, it wasn't sold to everyone with that perspective. I think Microsoft may have counted on developer enthusiasm a bit more to get the word across.

Also to be fair, that was still the era where "everyone" bought the new iPhone at launch and iOS compatibility was seen as somewhat equally spotty that if you didn't have the latest hardware you didn't expect the next iOS version to run well and you'd expect to get left behind on apps. It was also the era where Android was often non-upgradeable between versions on hardware (because carriers wouldn't "certify it") and you generally assumed an Android device was version locked to whatever OS version you bought it with. Microsoft may have felt somewhat safe needing a hardware jump between WP7 and WP8 exactly because that was de facto the case with iPhone and directly the case with Android at the time.
by palata | 2026-01-12 17:10:22+00:00
I think it does both: you can have an LLM automate bad coding (that's the vibe coding part), and you can have an LLM speed up good coding.

Many times, bad code is sufficient. Actually too many times: IMHO that is the reason why the software industry produces lower quality software every year. Bad products are often more profitable than good products. But it's not always for making bad products: sometimes it's totally fine to vibe code a proof or concept or prototype, I would say.

Other times, we really need stable and maintainable code. I don't think we can or want to vibe code that.

LLMs make low-quality coding more accessible, but I don't think they remove the need for high-quality coding. Before LLMs, the fraction of low-quality code was growing already, just because it was already profitable.

An analogy could be buildings: everybody can build a bench that "does the job". Maybe that bench will be broken in 2 months, but right now it works; people can sit on it. But not everybody can build a dam. And if you risk going to jail if your dam collapses, that's a good incentive for not vibe coding it.
by sanderjd | 2026-01-12 17:10:30+00:00
This is true if you want to build professional software. But what I foresee is a lot more tasks being accomplished with task-specific tools created by the people responsible for doing those tasks. Like how people use spreadsheets to get their jobs done, but with a much broader set of use cases.

Once it is easier to just make almost anything yourself than it is to go through a process of expressing your requirements to a professional software development group and iterating on the results, that will be a popular choice.
by amiga-workbench | 2026-01-12 17:10:36+00:00
I got mine 2nd hand on eBay as new old stock. £300 for a 55" 4K panel. The only thing I can ding it for is that the backlight local dimming is done in columns which is extremely distracting, so I turn it off. You have to remember this thing is designed to sit in a shop window in direct sunlight.

Ticks all my other boxes though, powers on as soon as my finger leaves the button on the remote, same with input switching and any other interactions with the OSD. Its completely braindead, just how I like it.

Oh, they also sent me the model with the touch digitizer installed. So I've got capacitive touch and pen input, it has a USB-B port on the side to connect to a computer.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-12 17:10:50+00:00
> I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.

This sort of thing didn't work out great for Mozilla. Apple, thankfully, has other business bringing in the revenue, but it's still a bit wild to put a core bit of the product in the hands of the only other major competitor in the smartphone OS space!
by greentea23 | 2026-01-12 17:11:14+00:00
Mullvad is nothing like Apple. For apple devices:
- need real email and real phone number to even boot the device
- cannot disable telemetry
- app store apps only, even though many key privacy preserving apps are not available
- /etc/hosts are not your own, DNS control in general is extremely weak
- VPN apps on idevices have artificial holes
- can't change push notification provider
- can only use webkit for browsers, which lacks many important privacy preserving capabilities
- need to use an app you don't trust but want to sandbox it from your real information? Too bad, no way to do so.
- the source code is closed so Apple can claim X but do Y, you have no proof that you are secure or private
- without control of your OS you are subject to Apple complying with the government and pushing updates to serve them not you, which they are happy to do to make a buck

Mullvad requires nothing but an envelope with cash in it and a hash code and stores nothing. Apple owns you.
by caminante | 2026-01-12 17:11:51+00:00
No.

>I don't think anyone will dispute that the initial build out for solar is far far cheaper.

OK.

>The devil is in the rest of the details.

Now, this is "hand wavy" instead of answering my question and pointing to sources who refute the up thread claim that nuclear will be "cheap" v. alternatives.

Do you have an LCOE study showing nuclear as "cheap"?
by smj-edison | 2026-01-12 17:12:34+00:00
Oh cool! I'd love to hear more. I'm implementing an existing language, Tcl, but I'm working on making it safe to share values between threads, since a project I contribute to[1] uses Tcl for all the scripting, but they have about a 30% overhead with serialization/deserialization between threads, and it doesn't allow for sharing large values without significant overheads. I'm also doing some experiments with heap representation to reduce data indirection, so it's been fun getting to learn how to implement malloc and other low-level primitives I usually take for granted.

[1] folk.computer
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-12 17:12:55+00:00
[dupe]

An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367744

Unix v4 (1973) – Live Terminal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468283

Fixing a Buffer Overflow in Unix v4 Like It's 1973

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544610
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-12 17:13:05+00:00
> Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing.

