MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2026-01-26 22:56:05+00:00
I mean I interviewed the engineer for 47 minutes and asked him about this and many other things directly. I think I've done enough homework on this one.

I take back the implication I inadvertently made here that it compiled cleanly the whole time - I know that's not the case, we discussed that in our interview: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/23/fastrender/#intermitte...

I'm frustrated at how many people are carrying around a mental model that the project "didn't even compile" implying the code had never successfully compiled, which clearly isn't true.
by raggi | 2026-01-26 22:56:07+00:00
> I'd just cloned a copy of Chromium myself, and for all that time and money, independent developers who cloned the repo reported that the codebase is very far from a functional browser. Recent commits do not compile cleanly, GitHub Actions runs on main are failing, and reviewers could not find a single recent commit that was built without errors.

Significant typo I assume?
by kxbnb | 2026-01-26 22:56:16+00:00
The "independence" point resonates. We've seen this pattern in policy enforcement too - the system that generates behavior shouldn't be the same one that validates it.

What I'm curious about is how the feedback loop handles ambiguity. When the review agent flags something and the coding agent "fixes" it, there's a risk of the fix being technically compliant but semantically wrong. The coding agent optimizes for passing review, not necessarily for correctness.

Have you seen this create adversarial dynamics, where coding agents learn to game the review criteria rather than actually improving code quality?
by aucisson_masque | 2026-01-26 22:56:22+00:00
It ain’t that confusing. Click on the icon of the app you want to launch and that’s it.

The app is similar to what’s going in on windows.

Where that becomes frustrating is when you have a computer that isn’t well supported by Linux, things don’t work, battery is bad, you have to look up for ways to fix them and so on.

But if the « driver » support was as good as on windows, people could switch in 2 seconds.

My university computers ran Ubuntu, we were not computer nerd but civil engineering yet everyone adapted very quick.
by AgentMatt | 2026-01-26 22:56:42+00:00
> It's a terrible long term lubricant (because it's designed to evaporate, it actually concentrates gunk and grime).

I recently read that WD40 isn't actually a lubricant but a lubricant remover. So as you write you'd use it to remove gunk but then follow it up with an actual lubricant.

On the last two bottles of WD40 I came across (im Germany) I checked the back and it indeed said that it's not a lubricant but a lubricant remover.

(Disclaimer: can't read the article past the intro where it does call it a lubricant...)
by bokohut | 2026-01-26 22:57:03+00:00
My software logic mind asks: I question why if Copilot is so great then why cannot Microsoft turn themselves around by dogfooding their own solution that they have forced on all of their users which then proves to the world that Copilot is great?

I am led to believe from marketing that A.I. has all the answers and with Microsoft having the greatest A.I. don't they have all the answers?

I apologize in advance for my dumb.
by Telaneo | 2026-01-26 22:57:15+00:00
HDD performance on Windows just died after some Windows 10 update. Sure, it took two minutes to boot 7 of an HDD, but once it was going, Explorer ran fine, and Firefox would run fine after that (probably cached after boot).

Same goes for day one Windows 10 (they probably didn't touch the relevant parts). I remember having to deal with a Windows 10 machine on an HDD, and it was mostly fine after it booted, but even clean installs on more recent version are just horrible. There's probably been some optimisation done which works fine on SSDs but just thrash HDDs, and HDDs as boot drives just aren't a thing anymore (within margin of error), so it didn't matter.

The fact that they've managed to throw so much bloat on top that even SSDs start struggling though, that really is something.
by tshaddox | 2026-01-26 22:57:37+00:00
It sounds like the external dimensions are going to be exactly the same or nearly so. I'm hoping the battery compartment is also identical so that third-party mounting and extended battery packs continue to work.

