MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nephihaha | 2026-01-18 09:13:05+00:00
There are some very talented people on this list and some that are much less so. The sad thing is that Oxford and Cambridge have a disproportionate influence on British society and are used to form future elites, not just in comedy but elsewhere.

I've seen shows at the Edinburgh Fringe where such types think they are funny/talented by virtue of the university they went to. Footlights members may have produced Python and "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", but it also gave us "Out of the Trees" (available on YouTube) and "Ayoade on Ayoade".
by dgxyz | 2026-01-18 09:15:52+00:00
I rather liked the T-series (had quite a few!). But Lenovo are really running out of good will as far as I am concerned. They're riding the brand to destruction. Had some serious problems recently including one brick and one out of warranty battery turning up completely dead. The latter was an absolute nightmare to sort out resulting in a chargeback in the end.

I've taken to just buying multiple 2-3 year old "tested" units again (plenty of NOS ones out there) and keeping them alive via ebay which is what I was doing around the X201 era. Same with the desktops - mine is a 2019 M720T ThinkCentre that cost me $150 equiv a couple of months back (before the RAM pricing went mental)

I had a brief affair with Apple, culminating in a fairly nice M4 MacBook Pro, but quite frankly it scares me carrying that around and I really do not like Tahoe (Sequoia was fine). Back to Debian stable on the T14 gen 3 it is...
by oldnewthing | 2026-01-18 09:16:40+00:00
We were working on the data powering the Xbox console frontend for searches. For example, the metadata that powers a search like "romantic movie". The data was stored in Azure tables. We were all thinking about backup strategies for the data, serialization and deserialization etc. My suggestion was to simply create timestamped copies of the table. That is, if the table was X, the backup would be X_2026-01-18-14-25-00. This required no serialization and deserialization, could run entirely in memory and could shard the processing and was brutally fast. Also, by distributing the copies across multiple regions we could be more reliable. A simple and dumb solution vs a complex one :)
by gethly | 2026-01-18 09:16:48+00:00
SoA is nothing new. Not sure why it needs to be even discussed...

Anyway, here's few videos of interest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwkuAqObplU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IroPQ150F6c

Odin also supports SoA natively https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#soa-data-types
by lnfromx | 2026-01-18 09:17:50+00:00
Oh yes I see that. I got my first ThinkPad last year and the only one that wasn't loaded with "AI" nonsense was a P1. Despite the enormous size and weight it's a similar experience than old ones gave me when I tried them. I guess thats the option for me as long as possible. At some point we have to switch to something newer anyway...
by Terretta | 2026-01-18 09:18:04+00:00
I almost noted on that as I've harped on sub-200ms for web responsiveness since the 90s.

However, reacting to something you see is a diff thing than sensing intra key-to-char lag in flow.

In CS, responding to what's on screen is diff from button press to seeing game action. High polling rate controls are going after that.
by indolering | 2026-01-18 09:18:08+00:00
It looks like it was done to not delay the 4.0 release. Since they follow semvar, that means it won't get the axe until 5.0 [1]. Pretty wild considering that 3.0 was released 10 years ago.

But maybe they will scope this one better: they were talking about getting 4.0 released in 2020 back in 2019!

[1]: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/pull/5077
[2]: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/issues/4299
by Jahanzaib687 | 2026-01-18 09:18:25+00:00
Creator here. I wanted to add a bit more context on why I built UAIP.

Working in the AI automation space (at APEX Automation Group), we kept hitting a wall: how do you let an autonomous agent actually pay for a service or data from another agent without a human in the middle to sign off on a $50 credit card transaction or a manual API key exchange?

Current API infrastructure is built for B2B/SaaS, not Agent-to-Agent (A2A) economies.

A few technical choices I made:

Why Base/USDC? I needed settlement that costs less than the transaction value. Doing a $0.05 data request on Ethereum L1 is impossible. Base gives us the sub-penny finality needed for micro-tasks.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs: We use Schnorr/Curve25519 so agents can prove they have the authority to spend from a treasury without exposing the underlying private keys to the inference engine (LLM), which is a huge security risk.

SQLite WAL Mode: Used for the backend to handle high-concurrency local state management before syncing to the chain.