You might want to review how you approach these tools. Complaining that you need to rewrite 70% of the code screams of poor prompting, with too vague inputs, no constraints, and no feedback at all.

Using agents to help you write code is far from a one-shot task, but if throwing out 70% of what you create screams out that you are prompting the agent to create crap.

> 1) I'm not good at prompting, even though I am one of the earliest AI in coding adopters I know, and have been consistent for years. So I find this hard to accept.

I think you need to take a humble pill, review how you are putting together these prompts, figure out what you are doing wrong in prompts and processes, and work up from where you are at this point. If 70% of your output is crap, the problem is in your input.

I recommend you spend 20 minutes with your agent of choice prompting it to help you improve your prompts. Check instruction files, spec-driven approaches, context files, etc. Even a plain old README.md helps a lot. Prompt your agent to generate it for you. From there, instead of one-shot prompts try to break down a task into multiple sub steps with small deliverables. Always iterate on your instruction files. It you spend a few minutes on this, you will quickly halve your churn rate.
by lonelyasacloud | 2026-01-12 17:13:14+00:00
> This is a good way to regulate this. Criminalize people who abuse AI tools to cause harm.

In same way as is done so successfully with guns, speeding automobiles, etc?

These things are capable of inferring photorealistic av deepfakes; with a well drafted law they're more than capable of inferring if what they are being asked to is illegal.

It makes zero sense to wait for the poop to hit the fan and then waste taxes investigating the illegality, punishing criminals, and dealing with impact on victims when it can stopped at source.
by MiddleEndian | 2026-01-12 17:13:21+00:00
I have a Surface Laptop Studio. And while Windows 11 overall kinda sucks, the ability to turn it into a little easel and the responsiveness of the pen are both great. I also like precise scrolling with the touchscreen sometimes.

The part of the hardware I really don't like is that the `Fn` key toggles fn-lock with a tap and then alt + F4 and such don't work. There's enough space to have another row of keys or something, I never want fn-lock off (I use four finger scroll for volume controls), it's infuriating. But pretty much all laptops (and shockingly some desktop keyboards) have similarly dumb behavior.
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-12 17:13:54+00:00
I'll buy it, but mainly because that's what modern society has been doing since the 1890s: standardizing spelling, lightbulbs, schooling, addresses, clothing sizes, heck, even house loan. We've made a single, life-long identity so as to be able to tie earnings, taxes, retirement and consequences to a person, rather than letting everyone segment risk as they see fit. Centralizing everything from RAM production to news gatekeeping to food production, monopolies of various sorts appear and grow. We've managed to unring the bell of technological process through legal threats (copyright, liability, torts) to such a degree that air travel hasn't progressed much since 1960, and we're still predominantly using a descendant of an operating system from the early-to-mid 1970s.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-12 17:14:26+00:00
These calorie numbers don't make much sense to me. The typical recommendation for how much a man should eat is 2000-2800 Cal/day, and for the average woman that is 1600-2200 Cal/day, depending on age and exercise levels [0]. So if it were true that the average American ate 3600 Cal/day, they would be eating 800-2000 excess Cal, not 400-700.

Even if we assumed that average food cost/Cal is a meaningful concept, the reduction would be much higher.

[0] https://www.ummhealth.org/health-library/eating-the-right-nu...
by weinzierl | 2026-01-12 17:14:30+00:00
The famous

"A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux"

tutorial has some good answers for you.

https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...

In short: Compilers don't help l, but with a good macro assembler it is quite convenient. Maybe the author used custom tooling but the assembler route is the easiest if you only need this once or a couple of times.

To the second question, reverse engineering software like IDA Pro or Binary Ninja are not only made for strange and broken binaries but often used for binaries with deliberate anti-reversing measures. They are as good as it gets when it comes to not choking on unusual binaries.

EDIT: Forgot to mention Ghidra.
by distances | 2026-01-12 17:14:35+00:00
No, I don't think that's a fair way to put it. People regularly report having quite old Arch installs without stability issues. And people also regularly advice Linux newcomers not to pick Arch.

If you check their news section, it's a reasonable number of notes, 13 for last year. I think it's fair to say it seems to work well if you are willing to follow their procedure and already know what you're doing.

https://archlinux.org/news/
by bhaak | 2026-01-12 17:14:42+00:00
This would still be valuable even if the LLM only finds out about things that are already in the air.

It’s probably even more of a problem that different areas of scientific development don’t know about each other. LLMs combining results would still not be like they invented something new.

But if they could give us a head start of 20 years on certain developments this would be an awesome result.
by brudgers | 2026-01-12 17:14:50+00:00
A very common clear need is incorporating 44.1khz audio sourcesinto video. 48khz is 48khz because 48khz divided by 24fps, 25fps, or 30fps is an integer (and 44.1khz is not).

