MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bagacrap | 2026-01-24 13:55:21+00:00
This is confusing. Voice is not a UI, it's an input device. When I call my bank and have to input some numbers into the automated system, I prefer to say them than to type them. The phone menu system is the UI, fingers or voice are two different input modes for the same UI.

The problem with alexa booking tickets is not the use of my voice but that there are a lot of decisions (comparison shopping, seat selection etc) to be made. Alexa can't read my mind to make the trade-offs I would make, although it could ask me 10 zillion questions. The difference between voice/ears and fingers/eyes is the bandwidth of information transfer, but also the availability of the tools. Hands and eyes may be busy as in your car example, but they are also busy if I'm carrying a toddler around the house or can't be bothered to reach into my pocket or am already using my phone for something else (game, video etc). So voice is a good option for many tasks. And LLMs/agents do have the potential to make more tasks (simple ones, not booking tickets) accessible to voice since "AI as UI" is where it holds the most potential IMHO. And that's great because we need all the help we can get to avoid taking our phones out of our pockets and getting sucked into random tangents like HN comment threads just bc we wanted to check the weather
by cyberrock | 2026-01-24 13:55:31+00:00
SD was only successful because most users don't need to do things Linux is still poor at, such as printer compatibility, sound driver compatibility, and specialty software like music and video editing. The stroke of brilliance is having users buy an additional device instead of replacing their daily driver.

Its success seems to be about 5 million units (of which 2 were mine, mind you) as of last estimation. Given how reticent they are to reveal the price of Steam Machine, I doubt it would do better. I think they just bought a bunch of junk from AMD because that strategy worked for Switch 1 and Steam Deck. And even if it's successful I think it's odd to frame it as an example of monoculture breaking when Valve/Steam is a veritable monoculture. It's like a modern Apple user still thinking they're the guy throwing the hammer at the screen.
by jraph | 2026-01-24 13:55:42+00:00
> I dunno, you're being pedantic :)

I know, I'm usually not, but this is all xhtml.club and this footnote are about, might as well be correct :-)

Constraint validation is still descriptive (what is allowed)

All details and summary are doing is conveying information on what's a summary and what's the complete story, and it has this hidden / shown behavior.

In any case, you will probably find something procedural / programming like in HTML, but it's not the core idea of the language.

In the end, all I'm saying is: you can just avoid issues and just say "HTML" without further qualifying it.
by 3rodents | 2026-01-24 13:56:05+00:00
I’m not anti-AI but it isn’t part of my workflow. You’re describing yourself as someone unable to achieve your ideas without AI. That’s fine. But there are many people who have spent years building the skills necessary to be able to realize all of their ideas, and that their ideas are inextricably linked to the process. I wouldn’t have the ideas I have today if I didn’t spend years of my life in my editor. I could defer to Claude code for all my work, and I’d be frozen in time, never to progress again, losing everything that makes my work my work.

Perhaps something will change, but right now, Claude code does not change anything for me. If what I do is ancient and quaint, so be it. I’m not competing for who can churn out the most code, never have, never will, because that’s not what software development is about.
by arter45 | 2026-01-24 13:56:10+00:00
In the session scenario, I was talking about firewalls, not BGP routers (although, of course, you could have firewall features on a BGP router).

What I'm saying is, there are ways to validate and carry out network changes in a pretty robust way, including gradual rollout (if that's what you want) by using route or firewall rules priority or other mechanisms.

I keep being skeptical about this flapping strategy, but if this works in your setup, good for you.
by avelino | 2026-01-24 13:56:14+00:00
Advantage over manual uberjar + jlink/jpackage:

The main pain point jbundle solves is that jpackage generates installers (.deb, .rpm, .dmg, .msi), not plain executables. jbundle produces a single self-contained binary — just a shell stub concatenated with a compressed payload. You chmod +x it, distribute it, and the user runs ./app. No installation step, no system-level changes.

It also automates the full pipeline (detect build system → build uberjar → download JDK → jdeps → jlink → pack) so you don't need a JDK installed on the build machine — it fetches the exact version from Adoptium. Plus it includes startup optimizations like AppCDS (auto-created on first run, JDK 19+), CRaC checkpoints, and profile-tuned JVM flags for CLI vs server workloads.

Cross-compilation:

Yes — jbundle build --target linux-x64 (or linux-aarch64, macos-x64, macos-aarch64). Since the JAR is platform-independent, it just downloads the appropriate JDK runtime for the target OS/arch from Adoptium and bundles it. You can build a Linux binary from macOS and vice-versa.

Plain executable (not an installer):

That's exactly what jbundle produces. The output is a single file you can scp to a server or hand to someone. On first run it extracts the runtime and jar to ~/.jbundle/cache/ (keyed by content hash), so subsequent runs are instant. No .deb, no .dmg, no "install this first" — just a binary.

