MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wpietri | 2026-01-24 14:15:10+00:00
Sure.

As background, when power is misused, you'll often find somebody immediately showing up to explain why it was the fault of the person harmed. In the US, for example, this happens basically any time a cop kills somebody. In analyzing the situation, the agency of the person with power is minimized or ignored; the agency of the person harmed is maximized.

Open-source project are often run as little fiefdoms. Power is concentrated; checks and balances are minimal or nonexistent. Note that I'm not saying that this is bad or good; that's just how it is.

The "just fork it" style of response that the article is addressing, which I don't ever think I've seen in an issue but often see here on HN as a response to some complaint about a project. It's not part of a careful analysis about the costs and benefits of forking. There's also little or no attempt to understand who a project's audience and community is, or the value of the complaint in that context. It's a drive-by response to shut-down a complaint in a way that treats the complain as illegitimate, suggesting that person is wrong for wanting something different from what's on offer.

Does that help?
by hcal | 2026-01-24 14:15:47+00:00
I had browseros do a bunch of data validation for me in my Dolibarr ERP system. It cross checked my new master data against our old ERP, flagging bad links and filling in missing data. I could have done it much quicker overall with the api and some scripting, but it was easy to just write a two line prompt telling it where the data is and how to manage disagreements. Then I just watched it run on a second monitor for a few hours while I worked other projects.

I used a local Ollama model and though it was kind of amazing that it worked. I couldn't turn a typical user lose with something like this yet, but I think I see the vision. I image a lot of automation could happen this way in the future. I put less effort into the prompt than I would have needed to spend teaching someone from the office pool to accomplish the same goal, and got a good enough result.

In practice I have found that I can accomplish the same results in a stricter, more accurate, and faster way just using codex on the command line with some scripting and API access, but that's not going to work for a lot of people and putting it in the browser is pretty convenient... The MCP server that's built in can also become a bit of an API for the entire web if you're careful in how you use it, which opens up possibilities for things that don't have real APIs.
by jraph | 2026-01-24 14:15:55+00:00
That's a stretch. Your link says

> Is this HTML5?

> In short: Yes.

See also [1].

That HTML5 was used in marketing doesn't make the technical term disappear. HTML5 is a bit more precise than HTML, it refers to the living standard that's currently in use, as opposed to HTML 4.01 and the previous versions of HTML.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5
by andrewstuart | 2026-01-24 14:16:03+00:00
>> The fun is in the journey, not necessarily the destination, to me.

I fully respect this. Lots of craftspeople love to work with wood by hand whilst factories build furniture on an industrial scale.

>> AIs fail badly anyway when you are doing things not found much online, e.g. in embedded microcontroller development (which I do)

But you are very wrong about embedded systems development and AI. I do a huge amount of microcontroller programming and AI is a massive productivity multiplier and the LLMs are extremely good at it.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-24 14:16:10+00:00
Long time ago I did my confirmation (ex-protestant), but I seem to recall that wood is used a lot because it's a symbolism to man's mortality and frailty. Then after/with the crucifixion it also became a symbol of sacrifice and redemption in connection to mortality and frailty. But someone who remembers their studies better might offer a better explanation to why it's so popular.
by ziml77 | 2026-01-24 14:16:21+00:00
Yep... I've seen exactly this happen. People losing data/access by their own fault and yet being extremely mad at the OS developer or the company they have an account with. And, no, it does not matter if you tell them 100 times that they are responsible for not losing their own keys/passwords, they will still be furious that you set up your system in (from their perspective) such a shitty way that it's even possible for a permanent lockout to happen.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-24 14:16:30+00:00
Autopilot is just cruise control/lane keep assist/slow down when the car ahead of you does.

It’s not close to FSD, Tesla wouldn’t call FSD as Auto pilot because auto pilots un the aircraft industry are pretty dumb (the first autopilot was literally a rope tied to the aircraft control stick). FSD used to be the expensive paid add on feature while autopilot was a more reasonably priced upgrade.
by pimlottc | 2026-01-24 14:17:16+00:00
The Chicago one could use a bit do a rework. The shape of the Loop is a very very distinctive, even iconic, but here it’s off — it’s squashed and fat, wider than it is tall, rather than narrower.

Obviously some compromises must be made for routing the traces but I’d consider the shape of the Loop to be the most essential element of the whole system.
by Bender | 2026-01-24 14:17:30+00:00
Only way to stop is to start fining these companies.

