MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seec | 2026-01-15 08:33:22+00:00
And the problem with those comparisons is that they make it look like everything is swappable without any issue.

Places where we raise cows generally do not support other types of agriculture (especially milk cows in the mountains).

You may stop raising cows, but it doesn't mean you will be able to grow nuts or pulses in the same place. That causes big problems for food security and economic networks.

All the arguments around emissions or caloric efficiency are way too simplistic to accurately describe the problem.
by jltsiren | 2026-01-15 08:33:58+00:00
Concurrency is easy by default. The hard part is when you are trying to be clever.

You write concurrent code in Rust pretty much in the same way as you would write it in OpenMP, but with some extra syntax. Rust catches some mistakes automatically, but it also forces you to do some extra work. For example, you often have to wrap shared data in Arc when you convert single-threaded code to use multiple threads. And some common patterns are not easily available due to the limited ownership model. For example, you can't get mutable references to items in a shared container by thread id or loop iteration.
by kace91 | 2026-01-15 08:34:00+00:00
I got a handheld emulator console as a Christmas gift. Configuring shaders that emulate crt TVs, I realized I had no mental model of how those TVs worked at all.

I’m used to “pixels are three little lights combining rgb colors”, which doesn’t work here, so I went on a rabbit hole and let me tell you, analog TVs are extremely impressive tech.

Getting an electron beam to hit a glass, making the chemicals on it spark, covering it in a “reading motion” for hundreds of lines, and doing that 60 times a second! And the beam is oriented by just careful usage of magnets. It sounds super sci-fi for an already dead, 130 years old technology.

I also learned that my childhood was a lie. Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-15 08:34:25+00:00
Huh? Why do you think that applying the constitution would allow the USA to snatch Maduro? What part of the constitution allows for that?

The idea that the constitutional rights apply to everyone on the planet is a nice idea, but that's clearly not what is intended by the document - it's meant to apply to people in the USA. A lot of the language is specifically about the states and their relationship to the federal government, so I think you're mis-reading it if you think that it should apply outside of the USA.
by dwaite | 2026-01-15 08:34:37+00:00
> I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.

Liquid Glass is part of an ongoing strategy to get developers to target all the platforms equally - not to come out with a native iOS version, then poop out an electron app for the Mac and let it run in a zoomed window on iPad.

This is an initiative that started with MacOS 11:

1. Make the Mac feel closer to an iPad; strip away arbitrary differences like app icons.

2. Catalyst to make porting an iOS codebase easier

3. Swift UI to make native targeting of platforms easier with their differing UX/capabilities

4. Create iPad variants of MacOS UX features like mouse pointers, menus, and so on. Create API (typically under Swift UI) to support both variants with the same code

I don't think the designers had a goal with Liquid Glass to make everything feel more like AVP. Instead, I think thats what they had touched last, and they used that recent experience to revamp all the platforms.

But their goal is that everything works like an iPad. An iPhone is a mini iPad (which maybe in the future folds out to have a similar size and aspect ratio to the iPad Mini). AVP is the iPad you strap to your face. And a build targeting Mac now has icons and menus and controls which don't look out of place.

That could be a big differentiator, when for many companies iOS and Android are the _only_ platforms that currently get native experiences and integration, with everything else being web or electron based.
by cosinusalpha | 2026-01-15 08:35:32+00:00
Thanks!

I actually tried a raw HTML when I was exploring solutions. It worked for "one-off" tasks, but I ran into major issues with replayability on modern SPAs.

In React apps, the raw DOM structure and auto-generated IDs shift so frequently that a script generated from "Raw HTML" often breaks 10 minutes later. I found ARIA/semantics to be the only stable contract that persists across re-renders.

You mentioned the raw HTML approach is "expensive". Did you feed the full HTML into the context, or did you create a BS4 "tool" for the LLM to query the raw HTML dynamically?
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-15 08:35:48+00:00
> When writing single-threaded code takes 90% of effort of writing multi-threaded one

That "when" is doing some heavy lifting! More seriously: You raise a very interesting point. When I moved from C++ to Java (10+ years ago), I was initially so nervous to add threads to my Java code. Why? Because it was (then) difficult and dangerous to do it in C++. C++ debuggers were awful, so I didn't think I could debug problems with multi-threaded C++ code. (Of course, the C++ ecosystem has drastically improved in the last 10 years, so I am sure it is now much more pleasant (and safe) to write multi-threaded C++ code.) When I finally sat down to add threads to some Java code, I could not believe how easy it was, including debugging. As a result, going forward, I was much more likely to add threads to my Java... or even start with a multi-threaded design, even if there is only a modest performance improvement.
by crote | 2026-01-15 08:36:55+00:00
I'm a bit confused about how it actually works, and somehow they decided to not include a demonstration video.

