MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by winternett | 2026-01-19 02:09:53+00:00
McDonalds and Taco Bell tried to get rid of their "soft skills" (AKA customer service} and look how they're doing right now... Endless stores that all look & feel the same -- uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes, longer drive-thru lines, and impersonal & impatient staff that avoids customers like the plague.

Evangelists will preach Ai because it's good for corporations that don't care about customer needs, but in the same sense, it may well be the catalyst for many to move out of cities to more human areas as it grows.

Businesses dictate the spread of Ai, and then foist it on customers because they think monopolies are sustainable, but the foundational rules always ring true -- Customer service & commitment are essential to the survival of a business. This tone deaf approach will eventually alienate many from companies that adopt it, and there aren't enough tech-inclined introverts to sustain profit in a world where Ai takes everyone's jobs. We don't ALWAYS want to talk to vending machines, human interaction is a need for many that Ai evangelists seem to think will simply go away.

I hope there are still some reasonable minded business leaders out there to swoop in and fix things after the ashes this era leaves along with all the VC carnage & political damage rendered on our economy.

Ai is great for math though... Maybe that should be the less-destructive focus.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-19 02:10:28+00:00
I'm not really replying to the article, just going tangentially from the "dead internet theory" topic, but I was thinking about when we might see the equivalent for roads: the dead road theory.

In X amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food.

I look forward to the various security mechanisms required of this new paradigm (in the way that someone looks forward to the tightening spiral into dystopia).
by femto | 2026-01-19 02:10:36+00:00
The "old" Internet is still there in parallel with the "new" Internet. It's just been swamped by the large volume of "new" stuff. In the 90s the Internet was small and before crawler based search engines you had to find things manually and maintain your own list of URLs to get back to things.

Ignore the search engines, ignore all the large companies and you're left with the "Old Internet". It's inconvenient and it's hard work to find things, but that's how it was (and is).
by Cedricgc | 2026-01-19 02:10:42+00:00
I should be specific. I think the technical analysis is reasonable and I actually enjoy someone staking on a big vision, which is why I saved these pieces.

An example:

"I’ve seen Grab’s hunger. I’ve felt it. I have it. This space is win or die. They will fight to the death, and I am with them. This company, with some 3000 employees I think, is more unified than I’ve seen with most 5-person companies. This is the kind of focused camaraderie, cooperation and discipline that you typically only see in the military, in times of war.

Which should hardly surprise you, because that’s exactly what this is. This is war.

I am giving everything I’ve got to help Grab win. I am all in. You’d be amazed at what you can accomplish when you’re all in."

This is the writing of someone planning to make a capstone career move instead of leaving in 18 months. It's not the worst thing to do (He says he left b/c the time difference to support a team in SE Asia was hard physically, and he's getting older) and I support taking big swings. I'm just saying Yegge's writing has a pattern.

Crypto and what Yegge is doing with $GAS is dangerous because if the token price crashes and people betting their life savings think he didn't deliver on his promises... I like Steve personally which is why I'm saying anything.
by bartread | 2026-01-19 02:10:44+00:00
> I think there are more places like that in the world.

There are but not as many as we might like.

I’d say I’ve learned to be decent on the soft skills side but it comes at a cost and the need to overutilise them can be incredibly draining.

So many places run Agile so it feels like software engineering for noisy extroverts but, to me, it just makes it so hard to get anything done, and I see others struggling the same way.

One of my pet peeves is how bad people are at, or perhaps how unwilling they are to embrace, asynchronous communication. Again, this favours the extroverts.

And then one key advantage of written communication nowadays is I can ask an LLM to help me with it so my message lands better. More than once, when dealing with particularly frustrating situations, I’ve asked ChatGPT to rewrite an email for me “so that I come across as a reasonable human being rather than a deranged psychopath”. It works.
by knollimar | 2026-01-19 02:11:32+00:00
I dispute technology in general. There are plenty of examples where industrialisation led to a drop in quality, a massive drop in price, and a displacement of workers.

