MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shykes | 2026-01-23 17:35:25+00:00
Imitation is the highest form of flattery! Obviously there was demand for an alternative to Docker that was native to the Red Hat platform. We couldn't offer that (although we tried in the early days) so it made sense that they would.

In the early days we tried very hard to accommodate their needs (for example by implementing support for devicemapper as an alternative to aufs). But we soon realized our priorities were fundamentally at odds: they cared most about platform lock-in, and we cared most about platform independence. There was also a cultural issue: when Red Hat contributes to open source it's always from a position of strength. If a project is important to them, they need merge authority - they simply don't know how to meaningfully contribute to an upstream project when they're not in charge. Because of the diverging design priorities, they never earned true merge rights on the repo: they had to argue for their pull requests like everyone else, and input from maintainers was not optional. Many pull requests were never merged because of fundamental design issues, like breaking compatibility with non-Red Hat platforms. Others because of subjective architecture disagreements. They really didn't like that, which led to all sorts of drama and bad behavior. In the process I lost respect for a company I once admired.

I also think they made a mistake marketing podman as a drop-in replacement to Docker. This promise of compatibility limited their design freedom and I'm sure caused the maintainers a lot of headaches- compatibility is hard!

Ultimately the true priority of podman - native integration with the Red Hat platform - makes it impossible for it to overtake Docker. I'm sure some of the podman authors would like to jettison that constraint, but I don't think that's structurally possible. Red Hat will never invest in a project that doesn't contribute to their platform lock-in. Back when RH was a dominant platform, that was a strength. Nowadays it is a hindrance.
by tgv | 2026-01-23 17:35:30+00:00
> You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s

Tell me about it. My iPod Classic was in a terminal phase, and since I like to carry my music around instead of streaming arbitrary stuff, I bought a Sony Walkman mp3 (+ other formats) player. It's bad. It takes a long time to boot, the battery life is mediocre, the UI is mainly lists of things, searching always misses tracks or albums, the volume defaults to a pretty low level, and when you increase it, it interrupts you asking if you're sure.

And when I started copying my itunes collection to the "walkman" (it is branded Walkman, but not worthy of the name), it would constantly stop copying. The included software was useless, and wouldn't copy a single track, giving up after 5 to 10 minutes of scanning. I had to write a Python script to overcome problems with long directory and file names and copy them to the proper directory.

Worst of all: there's a very loud click when you stop a track (using wired headphones). It's as if they never even used it.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-23 17:35:59+00:00
The only people who think that are programmers already or programmer-adjacent. Your mother is never going to be able to use a Gas Town-like workflow to make software for her own needs, nor is she even going to want to spend her weekends trying. These tools still require a baseline minimum of technical knowledge, and a real time investment, and also a real money investment the way some people are using them. Moreover, most real software has interoperability needs. A world where everyone makes their own Twitter or WhatsApp is a world where nobody can talk to anyone else.

There is a small subset of the population who is now enabled to make proof-of-concepts with less effort than before. This is no way diminishes the need for delivering performant, secure, interoperable software at scale to serve humanity's needs.
by quibono | 2026-01-23 17:36:04+00:00
Re: the unauthenticated RCE (CVE-2025-11344), am I to understand that Apache will read and honour any .htaccess file it finds, even outside of the config root path?
The lack of file clean-up when handling the exception is one thing... but this .htaccess logic strikes me as a bizarre default (if true).
by monooso | 2026-01-23 17:36:12+00:00
The BBC should not have cut together the footage in the way that they did.

But let's be clear, the edited footage does not misrepresent the nature of what happened; Trump was an insurrectionist.

You don't have to take my (or the BBC's) word for it. Jack Smith's final report [1] makes it clear that Trump knew what he was doing on January 6th (emphasis mine):

> ...the evidence established that the violence was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay.