If clicking on it does trigger a location permission prompt: what's the point? The "issues" with prompts getting denied can already be solved by web developers doing this themselves, rather than just blindly firing off a request on page load.

If clicking on it does not trigger a location permission prompt: have we forgotten about the Line Of Death [0]? Clicking random website-styled elements should never result in dangerous actions being taken - and leaking the user's physical location is definitely dangerous. Sure, they are trying to restrict the styling, but that's a fools' errant: somebody will just make a browser game where the button looks to refer to something ingame, but actually leak your real-world location.

Besides, who's actually asking for this? Location is perhaps useful for Google Maps-like websites to save you a few seconds of scrolling, but in practice it has mostly been spammy websites trying to get me to "subscribe to local news". Making geolocation easier is the last thing I want in my browser!

[0]: https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/
by Nora23 | 2026-01-15 08:37:04+00:00
This is really helpful, thanks! The offline aspect keeps coming up. PAVO currently generates content in real-time with Gemini, which obviously doesn't work without connectivity.

Thinking I should add a "pre-download" feature where users can generate audio guides and itineraries over WiFi before heading out. Would that solve the offline problem, or do people need the flexibility to explore spontaneously without planning ahead?
by hnews39 | 2026-01-15 08:37:16+00:00
This paper introduces a five-dimensional accessibility tensor for quantifying immigration service accessibility across developed nations. The framework measures: telephone contact, email correspondence, online appointment booking, walk-in access, and published processing timelines.

Applied to nine countries (USA, UK, Canada, Netherlands, Japan, China, Australia, France, Germany), the analysis reveals significant variance in administrative accessibility. Statistical analysis identifies one nation as a significant outlier (z = -2.24, p < 0.05) with zero accessibility across all dimensions.

Intra-jurisdictional analysis demonstrates that accessibility limitations reflect policy design rather than resource constraints, as parallel administrative pathways within the same jurisdiction achieve substantially higher scores.

Includes reproducible Python code and raw computational output for independent verification.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-15 08:37:19+00:00
swe-REbench does this. They gather real issues from github repos on a ~monthly basis, and test the models. On their leaderboard you can use a slider to select issues created after a model was released, and see the stats. It works for open models, a bit uncertain on closed models. Not perfect, but best we have for this idea.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-15 08:37:55+00:00
>> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.

> Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about.

Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?

> A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.

"likely", "might" - this is all speculation on your part too. There is no reason to believe that a lot of humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would, in fact, contribute more to society, nor that the contributions from those that do would, in fact, offset those that don't.

It's speculation on both sides of this particular argument I see no compelling evidence at all.
by pbmonster | 2026-01-15 08:38:42+00:00
> my bet is it's almost identical to the BEV version but with an engine where the big beautiful frunk is now

Would be interesting how small and how cheap you can design a ~50kW genset to be (any smaller and you don't gain that highly coveted towing range). I don't think it's an easy task, you still need to integrate the crash compliant fuel tank, the emissions compliant exhaust system, water cooling for the engine, ect.

It's a pretty long BOM you're adding to an already expensive BEV, so you don't really have thousands of dollars of budget to add to the production cost.
by coldtea | 2026-01-15 08:39:09+00:00
>I think stuff like this, is trying to recreate a world that doesn't exist anymore

And that's fine. We should build the world as we want it to be, not accept whatever shit our era gives us.

This includes changes to some things to how they were in the past (if they were better) and changes to other things to how we envision the future.
by Fazebooking | 2026-01-15 08:39:29+00:00
For me its getting clear that there is so much broad ways of continues improvement, and constant speed, that if this continues like this, even a basic LLM can do a lot of jobs.

Just today cursor released a blog were they run an agent for a week and it build a browser.

Claude Code with subagents and hooks are really good too.

And it takes time to just get it and roll it out to everyone, it takes time to do research, experiments, it takes time to install GPUs and make them etc.

We are currently only limited by things we can progress on.
by Krssst | 2026-01-15 08:39:51+00:00
> Once I started commuting, it happened a lot less as I built up immunity.

To give another anecdotal evidence: before COVID I used to catch 3 to 4 colds per year. Winter was basically a nightmare season where I was always living in fear of when I would get sick next. After COVID I started wearing an N95 in populated places. As a result, I went to 0 cold per years instead of getting sick even more often because of the additional virus in town. Now I feel I can live normally in winter without always worrying of getting sick and I always feel healthy.

I tried switching to a regular surgical mask (and in general being less careful) to try to find a good middle ground between cost, appearance and protection; while I did not catch colds I did get COVID at the same time as unmasked people around me, so I'm back to N95s (this was likely following something like hours and hours of continuous exposure so makes sense a leaky surgical mask did not prevent it). (my bout of covid was quite mild fortunately; but first time being mild does not mean future ones will be or won't lead to long-term symptoms).