I'm curious to hear from others working on AI orchestration—how are you handling cross-provider agent trust and payments right now? Is everyone just hardcoding API keys, or is there a move toward decentralized identity?
by efreak | 2026-01-18 09:18:57+00:00
I've seen it mentioned somewhere, probably here on HN, that the original thin scrollbar was implemented in Gnome, and that it only applied until you moved your cursor to it. If true, this sounds like a great innovation. Unfortunately, nobody bothers to expand the scrollbar when you get near it. And of course, scrollbars also didn't start to disappear until long after the square-ish monitors that made them so annoying were mostly replaced by widescreen monitors that didn't have that issue.

Anecdotally, I do recall using an extremely obnoxious viewer application (PDFs or ebooks or some such) on the Windows 8 store that reversed scroll entirely. The scrollbars were still there (though I can't remember if they had handles), but scrolling the mouse wheel down moved the document up.

The best UI is no UI--the program anticipates what you need and does it when you need it. Unfortunately, this is impossible in practice for anything other than the simplest systems (eg. pause music playback when the phone rings).
by andersa | 2026-01-18 09:19:29+00:00
I had a similar problem when I was making a tool processing a lot of data in the browser. I'd naively made a large array of identical objects each holding a bunch of fields with numbers.

Turns out, this works completely fine in Firefox. However, in Chrome, it produces millions of individual HeapNumber allocations (why is that a thing??) in addition to the objects and uses GBs of RAM, and is slow to access, making the whole thing unusable.

Replacing it with a SoA structure using TypedArray made it fast in both browsers and fixed the memory overhead in Chrome.

As someone more familiar with systems programming than web, the concept of creating individual heap allocations for a single double baffles me beyond belief. What were they thinking?
by dgxyz | 2026-01-18 09:20:53+00:00
I went from a T490 to a T14 gen 3 (Intel). Was a nice upgrade. The GPU sucks, which I don't need or care about, but the rest is fine. I got a NOS one for a reasonable amount of money.

The X1 looks nice but colleagues had thermal issues with theirs and the CPU is a bit limp so I skipped that particular problem.
Show HN: RLM-Toolkit – Secure LangChain
by Chgdz | 2026-01-18 09:21:02+00:00
alternative with infinite context
RLM-Toolkit v1.0.1 is a high-security LangChain replacement featuring:
- InfiniRetri: 100% Needle-in-Haystack accuracy @1M tokens
- H-MEM: Hierarchical memory for agent systems
- R-Zero: Reasoning chain verification
- Security Suite: 38 blocked modules, sandboxed REPL
Built for production AI agents where security matters.
pip install rlm-toolkit
GitHub: https://github.com/DmitrL-dev/AISecurity/tree/main/rlm-toolk...
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/rlm-toolkit/
by lolc | 2026-01-18 09:22:59+00:00
Yeah sure there are other languages where the cases allow flexible argument ordering. I should have written "another language" not "any other language" because I meant the languages I know. I can see how it'd work in Latin. Though poetry takes a lot of license with language, so by quoting from poetry, we're at the extreme end of what a language can do. From what little I remember in Latin there would be examples where one couldn't distinguish the cases.

The only variation in your English examples is with the prepositions. English is a language where you just do not get that kind of flexibility. Unless, again, you do poetry. Can't even put the inflected pronoun first even though it would be unambiguous:

Him Colonel Mustard killed.

Let's look at this contrived example:

The policeman bites the dog.

Notice how in English I can't reverse them easily. Have to get creative:

The dog the policeman bites.

Stilted and prone to get misunderstood isn't it? In German, this is possible:

Den Hund beisst der Polizist.

Though if you do that, people think you made a mistake and will misunderstand you. The cases are rather weak in German. No comparison to Turkish:

Köpeği ısırıyor polis.

They do it for emphasis as part of everyday speech. You can put the subject first or last or in the middle and there is no confusion. Though admittedly that example is stretching it :-)
by troupo | 2026-01-18 09:23:57+00:00
> I don't follow the logic that "it hallucinates so it's useless".

I... don't even know how to respond to that.

Also. I didn't say they were useless. Please re-read the claim I responded to.

> Are they also really bad at some aspects of dealing with both? Absolutely. Dangerously, humorously bad sometimes.