The main reason Trump wasn't charged with insurrection was down to the lack of case law (emphasis mine):

> [insurrection] typically involves overthrowing a sitting government, rather than maintaining power...

As such, the case would likely be bogged down for years as Trump attempted to wiggle through his favourite loophole, "nobody anticipated such an awful person being in charge."

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-the-full-special-...
by 0hw0t | 2026-01-23 17:36:49+00:00
Imo new life is far less stimulating than old life.

Wander in the trees and your brain is processing all the light reflecting off surfaces at endless angles given textured surfaces everywhere. Brain be processing the crunch of the sticks and grass.

Reading books was at an all-time high. Ear training making music with friends, was a constant.

Physically sitting still staring at a 2D screen, saving the universe from yet another alien threat video game, scanning likely repetitive and meaningless social commentary since no one is taking salient actions, just spinning wheels in place... modern life can't compete with that information overload.

Modern life is actually whittled down to "protect big corp profits" via consumption of their media and services. It's the opposite of diverse. It is hypernormalized and stagnant
by hackthemack | 2026-01-23 17:36:54+00:00
I am just glad some thought is being put into it. Thanks for the efforts.

I keep thinking about people putting secrets up in github. You can not really get rid of something that is out there, like you said.

But people do make a request to github to remove it. And if no one has put in the effort to copy it and republish it, it is not as "out there" as if it were still on github.

Thinking on old BBS boards on the internet. Most people will use Internet Archive to search for old dead sites. If it is not on there, it is not as "out there" as if it were on the Internet Archive.

I am thinking it is not quite as black as white as it seems. There is some kind of entropy effect.

Thinking on pre-internet newspapers. If you posted something in a fan zine in the 70s, it might have faded from existence due to lost copies, or it might be in some collector's stockpile. It might even be scanned into the Internet Archive. Or not.

No great solutions come to mind. But there does seem to be some "small" value in being able to say, delete this as it was a mistake.

Maybe, also, more education, or a warning about "beware, be extra careful, this is going to be around for all to see for a long time, possibly forever".
by deadbabe | 2026-01-23 17:36:55+00:00
The reason retro tech is fun now is because no one is making more of it, and the retro tech is as advanced as it could be without being ruined by enshittification and planned obsolescence. Every old piece of tech you come across is now a relic, rich in lore and history, and sometimes mystery when there are few people around who understand how it works anymore. These old devices are no longer things you just buy from a big corp, you have to find them in a pile of junk somewhere or trade a bit of money for it from some person, and on top of that the condition of the devices vary greatly, they are not fungible. This hunt for old tech feels very post-apocalyptic at times.

People will also look for creative ways to upgrade old tech and implement some quality of life improvements, doing things the original creators never thought of, or were simply limited by the technologies of their times. The result is much more variety in devices, no more homogeneous products.

And this effect will only get more pronounced as time goes on. Consider that in the year 2077, a humble N64 could be something sacred, handed down through many generations, each leaving their mark on the device, and people developing their own homebrewed games motivated more by fun than capitalistic ambition, or just pushing the limits of the device.
by toraway | 2026-01-23 17:36:57+00:00
Yeah I couldn’t figure out if they were just intended as illustrations and gave up trying to read them after a while.

Which is unfortunate as it would have been really helpful to have actually legible architecture diagrams, given the prose was so difficult for me to untangle due to the manic “fun” irreverent style (and it’s fine to write with a distinctive voice to make it more interesting, but still … confusing).

Plus the dozens of new unique names and connections introduced every few paragraphs to try to keep in my head…

I first asked Gemini 3 Pro to condense it to a boring technical overview and it produced a single page outline and Mermaid diagrams that were nearly as unintelligible as the original post so even AI has issues digesting it apparently…
by pydry | 2026-01-23 17:37:08+00:00
>I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't.

Remember the days when people experimented with and talked about things that werent LLMs?

I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.

