MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcgl | 2026-01-15 09:49:02+00:00
The model only sees a stream of tokens, right? So how do you signal a change in authority (i.e. mark the transition between system and user prompt)? Because a stream of tokens inherently has no out-of-band signaling mechanism, you have to encode changes of authority in-band. And since the user can enter whatever they like in that band...

But maybe someone with a deeper understanding can describe how I'm wrong.
by Dansvidania | 2026-01-15 09:49:07+00:00
I wonder about what in the software industry causes so many people to have similar "symptoms" from it.

I believe it must be something about dedicating oneself to creating something that "does not exist" in a material sense.

My 'farming' has been woodworking: completing the simplest wooden furniture has given me a satisfaction that I do not remember any app or software product ever getting close to causing, despite the fact that I love the work.
by matthewh806 | 2026-01-15 09:50:59+00:00
This was quite an interesting read. It's good to hear that farming & spirituality have given you a new purpose in life, but I think this pop at Thoreau

> and no, there's no manifesto decrying the system written from a cabin in the woods

Is a bit unjustified considering you've just written an entire blog post decrying your old "meaningless" existence vs the fulfilment you have in your new life. It comes across a bit holier than thou. As if to imply you're "quietly just getting on with it", which is evidently not the case, as you still feel the need to write about it
by ThisNameIsTaken | 2026-01-15 09:51:27+00:00
This is a great project: the code is super neat and the write-up very clear. I like the sousveillance aspect of it!

For a project I needed a low-latency RTSP stream as well. When reading a video stream with OpenCV, the default video buffer is quite big, which, when filling up, makes the video lag behind a second or two. It then becomes impossible to perform any interaction on it.

I wasn't familiar with the setting you use to overcome this: setting cv2.CAP_PROP_BUFFERSIZE to 1 on the VideoCapture.
I am not sure, but you might get even lower latency by turning to OpenCV's GStreamer support. For me the trick was:

gst = f"rtspsrc location={video_url} latency=0 buffer-mode=auto ! decodebin ! videoconvert ! appsink max-buffers=1 drop=true"
self.video = cv2.VideoCapture(gst, cv2.CAP_GSTREAMER)

When testing, I also found out that the codec and image settings of the camera matter. With a h264 stream, the images came in batches of a number of frames, whereas MJPEG provided a more constant image stream with lower latency. Lastly, disabling 3D noise reduction also removed some delay.
by neuralkoi | 2026-01-15 09:51:45+00:00
There's a story about Diocletian, the emperor who guided Rome through one of the most turbulent periods of its history, and later voluntarily abdicated and retired to his villa. When they begged him back to resolve some conflicts that had arisen he stated:

"If you could see the cabbages I have planted here with my own hands, you surely would never have thought to request this."
by carlocomin | 2026-01-15 09:52:16+00:00
An attempt to describe a quiet regime shift: once software becomes infrastructure, even curiosity gets proceduralized. Vulnerability research turns into timelines/CVEs/policies; maintainers get treated like an unpaid service desk; academia becomes deliverables and impact metrics. Not a nostalgia piece—more a question about resilience: who pays to keep non-accountable “redundant” exploration alive?
by aucisson_masque | 2026-01-15 09:53:23+00:00
It’s incredibly fast on my MacBook m1 air and more accurate that the native speech to text.

The ui is well thought out, just the right amount of setting for my usage.

Incredible !

Btw, do you know what « discharging the model » does ? It’s set to never by default, tried to check if it has an impact on ram or cpu but it doesn’t seem to do anything.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-15 09:53:24+00:00
They aren't getting a discounted travel ticket, they're getting free bus travel in return for carrying around a photo ID all the time. (I don't agree with fourteen and fifteen year olds being able to travel on the bus for free at ten or eleven at night on Friday or Saturday and getting up to no good on the public coin. It was sold to the public as a school bus replacement and/or reducing car use. It is an obvious attempt to normalise ID cards.)
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-15 09:53:45+00:00
The problem I've had with vibe coding is akin the adage of the first 90% of the code taking 90% of the time, and the last 10% taking the other 90% of the time. The LLM can get you to 90% initially but it hits a wall unless you the user know what it's doing and outputting, but that is very difficult when you're vibe coding by its very definition, meaning that you're not looking at the code at all. And then you have to read thousands of lines of code which you don't understand that it's entirely easier to stop and hand code a new version yourself, which is precisely what I've done with some of my projects.
by raddan | 2026-01-15 09:55:29+00:00
Man, I always get these “helpful” comments when I say something did not work. I currently have five PAID accounts with AI vendors. I regularly try the latest models and techniques. But you’re right: I did not systematically try ALL of them, so maybe one would have worked. But if they’re all so great, which people have been saying breathlessly for at least a year now, I shouldn’t have to systematically try them all.