For the macOS testing concern: since it's a CLI binary (not a .app bundle), it doesn't require signing/notarization to run. And with --target macos-aarch64 you can build it from a Linux CI without needing a Mac.
by gond | 2026-01-24 13:56:40+00:00
The social side is, among others, massively covered by Niklas Luhmann, the Zettelkasten guy. [1] is pure 2nd Order Cybernetics. The entry to it is a bit tough, it uses its own language. The precision presented, however, is brutal and you can’t get larger in scope, as it encompasses society as a whole, corporations, law, communication, all of it.

[1] Theory of Society, Volume 1+2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann
by guenthert | 2026-01-24 13:56:49+00:00
I didn't notice overheating, but there are a quite a few different products on the market.

The modest speed (~54MBps at my place) was then ok-ish, but the (variable!) latency of a couple of ms was annoying (it tended to break pacemaker/corosync cluster communication). And every once in a blue moon they stopped working altogether and needed to be un-plugged.

Worst, for someone interested in analogue electronics, they emit (of course) a huge amount of electrical noise into the power lines.
by probably_wrong | 2026-01-24 13:57:02+00:00
I think your edit shows why people are reading your comment in a different light than yours.

When you see that quote, you apparently focus on the "if I want X to happen, I need to create the circumstances that will lead to it".

When I read that quote, I immediately think of a long list of people who choose actions with complete disregard to the consequences of those actions. Mass unemployment? Destroy local communities? Poison the environment? Surveillance states? Hey, as long as they got what they wanted...
by charcircuit | 2026-01-24 13:57:26+00:00
>For a 50-entry timeline, the latency is usually less than 25 milliseconds. Profiling shows that few of those milliseconds were spent inside the database engine.

And instead were spent blocking on the disk for all of the extra queries that were made? Or is it trying to say that the concatenation a handful of strings takes 22 ms. Considering how much games can do with a 16 ms budget I don't see where that time is going.
by growse | 2026-01-24 13:57:30+00:00
I rarely see good faith engagements being immediately shut down with "just fork it" (you'd never accept issues / MRs!). Instead it's usually used as a last resort when the "exploiter" doesn't get their way and starts whining about it.

If a change is proposed that's completely counter to a community's stated values, then I guess "fork it" is a more appropriate immediate response, because it's hard to see how such a clash could be resolved without fundamental change.
by simondotau | 2026-01-24 13:57:32+00:00
> The next owner will probably call me an idiot for using CAT5E in 2019.

Unlikely, they’ll probably be delighted that you went to the effort at all. While not ideal, Cat5e is usually good enough for 10 gigabit over shorter lengths. It’s not unusual for it to work perfectly on wires as long as 20 or 30 metres.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-24 13:57:52+00:00
> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.

The bosses with half a brain do this only when the supply of labor is increasing relative to demand for labor. The bet is that the sufficient employees won’t have a choice to find a different job, and people that fail to maintain the new pace can be replaced with newer, and maybe even cheaper employees.
by andrewstuart | 2026-01-24 13:57:53+00:00
>> You’re describing yourself as someone unable to achieve your ideas without AI.

I did not say that.

>> But there are many people who have spent years building the skills necessary to be able to realize all of their ideas, and that their ideas are inextricably linked to the process.

I have been designing and building software for 35 years and have many open source projects.

You are implying that I don’t know how to program and I need AI to build stuff. Evidence to the contrary is on my GitHub.

It’s typical anti AI to suggest that you must love AI because you have no real skill.
by javier2 | 2026-01-24 13:58:33+00:00
We switched to gitlab at work about five years ago and this perfectly summarizes my experience. Add to that Gitlab projects also have a included Maven, NPM and python compatible package registry, so you can just push your package back in the CI pipeline is one of my favourite features as a smaller team. My least favorite feature is actually the sheer number of features. There is actually too many features. And the constant waiting. Basically every screen is just twice as slow as I would like to wait.
by Nursie | 2026-01-24 13:58:40+00:00
‘Western’ doctors recommend things that work.

Magnesium blood tests exist - https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/amp/article/magnesium-blood-...

Naturopathic ‘doctors’ have jobs because credulous idiots believe they’re something other than total quacks.

Your view of western medicine is biased nonsense.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-24 13:58:43+00:00
As far as I remember, in some cases yes. I remember when it initially launched, the typical demo was a list of 10K items or something, and the speaker (maybe Pete Hunt?) demonstrated the amount of time it took to add/remove items from that list, and how without the Virtual DOM, there was a lot of trashing (or something), and with the vdom, things got a lot faster.