Now it's all LLMs all the time and it's so goddamn tedious.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-23 17:37:14+00:00
The polyend pedal being discussed is $299, plus whatever tokens you end up using. So $180 is a steal relative to that.

Also, those were just the three first ones from memory + a quick google, there are probably other options - but i doubt you’ll find anything under $150. Pedals are not cheap, except when mass produced - and a programmable dsp pedal is by definition niche.

Another option, for people willing to hack a bit, is that the FV1 dsp chip is used in a ton of pedals, and is pretty hackable if you wanted to load your own code: you could find a cheap pedal that uses that chip and hack it.
by lovich | 2026-01-23 17:37:20+00:00
> It's just a giant experiment and the author explicitly tells you not to use it.

No, he threw up a hyperbolic warning and then dove deep into how this is the future of all coding in the rest of his talks/writing.

It’s as good a warning as someone saying “I’m not {X} but {something blatantly showing I am X}”
by k310 | 2026-01-23 17:37:27+00:00
> his whole social world had shrunk down to one person. His wife.

I live alone, in the boonies. I don't even have a wife any more (divorce), and I email. I text. I get some responses, and the thread dries up. I always have coffee by myself, mainly because I live 50 miles from a city big enough to have a Wallgreens.

Presence is everything. People won't drive the 50 miles, and I offer coffee, homemade baked ziti, free entry to Yosemite, and Armagnac after dinner.

(rant deleted)

> They reach out first.

They nag.

When I am president, I will ban couches, so people can get out, enjoy nature and meet real people. Might as well phone people in The Matrix. With my luck Neo would hang up.
by divbzero | 2026-01-23 17:37:48+00:00
My instinct is that effective AI agent orchestration will resemble human agile software development more than Steve Yegge’s formulation:

> It will be like kubernetes, but for agents,” I said.

> “It will have to have multiple levels of agents supervising other agents,” I said.

> “It will have a Merge Queue,” I said.

> “It will orchestrate workflows,” I said.

> “It will have plugins and quality gates,” I said.

More “agile for agents” than “Kubernetes for agents”.
by xorcist | 2026-01-23 17:37:51+00:00
The question does not make sense because it does not describe what happened. It was the conservatives who took the decision to phase out nuclear power in Germany.

It is unlikely that the greens had much control over that, even if someone would have claimed it their victory at the time. That the greens would wield secret power over their political opponents would require a special kind of conspiracy.

It was done for economic reasons, like so many other political decisions are. The connections to Russian oil and gas companies on both sides of politics probably helped, but it would have happened anyway. Of course it was spun as a great thing for the environment, which it wasn't, but spin doesn't have to make sense.

Ex-politicians riding the Russian oligarch gravy train should be chastised, and rightfully so. That does not require any anti-green sentiment or conspiracies, just common sense.
Show HN: Will this discover hidden YouTube video gems (or gems in the making)?
by johnboygiz | 2026-01-23 17:37:57+00:00
In going against the trend of everything viral, I decided to make a little app to help discover some youtube video gems that show early promise by way of their "views to Likes" ratio. And combined with some keywords this throws up some interesting videos that haven't (yet) gainned any traction, but show early signs of doing so.My thinking is that such videos/channels validates interest and confirms high quality content thats relevant and therefore desirable.Of course this would logically extend to getting an algorithim boost from YT and therefore further exposure/likes etc ? I will caveat all of that with I have no idea how YT algo works though:) Anyways, appreciate any feedback on this and whether it could be useful to anyone who could make an angle from this.
by alecbz | 2026-01-23 17:38:27+00:00
Even ignoring determinism, with traditional source code you have a durable, human-readable blueprint of what the software is meant to do that other humans can understand and tweak. There's no analogy in the case of "don't read the code" LLM usage. No artifacts exist that humans can read or verify to understand what the software is supposed to be doing.
by incanus77 | 2026-01-23 17:38:59+00:00
Same!