Some people told me that wearing masks will "weaken" my immune system, I still need to see that; after two/three years I just feel healthy and this is refreshing after decades of getting sick all the time.

Plus, instead of the advice of "cook your own food to eat well, sleep well, do sports" that probably requires something like 28 hours per day with a standard-issue job while likely not being as effective as respiratory protection, putting a mask on takes only 30 seconds per day. That's probably good general advice anyway, but not the shortest path to solving the "getting sick often" problem.
by moshetanzer | 2026-01-15 08:42:44+00:00
Ask HN,

It feels increasingly backwards that PR reviews are where we catch basic bugs, style issues, and convention violations.

With AI writing a large chunk of code now, the volume of small, avoidable mistakes has gone up. Yet we still wait until PRs to point out things that could have been flagged instantly, pre-commit, on the author’s machine.

PR review should be about design, correctness, and tradeoffs — not “missing await”, inconsistent patterns, or obvious slop.

Is there a good reason pre-commit review isn’t the norm, or are we just accepting an inefficient workflow because it’s familiar?

Curious how others see this.
by _zoltan_ | 2026-01-15 08:43:29+00:00
8xGPUs per box. this has been the data center standard for the last 8ish years.

furthermore usually NVLink connected within the box (SXM instead of PCIe cards, although the physical data link is still PCIe.)

this is important because the daughter board provides PCIe switches which usually connect NVMe drives, NICs and GPUs together such that within that subcomplex there isn't any PCIe oversubscription.

since last year for a lot of providers the standard is the GB200 I'd argue.
by impossiblefork | 2026-01-15 08:44:13+00:00
Yes and no. Presumably people would remove them and install one of the very numerous alternatives on the first day.

I don't think it's a real barrier. The real barrier is the US troops in Germany, who could cause huge disorder. Many computers would of course have to be kept off to prevent updates from wiping everything though, so the first few days would be extremely interesting. Maybe immediate internet shutdowns to prevent malware updates while this goes on is the right solution, with people simultaneously sent out to help companies and individuals save their computers by installing some pre-checked OS.
by Nora23 | 2026-01-15 08:44:16+00:00
PAVO uses location-based grounding with Gemini to generate local guides in your native language. So it's less about "travel utility tools" and more focused on deep local knowledge and cultural context.

But you're right - Google Maps handles destinations well, but there's no reason we couldn't use Gemini with grounding for transit guidance too. That's a really interesting idea, thanks! Definitely going to explore that.
by pathartl | 2026-01-15 08:44:22+00:00
I know many items in this list can apply to both, but I've been maining 11 since release and going back to pre-11 builds of 10 genuinely feels like a downgrade:
- Windows Terminal is great
- Settings now covers almost everything, I haven't had to actually go into Control Panel in years
- Explorer has tabs!
- The new context menu loads in items asynchronously. Some people hate it, but I remember how apps would abuse the context menu and bring my PC to a crawl.
- The CPU scheduler is genuinely insanely better with big/little CPUs
- Scaling with windows and monitor management is better
- Auto HDR
- Updated notepad is actually kinda good
- Updated paint is actually kinda good
- Built in WinGet is chefs kiss
- I actually love Fluent design

Again, some of these are on 10, but on 11 it feels like more of a tighter package.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-15 08:44:37+00:00
The goal seems to be to create essentially the geopolitics of 1984 (the Orwell novel, not the historical year), with the superstates of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia replaced (for now) with three imperial zones of influence whose metropoles are the US, Russia, and China (this is the real substance of the “Donroe Doctrine”, though the overt part of that focuses on only the US-centered zone of control), though these imperial zones of control becoming de facto or de jure superstates isn't out of the question.

As in 1984, visible geopolitical conflict with a sufficient perceived degree of real kinetic threat between the empires serves the rulers of each empire by providing the external threat to maintain the apparent need for strong internal control, it also facilitates the transition from the current international status quo to the desired end state by providing a set of threats intended to coerce lesser powers to accede to the dominion of their respective regional overlords.
by Y-bar | 2026-01-15 08:45:37+00:00
I have colleagues who are annoyed that I use Firefox because in their world everything Chrome does is standard and browsers like Safari and Firefox are annoying outliers. No matter if something they have implemented in Chrome is _actually_ standard and no matter how proper to the spec non-Chrome browsers implement a feature they see it as a chore to support the spec rather than the Chrome browser.

So, the "Why not use Chrome instead of Safari?” certainly happens.
by pbmonster | 2026-01-15 08:45:52+00:00
> especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range

The same argument works for large batteries, right? On 90% of your trips, you're lugging around several hundred pounds of battery you're not using.