It hasn't happened in software yet. I suppose this has to do with where software sits on the demand curve currently.

I'm imagining a few more shifts in productivity will make the demand vs price derivative shift in a meaningfully different way, but we can only speculate.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-01-19 02:11:36+00:00
The traditional way to square that circle is to say that someone who's interested in the answer should subsidize the market. Essentially they provide liquidity to the market which essentially pays people with accurate information to bet. Some work has been done to figure our effective ways of doing that. In practice, it seems like gamblers often provide enough liquidity that this is not needed
by wackget | 2026-01-19 02:11:45+00:00
I'll consider switching to Linux when the GUI becomes as configurable as Windows 10 or earlier.

For example, this is my taskbar layout:
https://i.ibb.co/1GqKH27L/taskbar-layout.png

To my knowledge, it's not possible to achieve anything like this layout on Windows 11, Linux or Mac. I did try it in various Linux distros a few times but frankly got sick of navigating the maze of window managers et cetera. I think something like XFCE came close to providing a Windows-like taskbar but it was still far, far behind what Windows NT can offer.
by makercameron | 2026-01-19 02:11:47+00:00
I'm Cameron, one of the co-founders. Happy to answer questions about the economics of conferences (sponsor extraction, attendee value capture, the badge-scanning industrial complex) or what we learned scaling from 5,000 to 11,000 attendees.
The piece is about why we left a working model. The short version: conferences optimize for sponsor access to attendees, not attendee transformation. We think Build Labs (hands-on working sessions) instead of panels might fix this. Still figuring out if that scales.
Curious what others have experienced—especially anyone who's felt that post-conference emptiness and wondered if it's just them.
by numpad0 | 2026-01-19 02:12:07+00:00
A LIDAR point cloud from a single point of view is a mono-ocular depth map. Unless the LIDAR in question is like, using supernova level gamma rays or neutrino generators for the laser part to get density and albedo volumetric data for its whole distance range.

You just can't see the back of a thing by knowing the shape of the front side with current technologies.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-19 02:12:11+00:00
> You "never understand" these posts and then list off a ton of crap I shouldn't have to do to an OS to make it usable.

In the context of changes Microsoft could make, that list of instructions is there for demonstration purposes. It's about how if Microsoft wanted to clean up their mess, they have a far far easier method than what's suggested in the article.

> when alternatives exist that are much less of a pain, I'll be taking those

That's a different topic from the article and the comment you replied to.
by johnfn | 2026-01-19 02:12:48+00:00
I love tracking my HRV. It definitely follows my perception of stress, but watching it carefully has taught me a lot about what causes me to be stressed and what doesn’t. I love talking to people about this.

BTW, a really key tip: if you tell your Apple Watch you have AFib, it will take many more measurements of your HRV, making the value much more accurate.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-19 02:14:24+00:00
I wasn’t so keen on the idea of network states, given whose floating them, but I do wonder if like could we have network states tied to certain historical times; if you wanted to be a blacksmith say.

Arguably this is what the Amish did.

It would be nice to say, use AI to bring your state some level of wealth or abundance, while abstracting it behind an environment isolated from modern technology.

I don’t want to live through the actual turmoil of the 1800s, but a simulated version? Bring it on.
by Anon1096 | 2026-01-19 02:14:26+00:00
The world isn't zero sum, advertising grows the pie for all involved. One of the best examples would be the iphone when it was released. Even in your example category of cars Tesla and later Rivian/Lucid/BYD marketing was a game changer for electric vehicles.

Very few ads are for products where exact 1:1 competitors exist (though it's nonzero, maybe something like a commingled Amazon Basics widget).
by winternett | 2026-01-19 02:14:39+00:00
The jargon is getting more & more obtuse every year...

Also, a major feature of "vibe coding" now is the rough edges on UI design that don't make sense at all... It's pretty obvious that code bases aren't evolving because these systems can't handle complex prompts while retaining features from prior releases, and it seems like functional testing for releases has now become the kid who can't speak that fell down a well... Oh well.
Show HN: All Paul Graham essays as a single ePub for e-readers
by tomyanlol123 | 2026-01-19 02:14:44+00:00
I built a tool that compiles all 230+ Paul Graham essays into a single, well-formatted EPUB optimized for Kobo/Kindle.