Indeed.

Now combine "Finding patterns in large datasets is one of the things LLMs are really good at." with "they hallucinate even on small datasets" and "Are they also really bad at some aspects of dealing with both? Absolutely. Dangerously, humorously bad sometimes"

Translation, in case logic somehow eludes you: if an LLM finds a pattern in a large dataset given that it often hallucinates, dangerously, humorously bad, what are the chances that the pattern it found isn't a hallucination (often subtle one)?

Especially given the undeniable verifiable fact that LLMs are shit at working with large datasets (unless they are explicitly trained on them, but then it still doesn't remove the problem of hallucinations)
by mejutoco | 2026-01-18 09:25:56+00:00
Indeed. To be fair things like didnt and prob are on purpose, and "sometimes" and "obvious and many" are more styling than a mistake. And LLM should be uppercase. We can go on. In any case, that is exactly my point. I could have run it through an LLM, but didnt.

Here what deepseek suggests as fixed:

Sometimes, while on an AI thread like this, I see posts with many obvious grammatical mistakes. Many will be "typos" (although some seem conceptual). Maybe some are dictated or transcribed by busy people. Some might be incorrect on purpose, for engagement. These are sometimes posted by pretty accomplished people.

And I always think: any of these users could have run a basic grammar check with an LLM or even a spellchecker, but didn’t. Maybe software will be the same after all.

P.S. Probably I jinxed my own post and made a mistake somewhere.
by hliyan | 2026-01-18 09:26:01+00:00
The worst part is, when computer screens were monochrome or had only 16 colors, (and perhaps 16 pixels a side) to work with, designers managed to create more distinct icons or pictograms. Perhaps they may not have looked as elegant as a set of items on a collector's display case, but they helped the end user quickly zero in on the part of the screen they were interested in.
by Klaster_1 | 2026-01-18 09:26:16+00:00
Maybe AI should be a public service provided by the state, like education is? This will at least partially solve the issue of AI-access inequality. Personally, I wouldn't mind if EU provided such a service for its residents and citizens. It can also be more aligned with core EU values than offerings from grifter megacorps. Of course this would also require the usual checks and balances, as any concentrated power does.
by hexaga | 2026-01-18 09:26:56+00:00
It's not the searching that's infeasible. Efficient algorithms for massive scale full text search are available.

The infeasibility is searching for the (unknown) set of translations that the LLM would put that data through. Even if you posit only basic symbolic LUT mappings in the weights (it's not), there's no good way to enumerate them anyway. The model might as well be a learned hash function that maintains semantic identity while utterly eradicating literal symbolic equivalence.
by jjav | 2026-01-18 09:27:54+00:00
Not sure how to express this, but this concept that the color scheme of an app|website is supposed to be a "feature", bothers me to no end.

Color schemes were always supposed to be infinitely configurable by the user, not something a third party can control and dicatate. There used to be no concept of dark or light "mode", every person configured their UI colors as they wished. Want green on pink mode? No problem, just configure it.

(But to answer the question, definitely "light mode" for me. A predominantly dark screen brings on a headache quickly.)
Show HN: iTerm2 MCP Server – Let Claude see and control your terminal panes
by sumeruchat | 2026-01-18 09:27:54+00:00
Hello,

I built an MCP server that connects Claude (Desktop or Claude Code) to iTerm2. It lets the AI read what's in your other terminal tabs and send commands to them.

What it does:
- List all open panes with their working directories and running processes
- Read the screen buffer from any pane
- Send commands or keystrokes (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+D, etc.) to any pane
- Split panes programmatically

Why I made this:
When using Claude Code for development, I often have servers, logs, or test runners in other terminal tabs. Previously, I had to copy-paste output to give Claude context. Now I can just say "What's the error in tab 3?" or "Run the tests in the pane next to you."

It uses iTerm2's Python API via WebSocket. For Claude Code:
claude mcp add --scope user iterm2 -- npx github:sumchattering/iterm2-mcp-server

GitHub: https://github.com/sumchattering/iterm2-mcp-server

Hope you find it useful!
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-18 09:28:52+00:00
Unexpectedly wasn't asked: How it compares to Redox, another message passing microkernel system written in Rust? Also, what for embedded devices means? What specific features has that other microkernel systems don't, or just means is limited in scope*?