I recently picked up a few of these extended battery packs and it would be nice to eventually upgrade the AirTag if the extended range turns out to be meaningful. They're pretty neat, you remove the battery cover completely and only insert the half of the AirTag with the electronics and radio.

https://www.elevationlab.com/products/timecapsule
by bigyabai | 2026-01-26 22:57:43+00:00
It's believable. AMD's x86 APUs were basically neck-and-neck with the M1 in performance, and when you normalize for production processes AMD was actually more efficient under load: https://www.notebookcheck.net/M1-vs-R7-4800U_12937_11681.247...

x86 is the minority of the issue compared to securing cutting-edge nodes and optimizing for big.LITTLE. And once you factor in all of the dark ops on Apple Silicon (NPU, anyone?), they've basically butt up against the same wall of wasting transistors on specialized hardware that is obsolete within 3 years of release. Minus the ability to cleanly integrate it with compiler tech for efficiency gains, a-la SSE/AVX.
by rowanG077 | 2026-01-26 22:57:46+00:00
TBH my asahi M2 experience has been the best supported linux laptop I have ever had. It's not and day compared to the XPS 13 I had before which was supposedly a well supported laptop for linux, you could even buy it with ubuntu.

The only real drawback is no thunderbolt, and till recently no DP, and no x86 support. But I don't use any x86 only apps enough for it to matter. No thunderbolt sucks though.
by jtwaleson | 2026-01-26 22:57:50+00:00
Ok funny anecdote: I once did a special assignment for the CEO of Mendix to build a convertor for MS Access apps to Mendix. So, yes, I can confirm that this is roughly true ;)

I wrote a short post about it on my blog: https://blog.waleson.com/2022/10/access2mendix.html
by thesz | 2026-01-26 22:57:56+00:00
I was on the other side, I thought types are indispensable. And I still do.

My own experience suggest that if you need to develop heavily multithreaded application, you should use Haskell and you need some MVars if you are working alone and you need software transactional memory (STM) if you are working as part of a team, two and more people.

STM makes stitching different parts of the parallel program together as easy as just writing sequential program - sequential coordination is delegated to STM. But, STM needs control of side effects, one should not write a file inside STM transaction, only before transaction is started or after transaction is finished.

Because of this, C#, F#, C++, C, Rust, Java and most of programming languages do not have a proper STM implementation.

For controlling (and combining) (side) effects one needs higher order types and partially instantiated types. These were already available in Haskell (ghc 6.4, 2005) at the time Rust was conceived (2009), for four years.

Did Rust do anything to have these? No. The authors were a little bit too concerned to reimplement what Henry Baker did at the beginning of 1990-s, if not before that.

Do Rust authors have plans to implement these? No, they have other things to do urgently to serve community better. As if making complex coordination of heavily parallel programs is not a priority at all.

This is where I get my "rhyme" from.
by wvenable | 2026-01-26 22:58:40+00:00
Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their approach to updating the settings up but I think they did that exactly right. There was no way that were going to be able to re-implement every setting available in one go and have it be good. So they took the iterative approach and moved over the most important settings first and each version of Windows 10/11 more and more options are available in settings.

I find myself having to use the old control panel dialogs less and less -- but I'm also happy that they are still there.
by spicyjpeg | 2026-01-26 22:58:42+00:00
Bayer dithering was also employed heavily on the original PlayStation. The PS1's GPU was capable of Gouraud shading with 24-bit color precision, but the limited capacity (1 MB) and bandwidth of VRAM made it preferable to use 16-bit framebuffers and textures. In an attempt to make the resulting color bands less noticeable, Sony thus added the ability to dither pixels written to the framebuffer on-the-fly using a 4x4 Bayer matrix hardcoded in the GPU [1]. On a period-accurate CRT TV using a cheap composite video cable, the picture would get blurred enough to hide away the dithering artifacts; obviously an emulator or a modern LCD TV will quickly reveal them, resulting in a distinct grainy look that is often replicated in modern "PS1-style" indie games.

Interestingly enough, despite the GPU being completely incapable of "true" 24-bit rendering, Sony decided to ship the PS1 with a 24-bit video DAC and the ability to display 24-bit framebuffers regardless. This ended up being used mainly for title screens and video playback, as the PS1's hardware MJPEG decoder retained support for 24-bit output.