There is a way to fine them regardless of where they are operating from. Get them on the DNSBL/RBL sites such as uceprotect, spamcop, spamhaus, etc... There are many others. They are still used to this day though indirectly behind the scenes instead of outright rejecting email from those listed. They affect spam scores and are also used by some commercial server products. In some cases this is still a fine regardless of regional laws because one has to pay to get removed immediately rather than waiting for the penalty period without more reports to pass. Uceprotect is well known for this. Some see them as extortion sites and I love it. Spammers should absolutely be extorted to send more UCE.
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-24 14:18:12+00:00
> In this sense, while the html itself doesn't have control flow, it is an integral part of control flow in the larger system

That's correct but I don't see what it has got to do with the question of whether HTML is a programming language or not.

Strings do not have control flow but strings are integral part of larger programs that have control flow. So what? That doesn't make strings any closer to being programming languages.
by verall | 2026-01-24 14:18:33+00:00
> That’s not empowerment – it’s fragmentation

> This isn’t resilience, it’s entropy

> That’s not openness, that’s abdication

> Just fork it” hides power, it doesn’t challenge it

> is not about obedience to maintainers. It’s about stewardship of commons.

> the goal isn’t endless new projects. It’s shared infrastructure

It's Not A Blog Post — It's Moralizing Slop
by reactordev | 2026-01-24 14:18:39+00:00
I remember a time when Reddit didn’t exist. When phpBB and vBulletin were the hottest ways to build a community around a theme. I remember when they would get so large that you would need volunteers to help moderate.

Now, karma and all that came from a way of making it so that the admins of this site have to do less moderation and let the best participants of this site have that power. It’s ultimate democracy.
by cess11 | 2026-01-24 14:19:17+00:00
No, it does not, it just adds to the risk that you'd be fooled by them or the corporations that produce them and surveil you through their SaaS-models.

It's a person in the same sense as a Markov chain is one, or the bot in the reception on Starship Titanic, i.e. not at all.
by wenc | 2026-01-24 14:19:33+00:00
For analytic queries, yes, a single SQL query often beats many small ones. The query optimizer is allowed to see more opportunities to optimize and avoid unnecessary work.

Most SQLite queries however, are not analytic queries. They're more like record retrievals.

So hitting a SQLite table with 200 "queries" is similar hitting a webserver with 200 "GET" commands.

In terms of ergonomics, SQLite feels more like a application file-format with a SQL interface. (though it is an embedded relational database)

https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html
by perrygeo | 2026-01-24 14:19:38+00:00
I get that Gas Town is part tongue-in-cheek, a strawman to move the conversation on Agentic AI forward. And for that I give it credit.

But I think there's a real missed opportunity here. I don't think it goes far enough. Who wants some giant complex system of agents conceived by a human. The agents, their role and relationships, could be dynamically configured according to the task.

What good is removing human judegment from the loop, only to constrain the problem by locking in the architecture a priori. It just doens't make sense. Your entire project hinges on the waterfall-like nature of the agent design! That part feels far too important, but gas town doesn't have much curiousity at all about changing that. These Mayors, and Polecats, and Witnesses, and Deacons ... but one of infinite ways you arrange things. Why should there be just one? Why should there be an up-front design at all? A dynamic, emergent network of agents feels like the real opportunity here.
by stared | 2026-01-24 14:19:39+00:00
It is not a delusion. It happens all the time.

For example, 3 months ago developers of GZDoom didn't like where it heads, so forked it to UZDoom (vide https://github.com/ZDoom/gzdoom/issues/3395 and https://www.techspot.com/news/109864-gzdoom-developers-split...).

The core part is if you can find enough contributors (from the original repo, or new ones) to make it viable.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-24 14:19:46+00:00
Wireless POS card terminals are incredibly cheap, why people need to hand their cards to someone?

Waiter presents me the machine, I insert my card or wave it over the NFC reader of the machine, if I insert the card, machine always ask for pin, if I use NFC, it will ask sometimes based on some obscure criteria.

For really expensive transactions, eventually, I may get a notification on my bank app in the phone, asking me if I am really, really doing this, I authenticate with biometrics and click ok.

it is not that hard.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-24 14:19:47+00:00
A lot of work is fake work. It's just social signaling. It's just a game of being liked. Just look at the stats for autistic people who have difficulty finding and maintaining employment, not because they're bad at their actual job but because neurotypical people just don't like them. Anyone who has worked for a remotely large organization has met plenty of people who have been promoted well beyond their actual abilities or output.

In this space you'll often hear about Dunbar's number [1] and the idea that organizations with more than about 150 people tend to break down. In larger organizations, a whole layer of middle management seems to rise up with questionable output. Like you might have no idea who your VP is. One place I worked had the VP visit once a quarter, walk aroudn and ask what people worked on and occasionally yell at them.

The military is an interesting example because it's millions of people, often in confined spaces so a whole bunch of rules have to be created so they don't kill each other, basically. And if you talk to any current or former servicemembers you'll hear stories about how not much gets done there either. Toxic leadership, lots of waiting around for nothing, bureaucracy and so on.