*Contrast to Redox that is meant to be general purpose but also offers an embedded-oriented minimal version.
by kg | 2026-01-18 09:31:30+00:00
Yeah, this is a historical design difference between Firefox's Spidermonkey JS engine and Chrome's V8.

Spidermonkey uses (I'm simplifying here, there are cases where this isn't true) a trick where all values are 64-bits, and for anything that isn't a double-precision float they smuggle it inside of the bits of a NaN. This means that you can store a double, a float32, an int, or an object pointer all in a field of the same size. Great, but creates some problems and complications for asm.js/wasm because you can't rely on all the bits of a NaN surviving a trip through the JS engine.

V8 instead allocates doubles on the heap. I forget the exact historical reason why they do this. IIRC they also do some fancy stuff with integers - if your integer is 31 bits or less it counts as a "smi" in that engine, or small int, and gets special performance treatment. So letting your integers get too big is also a performance trap, not just having double-precision numbers.

EDIT: I found something just now that suggests Smis are now 32-bits instead of 31-bits in 64-bit builds of v8, so that's cool!
by metalman | 2026-01-18 09:32:27+00:00
there is a fuck of a lot of euro high precision and refined manufacturing equipment used in the US, this will hurt small/medium business, and underscores why Chinese social media call him "Comrade Trump", the best friend they have ever had in Washington, as the price point toggles over to Chinese alternatives, and it's China, they can pivot and scale, fast.
And for Canada all the shifting and flipping is disruptive, but we are able to attract the best of the best from international skilled trades, scientists, and other proffesions, AND get realy good trade deals, while bringing a strong awareness that well, fuck it, work is good, doing things is good, we have something here worth working for and the contrasts have never been so stark, and it's Canada , we are generaly used to a bit of adversity , and it gives you an appetite.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-18 09:33:14+00:00
> If you can't fence the product then there's no motivation to steal it in the first place.

Couple of big problems with this thought:

* You have to know you can't fence it. Do you think bike thieves are following exactly which e-bike models have DRM, whether it has been broken etc? I doubt it.

* It assumes that the DRM is so amazing that nobody figures out how to defeat it.

So it might be true, but it also might not.
by sparklysoup | 2026-01-18 09:34:13+00:00
> the journalists found that it's a 57-year old lady who's never been known in the scene, who was married to a French banker whose parents survived the holocaust, but in the last decade fell into the rabbit hole of white-victimization-theory.

Just to clarify, she fell into the rabbit hole, not him. He divorced her. Your comment can easily be read both ways.
by eimrine | 2026-01-18 09:36:32+00:00
There are a lot of examples of enshittification. Putting advare was never enshittification, no matter how intrusive they are. They are never unbearable. There are a lot of thing tangential to ads which is enshittification, for example dark patterns.

But if the alternative of ads is communism it is not enshittification.
by falloutx | 2026-01-18 09:37:16+00:00
Its very hard for any of LLM fans to share anything substantial, Its always just demos and prototypes which even they have no idea how it works. If you work for any big company, you know all of LLM fans who are just trying desperately to show their managers and leaders that they can use LLMs. Even publicly famous programmers who run 10 agents at the same time, when you use their products you see they have become buggy and they have been shipping more slop than their customers require.
by plutodev | 2026-01-18 09:38:28+00:00
This framing makes sense. What we call “AI thinking” is really large-scale, non-sentient computation—matrix ops and inference, not cognition. Once you see that, progress is less about “intelligence” and more about access to compute. I’ve run training and batch inference on decentralized GPU aggregators (io.net, Akash) precisely because they treat models as workloads, not minds. You trade polished orchestration and SLAs for cheaper, permissionless access to H100s/A100s, which works well for fault-tolerant jobs. Full disclosure: I’m part of io.net’s astronaut program.
by mcintyre1994 | 2026-01-18 09:39:59+00:00
The features it asked for in this case were better tools, I thought they were really sensible. It said it wanted a —dry-run (like the CLIs the rct one was modelled on), it wanted to be able to segment guest feedback, and it wanted better feedback from its path tools. Those might not be actually possible in rct, but in a different context they’re pretty smart requests and not just verbose edge cases.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-18 09:40:20+00:00
The philosopher N. Bostroem has this scenario in which an AI would find out it is a good idea to invest all ressources into the production of paperclips - and in the end nothing is left than paperclips