[1]: https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/graphicsprocessingunitgpu/#24...
by nadis | 2026-01-26 22:58:43+00:00
> "For us, abandoning low-code to reclaim ownership of our internal tooling was a simple build vs buy decision with meaningful cost savings and velocity gains. It also feels like a massive upgrade in developer experience and end-user quality of life. It’s been about 6 months since we made this switch, and so far we haven’t looked back."

Fascinating but not surprising given some of the AI-for-software development changes of late.
by hn_acker | 2026-01-26 22:59:02+00:00
This post cannot be viewed on Bluesky without an account. Please check that Bluesky posts are visible to the general public before you post them, or link to a third-party viewer. For example, the post is visible with Skyview [1].

[1] https://skyview.social/?url=https://bsky.app/profile/merz.bs...
by cdrnsf | 2026-01-26 22:59:19+00:00
The agencies in question are unlikely to face any accountability. The agencies that would typically investigate something like this are no longer independent and, instead, are headed by feckless Trump loyalists. It doesn't matter whether it's legitimate, it matters whether it serves their ends. If they cared about process or the law they wouldn't have been labeling the victim a domestic terrorist within minutes of ICE agents murdering him.
by setopt | 2026-01-26 22:59:35+00:00
> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.

For me it is. I was already considering going back to Linux for a while, and MacOS Tahoe pushed me over the fence. Got a Thinkpad with Linux as a replacement for my MacBook some months ago and don’t regret it yet.
Show HN: JSON spreadsheets with vi bindings (proof of concept)
by awalGarg | 2026-01-26 22:59:54+00:00
Hi folks! I'd like to share a proof of concept for an idea I've thought about for a long time. Think of a new form of spreadsheets where the primary data structure is not a rigid grid but a free-form JSON-like structure (but with first class tables support of course). I'm linking here a demo which uses vi style hotkeys for interaction, although of course the idea is not limited to that mode of interaction.

The addresses end up being JSON paths. The layout is currently rigid because it's just a PoC but ideally you'd have much more control over it, kind of like a canvas.

Expressions can refer to other cells via their JSON based address, even relative to their current address. There is no expressions support in the PoC yet but a table in the example does show a dynamic column. Since you have arbitrarily nested arrays/hashes anyway, you can reserve tables to represent arrays of homogenous records, and some of the columns can be dynamically calculated (or have a default dynamic calculation) based on other columns. The expressions are just JavaScript functions, but they can be anything that works with JSON types.

This is very far from finished. I'm just been trying to share early these days and I think many of you'd find the idea itself interesting.

Why? I think spreadsheets are great but they are underutilized because of their rigidity. They are not suitable for version control, being authoritative data sources, powering APIs etc. I don't know if this is the right direction either. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts!

The code is 100% manually written by me (except for the CSS background which I copied from SO). If there is sufficient interest in collaboration, I'd be happy to put up the source on codeberg.
by stockresearcher | 2026-01-26 23:00:04+00:00
Not terribly surprising.

The base load is heavily nuclear and doesn’t adjust very quickly; there is a lot of installed wind and solar capacity. The past few days have been bitterly cold but also windy and sunny.

Today the wind was a pretty solid 15-20 mph with gusts into the 30s. The high temperature today was 9F (-12C). With no clouds whatsoever. Solar panels go crazy when it is cold and bright.
by legitster | 2026-01-26 23:00:30+00:00
I suspect though that a lot of the secret behind Chartreuse isn't just the recipe, but the actual sourcing of the ingredients.

Presumably the recipe relies on very unique and location-specific herbs to the alps. Part of the justification for limiting supply is concern for the environment and sustainability of their production. The order also had to cease production while they were evicted.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the key ingredients weren't wild foraged or at least very unique species.
by kibwen | 2026-01-26 23:01:04+00:00
> I can't say for 960 specifically, but for standard chess getting rid of castling usually results in the players just manually castling their kings.

The entire design of 960 is backwards when it comes to castling, because it was deliberately designed to facilitate castling. This is the whole reason there are "only" 960 positions, as opposed to 2880 positions if our only restriction is that bishops are on the opposite color (and that both sides are symmetric). By reifying castling as something that must exist rather than a gross and unfortunate hack to paper over the flaws of the standard chess position, the ruleset puts the cart before horse.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-26 23:01:08+00:00
It very much is.