I think this was back in 2013-2014 sometime though, so I might be misremembering, it's over a decade ago after all.
by bakugo | 2026-01-24 13:58:55+00:00
> this new technology has changed my job and I refuse to use it because I'm afraid

You're confusing fear with disgust. Nobody is afraid of your slop, we're disgusted by it. You're making a huge sloppy mess everywhere you go and then leaving it for the rest of us to clean up, all while acting like we should be thankful for your contribution.
by AnonHP | 2026-01-24 13:59:19+00:00
Gold has a few properties: one is that it has had value through history and another is that it’s a physical asset, and because of these two properties, it’s quite liquid. It’s also a metal that doesn’t naturally corrode.

Central banks of countries hold various kinds of assets, including bonds and currencies of other countries. But bonds and currencies are just “paper”…or are more vulnerable than gold to shocks in certain conditions.

The disadvantage of physical gold is that it doesn’t generate any income by itself, as compared to bonds.

During times of higher uncertainty, people and institutions (including central banks) flock to gold.
by kevincox | 2026-01-24 13:59:22+00:00
I would really like to use XHTML. It would make my HTML emitter much simpler (as I don't need special rules for elements that are self-closing, have special closing or escaping rules and whatever else) and more secure.

However no browsers have implemented streaming XHTML parsers. This means that the performance is notably worse for XHTML and if you rely on streaming responses (I currently do for a few pages like bulk imports) it won't work.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-24 14:00:47+00:00
> the writing is on the wall that eventually we will automate virtually all jobs out of existence.

That already happened decades ago. Less than 10% of the population does the work necessary to provide more than 80% of goods and services.

The majority of adults in the industrialized world do not do any productive work (regardless if they have employment or not). And on top of this, a huge percentage of adults - maybe 20% - have never done even one day of productive work in their entire life and will live from cradle to grave without ever having contributed.

Among those who actually do some productive work, most are doing it at a small fraction of their potential.

Industrialization of goods production and agriculture, combined with digitalization, has made contribution and reward completely disconnected. Meaning most industrialized nations have scam economies, regardless if the nations are communist, capitalist, or anything in between. Your salary, your employment, your wealth, has no connection to how much you contribute to the economy. That is true both for individuals and for businesses.

Everybody I know in real life who actually works for a living is doing the work of 5-10 people. That's their productive output. A factory worker is probably in the range of 40-50 people, as well as an industrialized farmer.

So you are already living in the scenario which you fear. We're already in the jobless future, and the solutions will continue to be the same: government handouts, fake jobs at fake businesses and fake public services, money manipulation to boost real estate fake appreciation, regulatory manipulation to create new streams of income for people not working, etc.
by orleyhuxwell | 2026-01-24 14:01:06+00:00
I am not tired by this anti-AI stuff.
As a person who uses it in very limited capacity, also as an ML/computer vision developer and researcher with 10 years of commercial experience with it, I want much more anti AI stuff.

Low quality (low precision) news, code, marketing, diagnosis, articles, books, food, entertainment (shorts, tik-tok), engineering is in my opinion the biggest problem in XXI century so far.

Low quality AI usage decisions, low quality AI marketing, retraining, placement, investments are accelerating the worst trends even more.
It's like Soviet nuclear trains - just because nuclear is powerful and real it doesn't mean most of it's applications made any sense.

So as a pro-AI person and AI-builder in general, I want more anti-AI-slop content, more pro-discipline opinions.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-24 14:01:10+00:00
As someone who's said something like that several times, I'm fine with never saying it again. I did it because I really do believe the bottom of the job market is going to fall out for engineers that aren't capable with AI and I was trying to be helpful, but if the people hand coding are aware of the risks and accept them, shrug you do you.
by kfreds | 2026-01-24 14:01:27+00:00
Obviously it’s far more nuanced than that. I’d say there are several categories where a reasonable person could have reservations (or not) about LLMs:

Copyright issues (related to training data and inference), openness (OSS, model parameters, training data), sovereignty (geopolitically, individually), privacy, deskilling, manipulation (with or without human intent), AGI doom. I have a list but not in front of me right now.
by Desafinado | 2026-01-24 14:01:35+00:00
From Jonathan Haidt on social media's impact on mental health:

"In the last few years, however, a flood of new research has altered the landscape of the debate, in two ways. First, there is now a lot more work revealing a wide range of direct harms caused by social media that extends beyond mental health (e.g., cyberbullying, sextortion, and exposure to algorithmically amplified content promoting suicide, eating-disorders, and self-harm). These direct harms are not correlations; they are harms reported by millions of young people each year. Second, recent research — including experiments conducted by Meta itself — provides increasingly strong causal evidence linking heavy social media use to depression, anxiety, and other internalizing disorders. (We refer to these as indirect harms because they appear over time rather than right away).