You know what did work? Me.
by piltdownman | 2026-01-15 09:55:38+00:00
It's the VA for survivors of the 1980s as it doesn't allow music or TV inside, so tends to get ignored by the soccer followers of a weekend and the younger generation entirely.

TBF their curry club and other food specials are basically subsidising old bachelors to the point of being an ersatz social service @ £8.45 to £11.45, including a drink, for 12 hours of service every Thursday.

https://thewetherspoonsmenu.uk/wetherspoons-curry-club-menu/

Generally speaking, its best described as the RyanAir of pubs. It gets you there, cheaply, but the juice may not be worth the squeeze in terms of ambience and clientele.
by sph | 2026-01-15 09:55:41+00:00
This is my path, 4 years in the making, which should peak this year when I finally buy a property I have been saving for.

Remarkably similar to the author's, following a massive burnout from work in mid 2020 from which I became a new^Wdifferent person, with a new perspective on life. Three years of therapy later, jailbroken Kindle filled not with the Bible but philosophers and other role models [1]

The eyes of friends and family gloss over when I describe my new goal in life, of finding the tight path between being a computer wiz and finding a life as close to Nature as possible; of finding a community of like-minded people that exist in real life, for someone that grew up and lived all his adult life on the Internet. An Internet of people that keep telling me that urban living and modern technology isn't so bad, that I should stop complaining and schedule another interview that modern tech is "so much fun and comfortable, look at all this money." I do believe we have gone wrong somewhere, I do believe there is a third path between totalitarian techno-optimism and complete rejection of modernity, and perhaps this is the best time in history to explore it, by returning to our roots. Remembering our natural ecosystem which is our home and sustenance. We earn our living in front of a square piece of glass connected to the ether, why the hell would one live packed like a sardine in impersonal and smelly cities? I truly, desperately need to believe in a return to the countryside; to more humane rhythms of living.

We don't have to abandon all our comforts. And for once the technologists like us can use their brains for the good of humanity and their neighbours, rather than making people click on ads.

My favourite quote is from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man"

---

1: Martijn Doolaard, and the Emacs philosopher Protesilaos Stavrou have had the greatest influence on me.
by gf000 | 2026-01-15 09:55:52+00:00
It reminds me of the joke that "I can do math very fast", probed with a multiplication and immediately answering some total bollocks answer.
- "That's not even close"
- "Yeah, but it was fast"

Sure, it's not a trivial problem, but why wouldn't we want better compilation results/developer ergonomics at the price of more compiler complexity and some minimal performance penalty?

And it's not like the performance doesn't have its own set of negatives, like header-only libraries are a hack directly manifested from this compilation model.
MultiLang‑ASM:A Universal Assembly Platform for Kids,Students,Kernel Developers
by neuroosgenesis | 2026-01-15 09:55:52+00:00
The MultiLang‑ASM Ecosystem introduces a groundbreaking approach to low‑level programming, offering two complementary open‑source projects that span the entire learning curve — from children discovering CPU logic for the first time to professionals building kernels and operating systems.

MultiLang‑ASM is a multilingual assembly language that allows developers to write real x86‑64 instructions in more than 27 human languages and dozens of regional dialects. It breaks the English‑only barrier of traditional assembly, enabling global accessibility for students, researchers, and system programmers.

Alongside it, MultiLang‑ASM‑Kids delivers the world’s first child‑friendly assembly mode. Designed for ages 7–12, it transforms complex CPU concepts into simple, natural‑language commands that compile into real assembly code. Kids can learn registers, loops, comparisons, and memory using intuitive verbs like:

pon rax a 5
suma rax con 3
enseña rax

Together, these two repositories form a unified ecosystem that democratizes low‑level programming across cultures, languages, and age groups — from early education to professional OS development.

Repositories:

Main Platform: https://github.com/cyberenigma-lgtm/MultiLang-ASM

Kids Platform: https://github.com/cyberenigma-lgtm/MultiLang-ASM-Kids
by panda-giddiness | 2026-01-15 09:56:38+00:00
> Whatever power you put into the hands of the government is guaranteed to fall into your enemy's hands some day.

Only if there's a functioning system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, there is not. This Court is willing to use motivated reasoning to achieve its preferred outcomes; to slow-walking favorable rulings for Democrats while expediting favorable rulings for Republicans (often without explanation via the "shadow docket"); and to throw out decades of precedent in the process by ignoring stare decisis, a bedrock legal principle which ensures stability of the judicial process.

Just to give an example, consider the ban on universal (national) injunctions. One might be surprised to learn that it was the Biden administration that initially petitioned the Court for the ban. However, the Court found such a ban unnecessary then (i.e., when lower Courts were blocking the Biden administration's agenda), but conveniently found it necessary during the second Trump administration (when lower courts started blocking the Trump administration's agenda). And just as another kick in the balls, they used the birthright citizen case as a vehicle to bring the matter to Court, strengthening the President without even deigning to address the Trump administration's obviously illegal executive order.