My earliest memory of anything computer programming is from the early 80s, when a snow day had the two neighbor kids, whose parents were teachers in another district, over to our house with their TI-99/4a. The oldest showed me the entry and running of the sample program Mr. Bojangles. I was enthralled.

A few years later I had one of my own, though at that point it was very long in the tooth. But I still learned its limits, playing (yes) Hunt the Wumpus, Tombstone City, and others, programming, and doing things like composing the Jeopardy! theme song in BASIC.

I have one of these again, with the stuff I had as a kid, and more (like the voice synth) and it's so limited even for the era, but still iconic.
by imiric | 2026-01-23 17:39:21+00:00
> Antitrust pressure has slowed consolidation, opened app distribution, killed the anti-competitive iMessage and AirDrop moats, and made big tech cautious about horizontal expansion.

Huh? In what reality is this remotely true? It certainly isn't in the one I live in.

The Big 6 control all media in the US, and mergers happen all the time (WBD->Netflix->Paramount?). Google owns web search and web browsing; Amazon owns e-commerce; Alphabet and Meta own adtech; Amazon, Microsoft, and Google own cloud computing; etc. All of these companies make frequent acquisitions and expansions. "Antitrust pressure" is just the cost of doing business.

What I think the author is referring to are the minor concessions Apple has made in some territories, mainly the EU. And even there, they're using every dirty trick at their disposal to do the absolute bare minimum.

Anti-competitive moats are still alive and well, and growing larger. It's curious that the author is positive about "AI", when that is the ultimate moat builder right now. Nobody can basically touch the largest players, since they have the most resources and access to mind-bogglingly large datacenters.

What a silly article. I don't understand how anyone can consider the current state of the tech industry "fun". I've been following it for nearly 30 years now, and it has gradually been devolving into a place that's anything but fun. Especially in these last ~5 years. I wish I could be optimistic about the future, but it should be obvious to anyone by now that technology, mostly but not entirely by misuse, is the cause of most of our problems.
by Terretta | 2026-01-23 17:39:24+00:00
> the volume of AI scrapers is making hosting untenable

Aside from that potential, it's also not true.

A Pentium Pro or PIII SSE with circa 1998-99 Apache happily delivers a billion hits a month w/o breaking a sweat unless you think generating pages for every visit is better than generating pages when they change.
by kaydub | 2026-01-23 17:39:30+00:00
It CAN be cheap.

I built a clinical pharmacist "pocket calculator" kinda app for a specific function. It was like $.60 in claude credits I think. Built with flutter + dart. It's a simple tool suite and I've only built out one of the tools so far.

Now to be fair, that $.60 session was just the coding. I did some brainstorming in chatgpt and generated good markdown files (claude.md, gemini.md, agents.md) before I started.
by Luke7492 | 2026-01-23 17:40:06+00:00
This has also always irked me when thinking about switching to web development full time, knowing how much to charge. I've never been able to get a clear answer on how much is enough or too little for projects. OP suggested $1k for a small business site and honestly this seems pretty fair to me, although I think I just interpreted their other comment to have meant $1k annually... I think I'd rather have an initial project fee and then a monthly for any maintenance or changes, but then how much should that be?
by throwway120385 | 2026-01-23 17:40:31+00:00
It sounds like a medical device, in which case marketing it may require FDA approval or notification. Whereas vibe-coding a one-off tool for yourself might still require validation but you're the one taking the risk and accepting liability for it.

I think the thing you're missing is that the tool doesn't need to be marketed because someone else could ask their LLM to make them a similar tool but fitting their use case.
by Night_Thastus | 2026-01-23 17:40:43+00:00
Yeah, I've always been surprised at how negative HN can get about Proton. They're not perfect, but man at least they're trying to fight the privacy fight.

I've always had a very good experience with them. It's cheap, fast and their spam filter works well. Maybe 1x-2x a year I get an email from them about some promotion but that's it.
by shikhar | 2026-01-23 17:40:55+00:00
> Personally I'd add an application level hash to protect the integrity of the records but that's just me.