We have to exchange the paperclips with .. datacenters :-D

Currentl, it sounds like every economy is aligning vast ressources onto production of datacenters - so in the end, datacenters will allocate all ressources
by hdgvhicv | 2026-01-18 09:40:36+00:00
In the 90s we read the paper and dumbed with our magnetic tickets. In the 00s we listened to MP3s while playing snake on an oyster. In the 10s we played Andy birds and listened to iTunes with a credit card at the turnstile. In the 20s we doom scroll and listen to Spotify while tapping out with our phone.

I don’t see the issue.
by notrealyme123 | 2026-01-18 09:40:38+00:00
A lot of podcasts server ads via their provider (e.g. megaphone). They do tracking and analytics.

Funny thing is that lots of the provider are now owned by Spotify. So right now you basically have the choice: a) listen to it on Spotify with good embedded ads b) listen to it on your podcast feed with bad embedded ads.

Anyway you listen to it on Spotify (Often).
by omnifischer | 2026-01-18 09:41:13+00:00
From the article:

> What the devs care about is the ability to understand the product experience from the perspective of each customer. In practice, this can mean any combination or permutation of agent, user, mobile device type, laptop, desktop, point of sale device, and so on

Really? Any permutation?

Most (arse hole) devs

- Import world - as it works on their latest 1TB machine or macOS studio

- always on the latest iPhone or pixel

- Add 100 tracking that works on their own machine

- POS device? They should ask some of devs to go and work on their canteens that have POS
by pxtail | 2026-01-18 09:41:32+00:00
I searched for good programming or more broad IT-related podcasts but unfortunately haven't found ones that aren't either straight up ad or thinly veiled ad. I understand that invited guests or podcast producers want to have compensation but end result is of putting and not attractive to me. I'll place software engineering radio as an example - I listened to some episodes but it gave me impression of slop even before word slop was established.
On the other hand I know excellent quality podcasts founded by voluntary Patreon members so I hope issue is I simply haven't found IT ones from that spectrum yet.
by mcintyre1994 | 2026-01-18 09:41:36+00:00
> Your outlook above is too self critical. This is the first time an AI has beaten this park much less played a full game of RollerCoaster Tycoon through a TUI. There are important learnings for B2B SaaS. This isn't LinkedIn (it is, in fact, LinkedIn). But seriously. What can we learn here.

From the transcript: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://gist.githubuserconten... :)
by user34283 | 2026-01-18 09:41:55+00:00
My argument would be that while some complexity remains, it might not require a large team of developers.

What previously needed five devs, might be doable by just two or three.

In the article, he says there are no shortcuts to this part of the job. That does not seem likely to be true. The research and thinking through the solution goes much faster using AI, compared to before where I had to look up everything.

In some cases, agentic AI tools are already able to ask the questions about architecture and edge cases, and you only need to select which option you want the agent to implement.

There are shortcuts.

Then the question becomes how large the productivity boost will be and whether the idea that demand will just scale with productivity is realistic.
by bunnie | 2026-01-18 09:42:28+00:00
Can't comment on Redox as I'm not familiar with it (maybe xobs is), but "for embedded devices" means design choices are made to accommodate smaller memory footprints - hundred k's of RAM, ROM; not the gigabytes expected in desktop-class OSes. So, this is in the same class as e.g. zephyr, threadx, chibi-os, Tock, etc. and has no explicit aspirations to be able to run e.g. server workloads. An example of such a trade-off is sticking with a 32-bit pointer size from the get-go. No desktop or server-class OS could make that trade-off, but the memory savings from smaller pointer and object sizes is meaningful on a memory-constrained device.
by lioeters | 2026-01-18 09:43:01+00:00
This brought me flashbacks of jQuery spaghetti monsters from years ago, some were Backbone related. In retrospect, over-engineered React code can be worse than decently organized jQuery code, but some jQuery mess was worse than any React code. So I guess I'm saying, React did raise the bar and standard of quality - but it can get to be too much, sometimes a judicious use of old familiar tool gets the job done.