MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-11 23:16:49+00:00
> Most HN users don't know about the alternatives, just like the public.

That's a rather ridiculous assumption on your part. As a tech-literate crowd, it's quite likely they are aware of them, if for no other reason those alternatives make the front page semi-frequently.

> If you say that those who know don't care, I will ask you for some evidence.

As soon as you provide evidence for the premises for your argument. As my position is simply saying yours is false, the onus is on you to support yours.

> "we" are aware of the problem and care about the freedom.

Sure, maybe, but caring about freedom isn't the same as caring about FSF approved software.
by hyperrail | 2026-01-11 23:16:50+00:00
Wrong. There was full app compat of WP7 apps in WP8 and Win10 Mobile, and for WP8 apps in W10M. The only full backward app compat break was from WM6.5/WP6.5 to WP7.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're thinking of the lack of device OS upgrades: from WP6.5 to WP7, from WP7 to WP8, and from older WP8 devices to W10M. So no forward compat, but absolutely yes to backward compat.
by hopelite | 2026-01-11 23:17:00+00:00
I get your point and think it is a matter of when things are relatively "perfectly" done as in iOS/MacOS, every little anthill seems like an eruption volcano, but let's also not make excuses for some of the rather disgusting issues in Tahoe that Steve Jobs' would have never allowed to ship.

I can't recall them all right off the top of my head, but I waited til 26.2 to update because of all the comments I saw about glitziness, and this resizing issue is just one of the quirks I have noticed are still not resolved; not to mention that my M4 Mac has not crawled and locked up as often as it has since I updated to 26.2. But again, to put it in perspective, that's only been very little hassle compared to what seems to be nothing but misery, suffering, and existential questions suffered by the wretched souls condemned to Windows.

Edit: another issue I have noticed in iOS is that now things like saving bookmarks in Safari is no longer a two step/tap process using long-press, it's a three step/tap process....WHY?? Same with "add to home screen". Also, the long press horizontal context menu (i.e., copy, paste) now does not slide left to reveal more options, it just changes mode to a vertical list. What is going on??? That's sickening...in my opinion. Horizontal, vertical? Pick one.
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-11 23:17:16+00:00
That's empirically false. If it was true, there wouldn't be any ongoing litigation about whether it's allowed or not. It's a legal gray area because there specifically isn't a law that says whether you're allowed or not allowed to legally purchase a text and sell information about the text or facts from the text as a service.

In fact, there's exactly nothing illegal about me replacing what Anthropic is doing with books by me personally reading the books and doing the job of the AI with my meat body (unless I'm quoting the text in a way that's not fair use).

But that's not even what's at issue here. Anthropic is essentially banning the equivalent of people buying all the Stephen King books and using them to start a service that specifically makes books designed to replicate Stephen King writing. Claude being about to talk about Pet Sematary doesn't compete with the sale of Pet Sematary. An LLM trained on Stephen King books with the purpose of creating rip-off Stephen King books arguably does.
by andrewmcwatters | 2026-01-11 23:17:25+00:00
I concede that this is the state of the art in secure deployments, but I’m from a different age where people remoted into colocated hardware, or at least managed their VPSs without destroying them every update.

As a result, I think developers are forgetting filesystem cleanliness because if you end up destroying an entire instance, well it’s clean isn’t it?

It also results in people not knowing how to do basic sysadmin work, because everything becomes devops.

The bigger problem I have with this, is the logical conclusion is to use “distroless” operating system images with vmlinuz, an init, and the minimal set of binaries and filesystem structure you need for your specific deployment, and rarely do I see anyone actually doing this.

Instead, people are using a hodgepodge of containers with significant management overhead, that actually just sit on like Ubuntu or something. Maybe alpine. Or whatever Amazon distribution is used on ec2 now. Or of course, like in this article, Fedora CoreOS.

One day, I will work with people who have a network issue and don’t know how to look up ports in use. Maybe that’s already the case, and I don’t know it.
by DiabloD3 | 2026-01-11 23:17:40+00:00
The reason fringing exists is because they're rendered as multi-colored fonts. As in, instead of 1 pixel for each pixel, its rendered in a 3x1 (or 1x3 for vert) 'greyscale', and then just striped across the subpixels, using the subpixels for their spacial locations.

With DirectWrite and Freetype, subpixel rendering isn't done for colored rendering. On OSX, due to lack of subpixel with Core Text, it also isn't done.