Meta’s own research on the effects of social media reduction confirms those from academic researchers. Both sets of researchers find evidence of causation, not mere correlation"
by bjt12345 | 2026-01-24 14:01:57+00:00
"WHY IS IT THAT MANAGERS ARE
typically running out of time
while their subordinates are typically running out of work?"

This was written in 1974 and times have surely changed because I never wonder this.

Instead I wonder why subordinates are typically running out of time whilst the managers seem to be typically running out of any useful work to do and instead are found doing something else.
by VorpalWay | 2026-01-24 14:02:42+00:00
The fun is in the journey, not necessarily the destination, to me. Should the goal of dancing be to get it over with as quickly as possible too? Should the ideal piece of music you play be a single crashing chord so you can get done with playing the piano? To me these are direct analogues.

Sure, there are some boring rote parts of coding, just like sawing boards might not be the most enjoyable part of woodworking. I guess you could use AI as the analog of power tools (would that be using AI to generate awk and jq command lines?). But I wouldn't want to use a CNC router and take all the fun and skill out of the craft, nor do I find agentic AI enjoyable.

And AIs fail badly anyway when you are doing things not found much online, e.g. in embedded microcontroller development (which I do) or with company internal frameworks.
by abanana | 2026-01-24 14:03:52+00:00
Yes, the author's assertion here is nonsense. A case of someone with a very small window of experience being certain that what he's seen couldn't possibly be an outlier - must instead be normal for everyone.

The article also has a constant theme of putting people down because of something he doesn't understand. The Helldivers 2 developers are "idiots" because he doesn't understand the reasons for asset duplication in games. Simple daisy-chaining of slave sockets off the master is "incomprehensible", "pointless", "arbitrary" and "a mess"; the person who did the wiring is an "idiot". It all comes across as unfortunately quite arrogant.
by radicalethics | 2026-01-24 14:04:21+00:00
What happens if I simply add an iterator mechanism to HTML (well, I guess we need variables too)? Is it no longer a markup language here (I won't add anything else):

<for i=0; i<1; i++>
<html>
</html>
</for>

Better question, why don't we upgrade XML to do that?
by javier2 | 2026-01-24 14:04:45+00:00
Yup. We just lost our "slightly below average" developers, but he was a nice guy and tries to deliver. But they have been slow to replace him, and now we are likely looking at 3 months before a new hire will just be in place, plus the new hire will not have the three years worth of experience the other guy had, so their project will likely be slower than at it already was for the rest of the year.
Ask HN: Why doesn't JavaScript have a Laravel/Rails-level back end framework?
by danver0 | 2026-01-24 14:04:57+00:00
In most ecosystems there’s a “default” backend framework (Rails, Django, Laravel, .NET).
In JS it still feels like stitching together Express/Nest + auth + ORM + jobs + queues + config.
Why did JS never converge on a batteries-included backend framework?
by falcor84 | 2026-01-24 14:05:22+00:00
I think that it is a debate, and it depends on the role of HTML in your system.

If all you're doing is using HTML to "annotate a document with its structure and its formatting", then yes, I'll accept that it's not quite programming, but I've not seen this approach of starting with a plain non-html document and marking it up by hand done in probably over two decades. I do still occasionally see it done for marking up blog posts or documentation into markdown and then generating html from it, but even that's a minuscule part of what HTML is used for these days.

Your mileage my vary, but what I and people around me typically do is work on hundreds/thousands of loosely coupled small snippets of HTML used within e.g. React JSX, or Django/Jinja templates or htmx endpoints, in order to dynamically control data and state in a large program. In this sense, while the html itself doesn't have control flow, it is an integral part of control flow in the larger system, and it's extremely likely that I'll break something in the functionality if I carelessly change an element's type or attribute value. In this sense, I'm not putting on a different hat when I'm working on the html, but just working on a different part of the program.
by chrisjj | 2026-01-24 14:05:30+00:00
> This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer

Or you got hacked by a spammer.

> even if you also happen to send legitimate emails.

And also a bad thing. E.g. for the user losing a critical legit email.

> if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.

Sorry absolutely not for everyone. To me, receiving legit PayPal email is far more important than being protected from PayPal spam, prevented from employing my own protection.

One size does not fit all.
by dvdkon | 2026-01-24 14:06:20+00:00
There's software where the continued existence of a diligent community around that project is necessary (web browsers, OS drivers, security-critical software...), but there's also software where I don't need any of that and I'm grateful for the chance to ignore any community around it and keep using the software anyway. Sometimes ideas just aren't compatible, and that's fine, forking allows us to part amicably.

I wish I could "just fork" most social problems. As FLOSS developers, we have the great luxury of being able to fork, and all we lose is the community, other people's considerations for our preferences. But for social problems, the people are the point, so "forking" alone wouldn't accomplish anything, not to mention physical limitations that make forking e.g. a country impossible.