One can view this "research" as "be nice to your employees" but I think it's more nefarious than that. Or at least "be nice" won't be the lesson Corporate America takes from it. Instead it'll be that employees need to be even more closely monitored so they're not slacking off.

I think about what I call "organizational churn". This is where every 6 months you'll get an email saying a VP in your direct chain whom you've likely never met now reports to a different SVP under some restructure or reorganization to "align goals" or for "efficiency".

What you realize after awhile is that organizational churn only exists so nobody is every accountable for their actions or output. They're never in the same place long enough to see the consequences of their action or inaction.

But what I've thought about a lot recently in terms of organization is the Chinese Community Party. Millions of people work for the CCP. Yet it's output has been stunning. Some 40,000km of high speed train lines in 20 years for less than the US spends on the military in one year. Energy projects, metros, bridges, cities, housing, roads, ports, the list goes on.

How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
by NorwegianDude | 2026-01-24 14:19:54+00:00
I've been using GitLab since the early days, but a week ago I switched to Forgejo. Power usage on the server dropped by 10%, despite both being idle most of the time.

As the author says, GitLab feels sluggish, and is bloated with 1001 thing I'd never use that just makes the UI a pain. Despite all the features I don't need, some that I would benefit from are disabled in the free version.

Forgejo is simpler. It allows me to hide features per project that I don't need. Bit there are some tradeoffs. Updates on GitLab was great. I've been letting it self update for years with no issues. This does not work on Forgejo. Forgejo is also a lot less polished, and some features just doesn't seem to work like they should.
by skybrian | 2026-01-24 14:20:40+00:00
I imagine with coding agents, maintaining private forks (reapplying patches on upgrade) will be a lot easier. Though, a plugin architecture would be better, where feasible.

If there there's a big enough community swapping patches that upstream isn't accepting for some reason, that's when a public fork becomes reasonable. (This is the Apache web server's origin story.)
by wpietri | 2026-01-24 14:21:20+00:00
> Instead it's usually used as a last resort when the "exploiter" doesn't get their way

I am not saying the phrase can't be used legitimately. Like the article's author, I just think it's often used in a way that isn't. Perhaps we're sampling from different areas of open-source culture, but when I think specifically of HN, I think just-fork-it style responses of the kind that the author is criticizing are common.

> A community is much more than the sum of it's members.

Sure, I agree with that. But you write it as if it's in contradiction with my point, which I'm not seeing.
by seec | 2026-01-24 14:21:51+00:00
Ah yes, I never used that. My car isn't very recent (about 10 years old now), and I drive very little (about 2-3k per year; I take the train to go anywhere far) because I hate it.
But the adaptive part would make it much more useful indeed.

However, something that is extremely annoying in France is that speed limits tend to change very often and abruptly.
I just think that trying to solve the problem solely at the car level is always going to have too many limitations...
by bakugo | 2026-01-24 14:22:36+00:00
> Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.

With an order of magnitude less data to host, though. The entirety of Wikipedia is less than 1PB [1], while the entirety of IA is 175+ PB [2].

Traffic is relatively cheap, especially for a very cache-friendly website like Wikipedia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

[2] https://archive.org/about/
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-24 14:22:40+00:00
> Nothing particularly notable here. A lot of it seems to be 'We have something in-house designed for our use cases, use that instead of the standard lib equivalent'.

The bulk of the restrictions are justified as "Banned in the Google Style Guide."

In turn the Google Style Guide bans most of the features because they can't/won't refactor most of their legacy code to catch up with post C++0x.

So even then these guidelines are just a reflection of making sure things stay safe for upstream and downstream consumers of Google's largely unmaintained codebase.
AI's Phase Transition Noise
by dpforesi | 2026-01-24 14:22:40+00:00
The Sound of a System Changing

Articles like “The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself”
https://www.noemamag.com/the-ai-powered-web-is-eating-itself/
frame AI as a breaking point for the internet — a moment where incentives collapse, creators are erased, and the web begins consuming its own foundations. The tone is familiar: something vital is being lost, and the damage may be irreversible.

But much of what’s being described isn’t destruction. It’s noise.

Specifically, it’s phase-transition noise — the turbulence a complex system makes while reorganizing into a new equilibrium.

The pre-AI web was already brittle. Discovery was winner-take-most, SEO drowned out originality, traffic was a proxy for value rather than a measure of it, and most content was effectively invisible. AI didn’t break this system; it stripped away the friction that concealed its weaknesses. Compression replaced browsing, summaries replaced scavenger hunts, and the redundancy of the web suddenly became obvious.