I suspect what you're really asking is "why does high color contrast look weird at the edges?" Because some monitors are "exceptionally clear and sharp", and people have been selecting monitors for this trait for over a decade.

On LCDs, "good" polarizers make it hard to make out individual subpixels (which also makes subpixel rendering kinda moot on them; you'll see the fringing but the text won't look any sharper than greyscale, and noticeably less sharper than aliased); instead of "clear and sharp" they're more "natural".

OLEDs and MicroLEDs do not have polarizers, and they're the sharpest monitors I've ever seen. However, good news (at least for me): I can see subpixels on a 1080p 24" during high color contrast (ie, fringing fonts), I _cannot_ see them on a 4k 24".

Even if I integer-scaled 1080p to 4k, I would be using an array that looks like...

R G B R G B

R G B R G B

.. to represent pixels. I can't see subpixels during situations like this. So, the only way to avoid the problem is just use HiDPI monitors. 32" 4k seems to be a very common size for Mac users; it causes it to do Retina scaling correctly, while also being about 150% the DPI of a 24" 1080p, or about 125% of the DPI of a 27" 1440p (the two most common sizes).

My recommendation also is: never use below 4k on OSX. OSX's handling of sub-4k monitors is broken, and usually leads to in-compositor scaling instead of letting apps natively render at LoDPI.
by Anthony76 | 2026-01-11 23:17:56+00:00
One thing that stood out to me is how much of the problem you’re solving is behavioral, not technical — people don’t struggle to meet others, they struggle with the uncertainty and emotional overhead of “starting”.
We’ve seen similar patterns while working on adoption and visibility for Web3 and SaaS products at AixBoost.com:anything that reduces decision fatigue and removes the need for a “perfect first move” tends to convert far better long-term.I wouldn’t sign up just to “try another social app”, but I would try this if it consistently delivered meaningful conversations without ongoing obligation. That distinction feels important here.
by fluoridation | 2026-01-11 23:18:17+00:00
>So, if you have f(T&&) and f(T), and call f(std::move(t)) then you'll get an ambiguous overload compilation error [...]

Okay, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm not talking about the program being invalid, I'm talking about the program being confusing to the programmer, which is what this article is about. Sure, in that case the program is ill-formed. What if you have f(const T &, double) and f(T, int)? If you call f(x, 0) you cause a copy, and if you call f(x, 0.0) you don't. A programmer who's not aware that the second overload exists will not realize this is happening, in the same way that he will not realize std::move() is not moving anything if they don't realize, for example, that the argument is const.
by epistasis | 2026-01-11 23:18:20+00:00
> New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission.

That's not correct, including storage with solar is still cheaper than nuclear. That's not measuring the cost by MW or GW, it's by measuring the cost of kWh, or the levelized avoided cost of energy, or the whatever metric you want.

And solar has the benefit of being able to avoid a good chunk of transmission by placing it at the site of use, so including transmission costs can only be to the benefit of solar.
by acutesoftware | 2026-01-11 23:18:20+00:00
I am working on a local RAG LLM designed for lower end PC's - ability for people to try out searching their own documents, seeing it was such a learning curve to get to this stage - hoping others can learn from my mistakes.

https://github.com/acutesoftware/lifepim-ai-core

Only been public a few days, so please let me know if there are glaring issues.
by hollowturtle | 2026-01-11 23:18:39+00:00
> Have you considered that maybe you aren't using it well?

Here we go, as I said, and again and again and again it's always out fault we're not using well. It is impossible to counter argument. Btw to reply to your question, yes many times and proved to be useful in very small specialized tasks and a couple of migrations. I really like how LLMs are helping me in my day to day, but still so far away from all this astroturfing
by convolvatron | 2026-01-11 23:18:49+00:00
maybe. I think we're really just starting this, and I suspect that trying to fuse neural networks with symbolic logic is a really interesting direction to try to explore.

that's kind of not what we're talking about. a pretty large fraction of the community thinks programming is stone cold over because we can talk to an LLM
and have it spit out some code that eventually compiles.

personally I think there will be a huge shift in the way things are done. it just won't look like Claude.
by dahart | 2026-01-11 23:18:52+00:00
There are lots of reasons you don’t see a lot of SDF skeletal rigging & animation in games. It’s harder because the distance evaluations get much more expensive when you attach a hierarchy of warps and transforms, and there are typically a lot of distance evaluations when doing ray-marching. This project reduces the cost by using a voxel cache, but animated stuff thwarts the caching, so you have to limit the amount of animation. Another reason it’s more difficult to rig & animate SDFs is because you only get a limited set of shapes that have analytic distance functions, or you have primitives and blending and warping that break Lipschitz conditions in your distance field, which is a fancy way of saying it’s easy to break the SDF and there are only limited and expensive ways to fix it. SDFs are much better at representing procedural content than the kind of mesh modeling involved in character animation and rendering.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-11 23:19:03+00:00
> For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they think of it.