Features:
- Chronologically sorted (newest first)
- Clean formatting for e-ink
- Auto-updated weekly via GitHub Actions

Built with Python/ebooklib.
by keyle | 2026-01-19 02:15:39+00:00
This is a good point. The kernel stuff of Windows isn't really the problem.

I've been on macOS for eons, but I still hope that some day, someone at microsoft will have the balls to make a Windows Redux. Which is just Windows 7 with a coat of paint; and less stuff, installable separately; geared towards speed and not stuffings.
by casey2 | 2026-01-19 02:15:46+00:00
This whole thread is pretty funny. Either it can demo some pretty clever, but still limited, features resulting in math skills OR it's literally the best search engine ever invented. My guess is the former, it's pretty whatever at web search and I'd expect to see something similar to the easily retrievable, more visible proof method from Rogers' (as opposed to some alleged proof hidden in some dataset).
by sodafountan | 2026-01-19 02:16:02+00:00
Because they're a corporation that makes money. They have incentives to employ people, and the vendor lock-in with Windows is far too large to change anything at the moment or anytime in the foreseeable future. Changing Windows to become a Linux-based distro would be a massive corporate undertaking; Microsoft isn't in the business of pleasing tech-minded people. They're a business that makes money.

Linux isn't a corporation; it's really more of an idea. They don't have marketing departments or people trying to sell you licenses. They don't have vendor lock-in or active-directory or a cloud based infastructure. They don't have an entire advertising division or a search engine. There aren't any shareholders to please or paid employees to keep on payroll for government kickbacks. They're not targeting the casual, media-focused, average computer user like Microsoft, which makes a lot of money by doing so.

In my last job, I worked in a mid-sized suburban office. There weren't any "Linux reps" knocking on our door, making sure we were getting the most out of Ubuntu.
by kristianp | 2026-01-19 02:16:10+00:00
Note that the original FLUX.2 [klein] model [1] and python code was only released about 3 days ago (inexact without knowing the times and timezones involved.) Discussed at [2]

[1] https://bfl.ai/blog/flux2-klein-towards-interactive-visual-i...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46653721
by hintymad | 2026-01-19 02:17:39+00:00
Dashboard is just an example. The gist is how much of know-how that we use in our work can be replaced by AI transforming other people's existing work. I think it hinges on how many new problems or new business demands will show up. If we just work on small variations of existing business, then quickly our know-hows will converge (e.g. building a dashboard or a vanilla version of linear regression model), and AI will spew out such code for many of us.
by heliostatic | 2026-01-19 02:18:37+00:00
This looks great. The decisions feature, and the focus on good async, reminds me of Stride (Atlassian's failed chat product).

Chat is such a social product, even inside a company, as many here have addressed. That said, irc, hipchat, campfire, matrix, slack, zulio, lync, wave, and a hundred others have had their moments of success, and I could see this being on the more successful side.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2026-01-19 02:18:43+00:00
The person in that thread could explain the situation a lot more better to the non technical users. You could do this:

"I don't know what happened to your computer but you seem to be saying someone hacked your computer and installed some software and you found acme.com mentioned on it. This was not done by me. acme.com is open source software that is freely available to anyone. This is the same as if someone installed software on your computer that mentions the google chrome web browser - that would not indicate google had anything to do with that action, since google chrome is freely available too."
by sharadov | 2026-01-19 02:18:43+00:00
I used to work with a brilliant asshole - he had this babyface but would constantly belittle his fellow engineers.

Everyone hated him but the CEO loved him since he thought he was their golden ticket to the promised land.

At some point he went with us to a shooting range for target practice, immediately after he developed a fascination for guns, he never threatened anyone, but one day he buys a Kevlar vest and tells all his fellow devs.