From inside the transition, this feels like collapse. Interfaces change faster than institutions. Old metrics stop working. Revenue models tied to clicks unravel. That local entropy is real — some sites will vanish, some careers will shrink, some forms of writing will no longer be economically viable. But local disorder is not global decay. In complex systems, it’s often the precondition for higher-order structure.

Crucially, user intent hasn’t disappeared. People who want brief answers get them faster now. People who need depth — journalists, analysts, researchers, obsessives — can still find primary sources, often more efficiently, aided by tools that surface clusters of links, perspectives, and provenance on demand. AI doesn’t block seriousness; it lowers the cost of reaching it when it’s actually needed.

What many of these essays mourn is not the loss of knowledge, but the loss of a business model and a familiar status hierarchy. They mistake the erosion of traffic for the erosion of truth, and interface change for epistemic failure. Yet knowledge doesn’t die when it’s summarized. It dies when discovery goes unfunded — a problem that long predates AI and won’t be solved by preserving artificial friction.

Every major leap in information technology has sounded like this while it was happening. The printing press, broadcast media, the web itself — all produced a chorus of warnings about collapse that, in hindsight, were the soundtrack of emergence. Optimization always sounds destructive before new structure stabilizes.

What we’re hearing now is not the web eating itself.
It’s the noise of a new information metabolism forming.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-24 14:23:03+00:00
Rust's compiler has six what it calls "lint levels" two of which can't be overridden by compiler flags, these handle all of its diagnostics and are also commonly used by linters like clippy.

Allow and Expect are levels where it's OK that a diagnostic happened, but with Expect if the diagnostic expected was not found then we get another diagnostic telling us that our expectation wasn't fulfilled.

Warn and Force-Warn are levels where we get a warning but compilation results in an executable anyway. Force-warn is a level where you can't tell the compiler not to emit this warning.

Deny and Forbid are levels where the diagnostic is reported and compilation fails, so we do not get an executable. Forbid, like Force-warn cannot be overriden with compiler flags.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-24 14:23:16+00:00
True, but in many environments where C is used the stacks may be configured with small sizes and without the possibility of being grown dynamically.

In such environments, it may be needed to estimate the maximum stack usage and configure big enough stacks, if possible.

Having to estimate maximum memory usage is the same constraint when allocating a static array as a work area, then using a custom allocator to provide memory when needed.
by jonpurdy | 2026-01-24 14:23:28+00:00
Same; this was the nicest unexpected surprise about buying this place.

Condo built in 2006 with cat5 . Two bedrooms + living room all wired with rj11 phone jacks. Just snipped those off, wired up rj45, and attached the other ends in my utility closet to a patch panel with rj45 as well.

I don't know if it's just cat5 or 5e, but it saturates a 2.5Gbe link and in-wall cable length is about 15-25 meters.
by jeremyjh | 2026-01-24 14:24:47+00:00
Yes exactly. I've forked many a library to meet my own needs. Usually temporary, but not always. The fact that I can do this when I have to means I can use basically any library. The submitted post is written from the perspective of some kind of social network project. People saying "just fork it" in that perspective are clearly missing the bigger picture, hence the post. And the author of that post, didn't acknowledge that FOSS is much more varied than their particular project.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-24 14:25:30+00:00
I've tried using it. I can't get it to do anything useful.

I wanted to get it to help write a very simple Django website, basically a phone directory thing. After dicking about trying to get Copilot to actually help I had about 5000 lines of code that didn't work.

I was able to write something that did work in about an hour and about 50 lines of code.

Do you actually understand how the program your AI created works?
by elzbardico | 2026-01-24 14:25:50+00:00
I use Apple Pay a lot, but because I am already carrying a phone and in my country my driver license can be government app in my phone, thus, I don't even carry a wallet most of the time.

But I would hate not to have the option of using my bank card by itself. When I travel, I always carry my wallet and a couple of card, because your phone can die, be stolen, you can be out of charge, etc...
by vibe_assassin | 2026-01-24 14:26:25+00:00
I didn't know people disliked GitLab. I use it for work and while some things could definitely be improved, overall I find it to be a pretty intuitive and easy experience. They could definitely improve user management at the admin vs group level (you cant see LDAP sync settings in admin panel, you have to navigate to the group) but overall I don't get frustrated using it. It's CICD syntax is a breeze for the most part too
by Tiberium | 2026-01-24 14:26:34+00:00
New account, vibecoded demo (the style gives it away, plus the comments in source), author using LLM to write comments, yet this reached the top page.. HN is certainly interesting nowadays.

I'm not against vibecoded stuff, but the author said it's a "deliberate design choice" in one of the comments, clearly not being open about the use of LLMs.

> https://web.archive.org/web/20260124143216/https://cosmic-od...

/* FIXED: Changed cursor from 'help' to 'default' to avoid confusion */

/* --- UPDATED MOON LOGIC --- */