Talk about a good thing coming from bad intentions! Congratulations on shaking that demon.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-11 23:19:39+00:00
I have two similar laptops, 840 g8 and 845 g8. The first is intel, the other amd.

The intel one had some kind of new touchpad, which doesn't work during the windows install. It was apparently some new thing introduced with intel's 11th gen, don't remember the specifics, but apparently other models had the same issue. Windows needs to connect to the internet to fetch drivers once installed, even 25h2 which I installed two weeks ago. Bonus points for the AMD ethernet dongle not being recognized, even though it's some random realtek, so I have to type my wifi password (my AP doesn't support wps). The AMD one works, even though the touchpads seem similar.

For a long time, the AMD's webcam didn't work. There's some USB doohickey that wasn't recognized (showed up with an exclamation point in device manager), and even installing all the drivers from HP's webpage didn't solve it. It solved itself somehow after some windows update two or three years later. Out of the box, it did have the webcam working, but the display brightness was somehow limited to "pretty dim". I was ready to write it off as just another crappy enterprise pc panel, but then I rebooted it into the bios and the thing burned a hole through my eyes. Installing windows manually fixed the backlight. Sleep on windows more often than not hangs for some reason, even now, 5 years in.

The intel had a long-standing issue with 4k output over its usb-c ports. At one point, installing the gpu driver from intel fixed it, but windows update would helpfully update it to an older, borken version. Nowadays we have 5k panels at work. I can only get 5k if the driver is initialized with the monitor connected. So if the screen goes to sleep, it won't run at 5k anymore when it wakes back up. Newer models don't seem to have this issue anymore.

Fortunately I'm only an occasional windows user, so don't care all that much. Everything worked perfectly under linux since day one, so apart from the comically bad display quality, I'm generally a happy camper.
by storus | 2026-01-11 23:20:02+00:00
I recently bought a MacStudio with 512GB of RAM and connected it to a LG 5k2k monitor. For some reason there was no way to change the font size (they removed the text size "Larger Text ... More Space" continuum from the Display section of settings) so I ended up with either super small or super large fonts without anything in-between. In the end I had to install some 3rd party software and mix my own scaled resolution with acceptable font size. This has never been a problem on Linux in the past 10 years, all I needed to do at worst when it wasn't done out of the box was to set scale somewhere and that was it.
by Anthony76 | 2026-01-11 23:20:12+00:00
One pattern I’ve noticed across tech (and especially crypto) is that the hardest part to predict isn’t what will happen, but how quickly trust compounds once a narrative starts aligning with real behavior.
We’ve seen this while working on long-term visibility and adoption for Web3 products at AixBoost.com — short-term spikes almost never validate predictions, but slow, consistent signals tend to confirm or kill them pretty decisively.
Curious which of your predictions you personally feel most uneasy about being wrong on.
by coldtea | 2026-01-11 23:20:20+00:00
>Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building.

Nope. It was coding. Enjoying the process itself.

If I wanted to hand out specs and review code (which is what an AI jockey does), I'd be having fucking project managers as role models, not coders...
by nephihaha | 2026-01-11 23:20:29+00:00
Norse colonisation tended to reflect their origin e.g. the Norwegians colonised the north west of Scotland and Iceland, which were more similar to Norway; Danes went to England and Normandy which were more southerly, flatter and more fertile, much like Denmark; the Swedes with their long Baltic coastline turned their attentions eastward.

Denmark got the North Atlantic islands through the union with Norway, and retained them after Norway became independent.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-11 23:20:40+00:00
Linux doesn't have much in the way of quality apps for people who aren't programmers, server administrators, or gamers.

Most people want to get productive work done with their computer, and OS X has top tier apps for every need possible.

No good e-mail app, no good office apps, no good calendar app, no good invoicing app, no good photo editing app, no good designer app, etc
by shamiln | 2026-01-11 23:21:01+00:00
Tailscsle was never the unlock for me, but I guess I never was the typical use case here.

I have a 1U (or more), sitting in a rack in a local datacenter. I have an IP block to myself.