Even the web suffers from problems of trust to some extent, with the PKI being a huge vulnerability and relying on the collective action of all browser vendors to act as a check on any CA trying to break the agreed guarantees. But in a world where you would have a hundred, or even 20, different popular browsers, with different geopolitical assignments, it would be far harder to punish a CA that decided to sign certificates improperly, e.g. to allow some government or criminal enterprise to MITM communication.

Establishing identity in a non-centralized manner, and without requiring a second, already secure, communication method than the one you're trying to authenticate, such as an in-person key exchange, is in fact impossible, not just hard. There are partial solutions, with different trade-offs, such as the PKI for the web, the TOFU with optional verification options used in Matrix or SSH, or the web-of-trust model of PGP.
by hobofan | 2026-01-26 23:01:47+00:00
If you are looking for a open source Chat WebUI with support for OIDC, maybe you are interested in the one we are building?[0]

We are leveraging oauth2-proxy for the login here, so it should support all OIDC-compliant IDPs, and there are some guides by oauth2-proxy on how to configure for all the bigger providers. We do have customers using it with e.g. Azure, Keycloak, Google Directory.

[0]: https://erato.chat
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-26 23:01:58+00:00
How are "programming" "coding" and "developing" different? Is a "tap" different from a "click"? How about "swipe" vs "drag"?

Sometimes we use different words in different contexts. Language usually doesn't make logical sense. In mobile environments you sideload to get the binary onto the device and use the OS to properly install it. This dates from a time where putting the binary on the device was the difficult part. Devices didn't have standard ports or fast/free wireless data. You had to do something special to transfer the data.

In a lot of cases, installation was also a separate special process involving the command line. It wasn't always just tapping the install button.
by dyauspitr | 2026-01-26 23:02:02+00:00
Video to a lot of people is way more engaging than text. Also video is much more information dense. You can’t teach people to do things over purely text but show them a video and a 1000 different indescribables become instantly apparent.

That being said I love a good book over its movie version anyway. Because text is cheap there is so much more detail you can include. There is no way text can compete with the information density of a video.
by jones1618 | 2026-01-26 23:02:06+00:00
I agree with you this would be valuable, mostly for persuading the general public.
The skepticism you're getting amounts to "biased people/government won't care no matter what" and "fancy tech makes the evidence look more doctored, not less." They're not wrong but there are some disputes this could settle. Some people have argued that the moment where an ICE agent appears to withdraw Pretti's gun might just be him retrieving his own fumbled gun. Maybe a synthesized view could clear that up.
Personally, I think it will come down to the moment where one goon said "He's got a gun" and another one took that as license to shoot him three times. The other 6 or so gunshots were a kneejerk pile-on to that cowardly act.
So much for the 2nd Amendment, right?
by troad | 2026-01-26 23:03:13+00:00
You can try to remap KDE keybindings but it won't affect Gnome applications, games, etc.

Personally, I found the most reliable thing to be a keyboard-level swap of Ctrl and the Cmd key. That way, whenever you're asked for Ctrl, which is all the time, you can always safely hit Cmd with no need for extra configuration. You can then remap various things in KDE Shortcuts to be more Mac like, like Cmd+Q, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+`, etc. (The only thing lacking is the Ctrl v. Cmd separation in a terminal, so I manually remapped all the Ctrl sequences in my terminal emulator to Win sequences, which matches my hardware Ctrl key. So, like on a Mac, Cmd+C works to copy, Ctrl+C is the escape code.)

This works for a Mac keyboard. For a Windows keyboard, you'd have to shuffle Alt -> Ctrl, Win -> Alt, and Ctrl -> Win. There are settings for this in xkb. (KDE surfaces these in its Keyboard settings panel.)