Also, for decades upsampling on ingest and downsampling on egress has been standard practice for DSP because it reduces audible artifacts from truncation and other rounding techniques.

Finally, most recorded sound does not have an original analog source because of the access digital recording has created…youtube for example.
by SkyPuncher | 2026-01-12 17:15:05+00:00
Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options.

GLP-1 helped me kick my cravings for junk food, but that just meant I was eating more of the "expensive" stuff. Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit.
by saidnooneever | 2026-01-12 17:15:21+00:00
doing something good doesn't make other things also good. there is some kind of demand they are servicing or a need they are having which they cant meet in some other way (finances..) though, which is likely the root of the issue rather than the zoos' existence itself. this is ofcourse ignoring the opinion (which i also hold) that zoos themselves are essentially or inherently bad. kids' enjoyment is not a good reason for cruelty and imprisonment/enslavement. neither is money or anyhting else. Domesticated animals is a different story.
by akopich | 2026-01-12 17:15:26+00:00
Author here. It started when I felt virtual functions and associated heap allocations are too expensive. Then I've realized std::any doesn't work for move-only types, let alone its SBO storage isn't configurable. Meanwhile microsoft/proxy does SBO only for trivial types. And there we go...

Woid is an extremely customizable high-performance type-erasure header-only library. It provides containers like std::any, std::function and tools for non-intrusive polymorphism.

Key features:

- Performance

- Value semantics

- Move-only type support

- Duck typing

- Extreme customizability

In my current benchmarks it outperforms std::any, std::function, inheritance-based polymorphism and some well-known libraries like function2, boost::te and microsoft/proxy.

I want to make sure the comparison is fair, therefore, your advice on how to better tune the existing libraries is rather welcome.

struct Square {
double side;
double area() const { return side * side; }
};
struct Shape : woid::InterfaceBuilder
::Fun<"area", [](const auto& obj) -> double { return obj.area(); } >
::Build {
auto area() const { return call<"area">(); }
};

auto a = Shape{Square{1.5}}.area();

And of course I'm here to answer your questions.
by maxloh | 2026-01-12 17:15:55+00:00
Is the training cost really that high, though?

The Allen Institute (a non-profit) just released the Molmo 2 and Olmo 3 models. They trained these from scratch using public datasets, and they are performance-competitive with Gemini in several benchmarks [0] [1].

AMD was also able to successfully train an older version of OLMo on their hardware using the published code, data, and recipe [2].

If a non-profit and a chip vendor (training for marketing purposes) can do this, it clearly doesn't require "burning 10 years of cash flow" or a Google-scale TPU farm.

[0]: https://allenai.org/blog/molmo2

[1]: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3

[2]: https://huggingface.co/amd/AMD-OLMo
by marmalade2413 | 2026-01-12 17:16:35+00:00
Can you confidently say that the architure of the LLM doesn't include any a priori bias that might effect the integrity of this LLM?

That is, the architectures of today are chosen to yield the best results given the textual data around today and the problems we want to solve today.

I'd argue that this lack of bias would need to be researched (if it hasn't been already) before this kind of model has credence.

LLMs aren't my area of expertise but during my PhD we were able to encode a lot of a priori knowledge through the design of neural network architectures.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-12 17:16:38+00:00
> LLMs got good at search last year. You need to use the right ones though - ChatGPT Thinking mode and Google AI mode (that's https://www.google.com/ai - which is NOT the same as regular Google's "AI overviews" which are still mostly trash) are both excellent.

I disagree. You might have seen some improvements in the results, but all LLMs still hallucinate quite hard on simple queries where you prompt them to cite their sources. You'll see ChatGPT insist quite hard that the source of their assertions is the 404 link that it asserts is working.
by sanderjd | 2026-01-12 17:16:42+00:00
That's not the narrative in this thread. That's a broader narrative than the one in this thread.

And yes, as I said, the point is not that Mel would benefit, it's that each time a new higher level of abstraction comes onto the scene, it is accessible to more people than the previous level. This was the pattern with machine code to symbolic assembly, it was the pattern with assembly to compiled languages, with higher level languages, and now with "prompting".

The comment I originally replied to implied that this current new abstraction layer is totally different than all the previous ones, and all I said is that I don't think so, I think the comparison is indeed apt. Part of that pattern is that a lot of new people can adopt this new layer of abstraction, even while many people who already know how to program are likely to remain more effective without it.
by senderista | 2026-01-12 17:16:44+00:00
I just hit the "transparent lock screen" bug in iOS 26 where TouchID is disabled but it's impossible to see the numbers on the lock screen, so I had to reboot my phone to unlock it. Hooray! Also, my 5-year-old iPhone has never felt laggy or glitchy before this forced upgrade, now it stutters all the time. Guess this is a great way to force me to upgrade to a new phone!
by dewey | 2026-01-12 17:16:50+00:00
I've thought about it and it would make the whole project even cooler with actual stats of "birdhouse regulars" not just in aggregated form but I don't know if it's possible and if bird faces have enough unique features to differentiate them?