The result of this mess is that, if the Trump administration is eventually voted out, it is highly unlikely that an incoming Democratic administration would be able to capitalize on the expansion of executive powers that this Court has given to this President. We see a similar situation in Poland. After ~a decade in power the Law & Justice party was voted out, but the new coalition government has not inherited the same ability to government, with its agenda constantly curtailed by Law & Justice appointees embedded throughout the government (including the highest court).
by croon | 2026-01-15 09:56:44+00:00
I'm generally an advocate for a robust safety-net such that people shouldn't be on their knees every month just to scrape by with food/housing/healthcare, and would love it if we reached Star Trek/The Culture levels of post-scarcity, but I'm simultaneously not convinced by this idea, but possibly from another angle.

1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists).

2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded.

TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.
by pas | 2026-01-15 09:57:07+00:00
yes and no, as the sibling comment mentions sometimes a message bus is used (Kafka, for example), but Netflix is (was?) all-in with HTTP (low-latency gRPC, HTTP/3, wrapped in nice type-safe SDK packages)

but ideally you don't break the glass and reach for a microservices architecture if you don't need the scalability afforded by very deep decoupling

which means ideally you have separate databases (and DB schema and even likely different kind of data store), and through the magic of having minimally overlapping "bounded contexts" you don't need a lot of data to be sent over (the client SDK will pick what it needs for example)

... of course serving a content recommendation request (which results in a cascade of requests that go to various microservices, eg. profile, rights management data, CDN availability, and metadata for the results, image URLs, etc) for a Netflix user doesn't need durability, so no Kafka (or other message bus), but when the user changes their profile it might be something that gets "broadcasted"

(and durable "replayable" queues help, because then services can be put to read-only mode to serve traffic, while new instances are starting up, and they will catch up. and of course it's useful for debugging too, at least compared to HTTP logs, which usually don't have the body/payload logged.)
by bschne | 2026-01-15 09:58:42+00:00
"Now, one day back at Data General, his weariness focused on the logic analyzer and the small catastrophes that come from trying to build a machine that operates in billionths of a second. On this occasion, he went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal:

I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

— from "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder
by raxxorraxor | 2026-01-15 09:58:58+00:00
But I also don't want the alternative, that I have to ID myself. Anonymous and pseudonymous access is the best solution.

The EU tries to introduce age verification, simultaneously it currently talks about sharing police data with the US for the Visa waiver program.

If this verification data is collected and normalised, we will constantly have to fight how much data that is required for auth and it can just be legislated.
by eddyg | 2026-01-15 10:00:11+00:00
Lots of existing work on “coding by voice” long before LLMs were a thing. For example (from 2013):
http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html
and the associated HN discussion (“Using Voice to Code Faster than Keyboard”): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6203805
by tpm | 2026-01-15 10:00:44+00:00
> I am not sure a government digital ID would help with dealing with businesses.

I am pretty sure it would if it was allowed to. Once businesses have one usable source of ID and/or residence, they don't have to create and maintain elaborate alternative ways of establishing this information.

I come from a country where there is a national ID and lived in the UK for a while (before there was any form of electronic registration of foreign workers). I facepalmed everytime I had to interact with a business requiring ID or address, or with the government. This is a long-solved problem and they refuse to use the known, good, solution. They even managed to make a national ID into law around 2010 and then scrape it a year or so later when a new government came into power. I still can't believe it.
by djnaraps | 2026-01-15 10:00:56+00:00
Sure! My mother is preparing a book detailing recipes, ingredients, foraging,
how to eat, when to eat and so on which will be released this year. Basically,
we follow the seasons and there are 4-5 "dishes" each season with some overlap.

The "dishes" are templates filled in with whatever is available at the time.
For instance, when chestnuts are in season they enter soups, casseroles, roasts,
salads and on their own drizzled with olive oil and salt. When they finish,
something else is in season and the dishes change again.

There's a very brief period of overlap where the staple summer vegetables
(tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, zucchini) and chestnuts are available at the
same time. These vegetables stuffed with a mix of brown rice and chestnuts and
baked in the oven is heavenly.

Instead of thinking about recipes and then obtaining ingredients to make them,
start with the ingredients and make it up as you go. Things that are in season
together typically go together. We base everything on olive oil, alliums, some
sort of legume or grain and seasonal greens, nuts, fruits and vegetables.