Keyboard layouts/shortcuts are a huge pain point with Linux. xkb is geriatric, and acts as such. Compose keys are flaky and inconsistent across applications. Virtually all Linux software is going to default to some idiosyncratic take on Windows shortcuts, often without much by way of customisability. (And those Windows shortcuts weren't very good to begin with.)
by titanomachy | 2026-01-26 23:03:29+00:00
Interesting framing, and definitely cutting close to some uncomfortable psychological questions. I don’t think I care much about being a high-performer for its own sake, but it definitely sucks to disappoint people. And I have the sense that there are people out there who experience a lot more joy and engagement with work, which is certainly something I want.

It’s possible that I just have the wrong personality to be a high-performer, and I should embrace being a somewhat overpaid flâneur. Or maybe I just haven’t found the right environment.

For now, I’ll keep following Derek Sivers’s advice [0] to relentlessly steer towards the things which give me that spark of excitement and motivation.

[0] https://sive.rs/compass
by eleventhborn | 2026-01-26 23:03:34+00:00
Coming from a Gsuite + Atlassian + AWS world to an all-inclusive Microsoft world was an experience. It should be in the bucket list for every developer to try once in their life.

WSL is a far better developer environment in Windows even for dotnet based development. I use it at work. It is fine.

Windows OS on the other hand is a mess. There are dedicated keyboard shortcut (win + c), keyboard buttons, buttons on desktop for copilot. Copilot is almost on every Microsoft software. I'm not getting the appeal of copilot at all.

Also, I have a personal gripe with a non-standard way of placing the Fn key - first of all, why keep it close to Ctrl, why? and on top of that, Lenovo & Microsoft and every other manufacturer have them in different positions on the keyboard.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-26 23:03:40+00:00
That was our theory in the office when we taste tested the various cokes. The favorite by far was kosher for Passover coke. At first we thought it was the sugar vs. HFCS, but bottled Mexican coke didn’t fare as well — blind most people thought Coke Zero (which is my favorite coke) was Mexican Coke.

My theory was that the carbonation was perfect and the product was fresher, as the bottler requires rabbinical supervision and they probably make it for a limited run.
by gtowey | 2026-01-26 23:03:50+00:00
My theory is that graffiti is tied to the feeling of lack of agency in one's life. Everyone wants to "make their mark on the world". Some of us get to do that with an interesting career, building a family, getting involved in the community. If you feel excluded from all that, like those things are beyond your reach, you might resort to things like graffiti. IMO it's something that says "I exist, and I can change things around me" for those who don't have a better way to do that.

Based on that we "fix" the problem by making sure that everyone has a chance to make a fulfilling life for themselves. Better & freer education; Healthcare; cost of living & wage support. Etc.
by anonnon | 2026-01-26 23:04:08+00:00
It doesn't; you're just dense or deliberately misconstruing my posts to grind your ideological axe. Europe should have checked Russia's aggression in 2014, when it annexed Crimea, not looked the other way and continued business as usual. Now Crimea is effectively gone for good, and Ukraine will be lucky if it gets back any significant quantity of Ukraine that Russia has stolen since 2022. Imagine how Ukrainians must feel, that Europe now is apparently willing to collectively go to war, but over an island in North America, and against the United States (a much more formidable power, militarily and economically than Russia), no less, but not for them.
by acdha | 2026-01-26 23:04:11+00:00
The technical angle which is most of interest to me are building systems which preserve evidence. For example, how do you build a cloud sync service which prevents someone other than the owner of the phone from deleting videos without the owner’s consent (or in ways which allow them to regain access after being released) while still allowing people to delete things they might not want a hostile government to see. There are no silver bullets here but some really interesting trade offs.
by guiltyf | 2026-01-26 23:04:58+00:00
> You didn't just write code. You built a living intelligence.

This tagline at the end of the website is one of those formulas that I can't help but link to language models.

I'm not saying it couldn't come from a human but since I started noticing it, I find it so cheesy and patronizing, it gets on my nerves.
by Telaneo | 2026-01-26 23:05:11+00:00
> Around 500 million PCs are holding off upgrading to Windows 11, says Dell.

> “We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines.

And that's ignoring the 500 million that can't upgrade due to TPM requirements or whatever.

https://www.theverge.com/news/831364/dell-windows-11-upgrade...