The following Monday was his last day..
by wackget | 2026-01-19 02:18:52+00:00
> Everything one sees on Windows can be stripped out and reverted to Windows 2000 mode. That grey boxy UI is literally still there.

Can the horrendous W11 taskbar be reverted to the classic taskbar, with full support for changing its size and screen position etc?

Can classic Explorer, without any OneDrive/Copilot nonsense, be restored?

Can the new "Settings" (*excuse me while I vomit) layouts be junked in favour of the Control Panel, along with all the associated modals such as the WiFi selection sidebar etc.?
by Retr0id | 2026-01-19 02:19:42+00:00
It's kinda like how edgy political takes are often wrapped in seven layers of meta-irony. If the audience reaction is negative you can say it was just a joke that didn't land.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, if it allows exploring new ideas with relative safety. I think that's what's going on here. It's a crazy idea that might just work, but if it doesn't work it can be retconned as satirical performance art.
by al_borland | 2026-01-19 02:19:47+00:00
I’ve been on both sides, starting in ops and transitioning to a dev role. I think there is incredible value in ops and have tried to maintain a good relationship with them. Handing things to ops, and giving them proper support, frees up my time and mental energy to focus on the work in front of me instead of what one-off failure may be happening.

Others on my team try to do it all, DevOps I suppose… they are chronically busy and stressed out. Bouncing back and forth between deep work and firefighting sounds awful. I find it very difficult, as I end up stuck waiting for the next fire.
Show HN: Knowhere – Rust-Based SQL Engine with TUI and GUI (Built on DataFusion)
by waxsum8 | 2026-01-19 02:22:50+00:00
Hello HN,

I built Knowhere, a lightweight SQL engine written in Rust that lets you query CSV, Parquet, Delta Lake, and SQLite files directly—no database import required.

It’s built on top of Apache DataFusion for high-performance vectorized query execution and supports two interfaces:

1. Interactive TUI: A Vim-style terminal interface (using Ratatui) for quick data exploration.

2. Desktop GUI: A modern IDE-like experience (built with Tauri + React) with a Monaco editor and glorious dark mode.

I wanted a tool that combines the speed of DataFusion with a rich user experience for local data analysis. It handles joins across different file formats, supports complex queries (CTEs, Window Functions), and requires zero configuration to get started.

The project is open source (MIT). I’d love to hear your feedback on the TUI/GUI approach!

Repo: https://github.com/saivarunk/knowhere

Docs: https://saivarunk.github.io/knowhere
by nobody9999 | 2026-01-19 02:22:56+00:00
>The politics of fear stoked by two sets of extremists egging eachother on is the core reason we're in this mess, the failure to reject both simultaneously and the desire to rule with feelings instead of facts caused it all.

Pol Pot[0] was a leftist extremist. Chairman Mao[1] was a leftist extremist. As were the Red Brigades[2] and the Symbionese Liberation Army[3], etc., etc., ,etc. Who in the US Democratic Party advocates for the same things as those guys? Let's see. No one.

In fact, the only ones in the US who've shown an interest in nationalizing the means of production (c.f. Intel) or putting down the Intelligentsia and normalizing violence against those who criticize the regime are just one set of extremists. Because extremists end up going full circle -- because for them it's about power and not ideology.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Brigades

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-19 02:23:24+00:00
This is why, when you've got a bunch of geeks deciding on where to go for dinner, someone has to say "We're going to the Jewel of India" and herd everyone out that way. If you don't do that then it'll be 11pm and people are still pulling up restaurant reviews and arguing over whether the one that got 4.3 stars really is better than the one that got 4.2 stars.

This is also the difference between a supremely dysfunctional and an OK-ish standards committee, the classic Home of Bikeshedding.
by bored_hacker | 2026-01-19 02:25:18+00:00
Mark Zuckerberg was right 2025 brought us mid life engineer level work via AI coding tools.