The durability is for being able to replay the stream, a hash will not let you reconstruct the original message(s).

If you just need ephemeral comms, making it persistent is indeed overkill. But reliability challenges often come up with seemingly ephemeral comms too – think streaming responses from an LLM. The last mile can be pretty flaky e.g. iOS will cancel connections when users background an app. Using a durable stream for persisting the tokens means a client can ask to resume from where it left off / from the beginning of the stream, and the data would be available without having to re-inference.
by mystraline | 2026-01-23 17:40:56+00:00
Admittedly, on my infrastructure, Ive been de-dockerizing. Theres too many footguns and little gotchas, and they all add up.

For example, sharing a graphics card, say a Intel A380 and Jellyfin, over docker is a TERRIBLE experience.

But the same, with a full VM, and the gfx card shared to it is easy peasy.

Now, for testing applications, docker is great. But when I decide to run a service, I'll de-dockerize OR single VM with docker inside, with cronjobs to once a week update.

And logging/monitoring is also a hell of a lot easier per machine, rather than 8 services through docker.

I'm sure if I need a full dynamic service fabric, sure go with Docker or K8s. But this is for personal and friend usage.
by casets | 2026-01-23 17:40:57+00:00
> Back then, the storage is was much more 'real': it was slow, made noises, degraded noticeably because of stray magnetic fields etc, complicated mechanical parts. By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.

And it also could involve manual manipulation of things holding the data.

I may not have ever worked with lots of switches or cards or big reel-to-reels, but for our family’s first computer we had a Radio Shack cassette player that I could hook to it to load software. It was an ordeal to put in a tape, rewind if necessary and coordinate pressing play on the cassette tape player with the load command I had to enter in to load a program. Those were the days!

I could also record and load my own programs from the tapes. Press the record and play buttons at the same time and hit enter on that keyboard!

Granted our first computer also had cartridges, but I only had a few for it.

It was like Christmas (or literally was Christmas) whenever we got new software from anywhere, whether it was from Radio Shack or a bookstore that had a few or more tapes available.

That’s why I started to program. It was fun, and it was the only way to get new software whenever I wanted it. Early on it was entering programs from the manual, but I learned quickly to write my own.

When I later got a 5 1/4” floppy drive, it was so awesome, especially once I got an Apple and could trade/copy disks from others, stores, a local college, and the library.

Even once we got a modem, you still had put the data somewhere, so it went on floppies.

Everything was physical and novel then. It was so awesome.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-23 17:41:25+00:00
Not really, it parallels the movements of today almost too perfectly:

The Luddites (1811–1816) were not merely destroying machines to stop technological progress; they were a broader, community-backed protest movement fighting for economic survival, fair wages, and against the erosion of their traditional, skilled way of life. While they were textile artisans at the core, the movement was fueled by widespread distress during the Napoleonic Wars and received support from local communities and even some sympathetic small-business owners.
by collinmcnulty | 2026-01-23 17:41:44+00:00
This deeply misunderstands the Court. The legitimacy of the Supreme Court rests not simply on the justices being placed on the Court via the letter of the law, but also on the Court being an impartial arbiter of what the Constitution says. With verdicts like Trump vs. USA, the Court (especially certain justices) has pretty well jettisoned even trying to convincingly appear to like a judicial body and instead is behaving as a purely political actor. The Court has never been immune from politics, but its legitimacy rests in restraining itself by what the Constitution says, even when the justices don't like it.
by stockresearcher | 2026-01-23 17:42:00+00:00
> The US might have had a president who was knowledgeable about technology and dedicated to solving climate change.

might have had? Ha, you should read up a bit on Jimmy Carter.

> A generation from now this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.

That was him when he put solar panels on the roof of the White House, which Ronnie Ray-Gun removed and sent to a museum.