Right now I only use it so that my thumbnails of pictures from the camera are centered on the head in the UI as I couldn't find a pre-existing model that does it for animals. I'm thinking that maybe having this data set of a few hundred bird faces will allow me to train a small one in the future to do it more automatically. If not...I at least learned something new about building models!
by fhennig | 2026-01-12 17:16:54+00:00
I don't actually need much, I think basically just encrypted cloud storage would be great. If there was something like proton mail, but ran as a co-op, I'd also use that (it has great calendar support too).

I'd really focus on it being usable for non-techies, I don't think I'd want a linux login for anything. IMO, the focus should be on the basic infrastructure of digital life for the everyday person.

tilde.club sounds interesting though! Hadn't heard of it before.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-12 17:16:56+00:00
It is fascinating to think that after we moved everything online, we keep finding uses for physical media that needs to be read by a player.

Yes, it is not efficient, but physical media looks to like it kind of meet some higher levels of needs in the Maslow hierarchy. It is ergonomic, it is human, it is tangible, countable. It is embodied in a world that is less and less embodied by the day.
by mmh0000 | 2026-01-12 17:17:06+00:00
Maybe E2E, but the data eventually has to be decrypted to read it.

Then you learn that every modern CPU has a built-in backdoor, a dedicated processor core, running a closed-source operating system, with direct access to the entire system RAM, and network access. [a][b][c][d].

You can not trust any modern hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#Securi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_privacy_of_iOS
by stackghost | 2026-01-12 17:17:22+00:00
Yes, that is exactly what I'm proposing.

You're talking about a library of markdown files for your own personal use to practice writing some code, posted to github, and includes a bunch of language about how to contribute, explicit instructions to fork it, etc.

Imagine giving a flying shit about the lack of a license, in that context. Couldn't be me.

The lack of a license file is by several orders of magnitude the least interesting thing about this repo.
by benoau | 2026-01-12 17:17:25+00:00
Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI? The reason this is important is their DOJ antitrust case, about to start trial, has made this kind of conduct a cornerstone of their allegations that Apple is a monopoly.

It also lends credence to the DOJ's allegation that Apple is insulated from competition - the result of failing to produce their own winning AI service is an exclusive deal to use Google while all competing services are disadvantaged, which is probably not the outcome a healthy and competitive playing field would produce.
by rjrjrjrj | 2026-01-12 17:17:28+00:00
Good article, but “Java deprecated their Date way back in 1997” is not exactly true. They deprecated a lot of methods and constructors in JDK1.1 when Calendar was introduced, but the class itself was never deprecated and it was the preferred way to represent a point in time until the “modern” approach was provided in java.time in JDK8 (c2014)
by sawirricardo | 2026-01-12 17:17:38+00:00
Built this with Claude Code Opus 4.5. It's an idle/clicker game where you run a coffee shop.

Tech: Pure HTML/CSS/JS, Web Audio API for sounds, localStorage for persistence, Stripe for payments.

The interesting parts:
- Balancing exponential growth is tricky. Used cost multipliers (1.4x-1.8x per upgrade level)
- Web Audio API can generate satisfying sounds with just oscillators
- Prestige systems add surprising depth to simple mechanics

I asked Claude to just do this pretty simple - about 1200 lines of JS total.

Happy to chat about this new way of "we can just build it"
by tech_ken | 2026-01-12 17:17:51+00:00
Managing the wg.conf is a colossal PITA, especially if I'm trying to like provision a new client and don't have access to my main laptop. It's crying out for a CRUD app on top of it, and I think tailscale is basically that plus a little. The value add seems obvious.

Also plex is way more than sugar on top of file sharing; it's like filesharing, media management, and a CDN rolled into one product. Soulseek isn't going to handle transcoding for you.
by MBCook | 2026-01-12 17:17:54+00:00
I think Google was withholding them unless Apple was willing to put the ads in.

Apple is a very VERY different company than they were back then.

Back then they didn’t have all sorts of services that they advertised to you constantly. They didn’t have search ads in the App Store. They weren’t trying to squeeze every penny out of every customer all the time no matter how annoying.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-12 17:17:58+00:00
The optics of working with Meta make it a non-starter. Apple symbolizes privacy, Meta the opposite.

With OpenAI, will it even be around 3 years from now, without going bankrupt? What will its ownership structure look like? Plus, as you say, the MS aspect.

So why not Google? It's very common for large corporations to compete in some areas and cooperate in others.