Following up on my 2025 workflows, this post explores the shift from manual prompting to agentic feedback loops. I break down why model choice now outweighs prompt engineering, how Claude Code has become my primary driver alongside Cursor, and why the "SWE II" level of AI requires a new focus on automated eval loops and organizational standards.
by samlinnfer | 2026-01-19 02:26:12+00:00
Here's the set up I use on Linux:

The idea is to completely sandbox the program, and allow only access to specific bind mounted folders. But we also want to have to the frills of using GUI programs, audio, and network access. runc [1] allows us to do exactly this.

My config sets up a container with folders bind mounted from the host. The only difficult part is setting up a transparent network proxy so that all the programs that need internet just work.

Container has a process namespace, network namespace, etc and has no access to host except through the bind mounted folders.
Network is provided via a domain socket inside a bind mounted folder. GUI programs work by passing through a Wayland socket in a folder and setting environmental variables.

The set up looks like this

* config.json - runc config
* run.sh - runs runc and the proxy server
* rootfs/ - runc rootfs (created by exporting a docker container) `mkdir rootfs && docker export $(docker create archlinux:multilib-devel) | tar -C rootfs -xvf -`
* net/ - folder that is bind mounted into the container for networking

Inside the container (inside rootfs/root):

* net-conf.sh - transparent proxy setup
* nfs.conf - transparent proxy nft config
* start.sh - run as a user account

Gist with all the files: [2]

[1] https://github.com/opencontainers/runc

[2] https://gist.github.com/dogestreet/443f77fc1a872cac66a51ba55...
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-01-19 02:26:38+00:00
I have a long blog post stewing here. I'll give you the gist.

Moving windows between monitors of different pixel densities is a rather difficult problem. Windows handles pixel density per-application, not globally, and it uses something called device-independent pixels (DIPs). macOS and every desktop environment I've tried on Linux does it globally, or at least globally per-display.

On Windows, when a window is moved across two displays with different scaling factors, a simple algorithm is used. It will choose the display that the greater fraction of the window is in to select the DIP, render, compose and rasterise, and hence and one part of the window may appear too small or too large on the other display.

On the other hand, macOS, GNOME, and KDE take the easy (but IMO very lazy) way out by rasterising the entire application window to the pixel density of whichever display that the greater fraction of the window is in, copying that framebuffer to the viewport of the other displays, scaling with some filtering algorithm, and then composing, leading to blurring on at least one display. I am happy to bet that you're just not noticing the early rasterisation and filtered scaling going on. Having used all 3 OSs across a variety of monitors, I am extremely particular about blurry text; enough that I will stop using a certain setup if it doesn't satisfy me (it's why I stopped using Linux on my personal system).

I'll concede neither is good enough. The real solution here is:

1. Render the application to as many viewports as there are displays that the application window is in, with the appropriate DIP for each display's scale factor
2. Compose the application viewports into each display's viewport depending on the apparent window position
3. The above will automatically clip away the fraction of the window that is outside each display
4. Rasterise the composed viewport for each display

Another concession: I personally prefer pixel-perfect rendering rather than having the same visual size, and hardly ever use windows spanning multiple displays (especially of different pixel density), so Windows' behaviour is less of a problem to me.

My bigger issue is other desktop environments not supporting subpixel anti-aliasing, not supporting 'fractional' scaling (macOS is by far the biggest offender), and edge artifacts that result from bad clipping. I have a few photos I took of KDE, where random pixels are lit up at the bottom of my secondary display, with my laptop below it.
by jsight | 2026-01-19 02:26:45+00:00
I put it in a VM and had it build a really simple todo app for me the other day. It wasted so many tokens that I can't help but agree with you right now. And I could certainly have done the same thing with beads and opus in approximately the same amount of time.

However, the gas town one was almost completely hands off. I think my only interventions were due to how beta it was, so I had to help it work around its own bugs to keep from doing stupid things.

Other than that, it implemented exactly what I asked for in a workable fashion with effectively one prompt. It would have taken several prompts and course corrections to get the same result without it.

Other than the riskyness (it runs in dangerous permissions mode) and incredible cost inefficiency, I'd certainly use it.