My great grandparents didn't follow recipes per se. When they made a soup they
used what they had and due to lack of refrigeration and ultra-processing
everything they ate was local, seasonal and fresh.
by NoBeardMarch | 2026-01-15 10:00:56+00:00
If it makes you happy, then by all means go for that. I am glad for you. What is generally recommended and evidence based is a different matter. I will not pretend to be an expert on it: All I have done is a cursory glance on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

For me, my joy has come from strength resistance training and my discovery of the stairmaster. The latter was a very fun find! It's a really strenuous exercise which makes you strong for hiking in the wilderness and I feel like I do not need to do it for as long as the treadmill which I hate.
by thatha7777 | 2026-01-15 10:01:23+00:00
It takes courage to step away from what you were known for, and even more to return and explain why. The journey from burnout to renewal resonates deeply with me, and I suspect many of us recognize the slow decay you're describing.

I'm on a similar path myself, hoping to marry open source and open hardware with farming. Heartfelt congrats to Dylan on finding WILD and the clarity to change course.
by bflesch | 2026-01-15 10:01:26+00:00
> The root problem is that permissions right now are super hard to adjust for users

Unlike you I'm not getting paid enough by google to accept this narrative. The root problem for google is "high denial rates" of geolocation prompts, as clearly stated by Google in the post.

Now please tell me what information the geolocation prompt actually provides to the website that cannot be taken from the IP address, which is already tracked and processed by google and every single website tracking tool. IP address tells the website about the city where users come from.

The root problem with "high denial rates" is that Google wants to know if you live in the rich part of town or in the poor part of town. This is why google engineers try to find new ways for users to permanently undo their blocking of geolocation permission.

If google engineers had any concern about their users, then the default option would be a way to temporarily allow geolocation for duration of the browser session, e.g. when you need to really use google maps. And after the browser window closes it would later go back to the previously blocked state from before.

It's a cognitive dissonance.
by jcynix | 2026-01-15 10:01:34+00:00
Good read thanks. I totally can relate to the choices problem. It's rather easy with physical books (or was, as we have little room left for even more books ;-0) but ebooks are "dangerous" too.

Regarding cameras, it's harder (and more expensive) to wrangle with gear acquisition syndrome (GAS) but after switching from Canon EOS to Fuji, because the Canon stuff was too heavy when hiking, I managed to restrain myself most of the time. Because the question always is whether my images would become better with different gear or with more trial and error.

I opted for trial and error and eagerly watch a selected number of YouTube channels who almost always show me that I should and can improve myself and not my gear.
by neuralkoi | 2026-01-15 10:02:09+00:00
At least for me it was the realization that I didn't really know why I was doing what I was doing.

I wanted to change the world and make it better, and it felt good to pursue a career with a high salary and prestige, but after years of working in software I was not seeing my work actually make the world better. In fact it was making me feel sick, tired, and depressed.

There was a short period of time in the 2000s when it did feel like tech was beginning to transform peoples lives and society for the better, but after the algorithms and rougher edges of our collective human nature took it over, it all seems to have drastically changed course.
by jononor | 2026-01-15 10:02:16+00:00
Thanks a lot for your transparency Jeff! Much needed in this area. And your content is quality, much unlike what else being discussed here.

It is really hard to actually make anything substantial on social media exposure. Unfortunately this does not stop many from exaggerating claims in order to (maybe become) be internet famous, or seeing high number of clicks etc. So it is both bad business for creators, and poisoning the discourse for readers - the only real winners are the social media companies and the product companies that get hyped up.
by sprucevoid | 2026-01-15 10:02:59+00:00
> denying said universal healthcare to republicans

How many do you claim hold that view? Can you cite some prominent examples? I want health care for all, including you.

> hyperbole

I posted https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts "lives lost based on the decline in outlays (current spending) may be in the range of 500,000 to 1,000,000 and potential lives lost based on the decline in obligations (commitments to future spending) are between 670,000 and 1,600,000."

and asked for data on the original "balancing out claim". You jumped in with mumblings of some unspecified number of lost jobs and vague claims about said job losers demise and then one mean online comment to you. That's where we're at, that's the tally based on the data you provided.
by gabordemooij | 2026-01-15 10:03:02+00:00
1. I guess this is just personal taste, we can add aliases if you like. lf (lowercase seems nice). Smalltalk itself uses brk. Could at both. Personally I love the 'touch' of history, makes it seem like there is continuum in tech somehow. But that's just personal taste as well.

2.
['the word 'Hello' has 5 chars']
['I say: "Hi There!"']
['In xoscript we use [' and '] ']

this is not allowed:
['this causes a '] parsing error.']

3.
It's all just message passing.

- {} * x is just message * with arg x
- yes it's a function, which is an object, and it has a method called *
- Smalltalk uses times: { ... } times: 101.

- True is an object
- (i = i) yields True, so you can send a messages to True
- continue/break only work with True
- , means: continue talking to object (True)