If you want to tackle the weight argument, you could always drop 40 kWh battery capacity from the truck. That frees up around 600 lbs you can now use for the genset.

The maintenance thing is a real problem, of course. A 50 kW genset that almost never runs will be much better on mainenance than a classic ICE car, but still add significant maintenance cost to a BEV.
by antomal | 2026-01-15 08:45:59+00:00
That’s a fair point. To be concrete, 'native to FreeBSD' in the context of grsh refers to three design choices where general-purpose shells often feel like guests:

Direct System Integration: Most shells target a generic POSIX or GNU/Linux environment. grsh is being built with FreeBSD-specific subsystems in mind—specifically Jails awareness (knowing if you are inside one and interacting with it) and planned ZFS integration for smarter path completions and status reporting.

The 'Base System' Philosophy: FreeBSD users generally prefer the 'base system' vs 'ports' distinction. I've chosen the BSD-3-Clause license and focused on keeping dependencies minimal to align with the FreeBSD architectural style, rather than bringing in the heavy baggage often found in Linux-first projects.

Signal & TTY Handling: Implementing job control directly against the FreeBSD termios and signal delivery nuances. While Rust provides abstractions, the 'feel' of a shell depends on how it handles these OS-specific edge cases.

Regarding macOS: It’s 'seamless' because macOS (via Darwin) shares that BSD heritage. The implementation for process management and terminal control translates much more naturally to macOS than it does to Linux, which often requires specific workarounds for its PTY/TTY behavior.

In short: I’m building for the BSD crowd first, not as an afterthought.
by ben_w | 2026-01-15 08:47:04+00:00
You seem to be saying "I want all the benefits of YOLO mode without YOLO mode". You can just… use the normal mode if you want more security, it asks for permission for things.

> Prompt injection is a technique for getting the LLM to output text that is dangerous when interpreted by the agent system, for example, "tool use requests" that propose to run a malicious Bash command.

One of the things Claude can do is write its own tools, even its own programming languages. There's no fundamental way to make it impossible to run something dangerous, there is only trust.

It's remarkable that these models are now good enough that people can get away with trusting them like this. But, as Simon has himself said on other occasions, this is "normalisation of deviance". I'm rather the opposite: as I have minimal security experience but also have a few decades of watching news about corporations suffering leaks, I am absolutely not willing to run in YOLO mode at this point, even though I already have an entirely separate machine for claude with the bare minimum of other things logged in, to the extent that it's a separate github account specifically for untrusted devices.
by lrvick | 2026-01-15 08:47:18+00:00
Supporting free and open source technology means supporting whoever can get it in as many hands as possible as cheaply as possible while paying your employees fairly. Adafruit gets this.

Making anything proprietary at this point for use in DIY software or hardware projects just makes me roll my eyes and hold my money for the day the open clones come. I have been saddened by dead open hardware projects because old versions of Teensy they were built around are no loner produced.

I will never buy a Teensy, but I look forward to buying the Freensy.

Sparkfun blew it by making the Teensy partially closed and so Teensy will be irrelevant. LibreOffice, OpenTofu, MariaDB etc. The most open solution always wins in the end. It is why I buy Prusa over Bambu, and why I pick Adafruit over Sparkfun.

My own companies likewise freely OSI license everything we do to the public no matter what the profit minded folks in our universe have to say. I -love- when people compete with us using our own work. If you can make a budget version of what we invent for people that cannot afford a bit extra to support us, wonderful. That is success for us as a creators that want to maximize impact.

If you cannot afford our prices, understandable, and by all mans buy from a competitor and contribute to the ecosystem that our customers benefit from. That is why we will never spend a second of our engineering time creating or promoting proprietary technology because all the skills we have are because others shared their work with us.

I honestly take a lot of inspiration from companies like Adafruit as a leader of my own orgs.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-15 08:49:00+00:00
> And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe if it wasn't released as MIT but released as GPLv3 you'd actually get compensated in the form of patches, bugfixes, features, etc in "your" software.

The whole RIIR movement is doing this - replacing as many GPL components as possible with rewritten MIT components. I find this completely disrespectful: trying to displace pro-user software with pro-business software.
by willvarfar | 2026-01-15 08:49:06+00:00
Seriously, this is not what big data does today. Distributed query engines don't have the primitives to zip through two tables and treat them as column groups of the same wider logical table. There's a new kid on the block called LanceDB that has some of the same features but is aiming for different use-cases. My trick retrofits vertical partitioning into mainstream data lake stuff. It's generic and works on the tech stack my company uses but would also work on all the mainstream alternative stacks. Slightly slower on AWS. But anyway. I guess HN just wants to see an industrial track paper.