Those servers are now publicly exposed and only a few ports are exposed for mail, HTTP traffic and SSH (for Git).

I guess my use case also changes in that I don’t use things just for me to consume, select others can consume services I host.

My definition here of self-hosting isn’t that I and I only can access my services; that’s be me having a server at home which has some non critical things on it.
by mbil | 2026-01-11 23:21:19+00:00
there's also https://github.com/cdarwin/go-koans for small go exercises.

you may have issues running in Docker; when i last touched this i needed to modify docker.sh:

-docker run --rm -ti -v "$PWD":/usr/src/koans -w /usr/src/koans golang:1.6.0-alpine go test
+docker run --rm -ti -e GO111MODULE=off -v "$PWD":/usr/src/koans -w /usr/src/koans golang:1.18-alpine go test
by drob518 | 2026-01-11 23:21:25+00:00
Apple really screwed the pooch on this last set of UI upgrades. They have been known as UI experts for decades and then they produced this unusable mess. I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad, but I’ve been delaying upgrading MacOS, hoping that they will fix most of the mess before I switch. If I was Tim Cook, I’d be looking for a scalp. This is as bad as the butterfly keyboard mess in terms of usability, IMO.
by noemit | 2026-01-11 23:21:58+00:00
I work at a similar rate to you and on 2 production projects and a number of prototypes daily. I don't pay anything outside the base subscription.

I don't find significant value in Claude Opus. It is slightly better at one-shotting, but not that much better to justify the cost. I've switched to Cursor "auto" mode - I don't pay anything on top of the base subscription cost, I am more diligent with my prompts and use Plan mode a lot and am just as productive if not more.
by froggit | 2026-01-11 23:22:01+00:00
Ditto. Coding isn't what i specifically do, but it's something i will choose to do when it's the most efficient solution to a problem. I have no problem describing what i need a program to do and how it should do so in a way that could be understandable even to a small child or clever golden retriever, but i'm not so great at the part where you pull out that syntactic sugar and get to turning people words into computer words. LLMs tend to do a pretty good job at translating languages regardless of whether i'm talking to a person or using a code editor, but i don't want them deciding what i wanted to say for me.
by -_- | 2026-01-11 23:22:45+00:00
Author here!
1a. LLMs fundamentally model probability distributions of token sequences—those are the (normalized) logits from the last linear layer of a transformer. The closest thing to ablating temperature is T=0 or T=1 sampling.
1b. Yes, you can do something like this, for instance by picking the temperature where perplexity is minimized. Perplexity is the exponential of entropy, to continue the thermodynamic analogy.
1c. Higher than for most AI written text, around 1.7. I've experimented with this as a metric for distinguishing whether text is written by AI. Human-written text doesn't follow a constant-temperature softmax distribution, either.

2b. Giving an LLM control over its own sampling parameters sounds like it would be a fun experiment! It could have dynamic control to write more creatively or avoid making simple mistakes.
2c. This would produce nonsense. The tokens you get with negative temperature sampling are "worse than random"
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-11 23:22:56+00:00
I guess you don't play chess and are fine with volunteering other people to take unwise risks from the safety of behind a keyboard.

> The thing that gives the president [sic] power is the constitution [sic].

False, that is a piece of paper and a symbol that means lots of different things to different people, especially those who have never read it. What gives power is people. He assumed plenary power that was made "legal" after the fact by a partisan hack SCOTUS.

That's what he wants. An excuse to declare martial law and become emperor for however much life he has left.

> Any effort to proceed with this crime should just mean that people depose the president. Impeachment and conviction are not the only ways to remove a president.

What must be done must follow existing legal procedures or it would be completely lawless, hypocritical, counterproductive, and more divisive. There isn't much difference in terribleness between a pariah former superpower ruled by an emperor or its dissolved fragments. Neither of these are acceptable. The path is straightforward and unavoidable: continuous and overwhelming pressure by constituents on all elected cowards until they accept impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate. This is the only way. What you talk about maybe good for you to watch the world burn but not for hundreds of millions of Americans. It will however result in POTUS Vance, who is crazy but not nearly as stupid and crazy by orders of magnitude and lacks the support of the entire crazy base, which would limit his power. If he should prove dangerously unfit, he can be impeached too.

We the People are the ultimate bosses, not the man in the chair.
by talideon | 2026-01-11 23:23:10+00:00
I'm still using my decade-old Precision 5510 (the XPS 15 at the time was a variant of it), and I've rarely felt the need to replace it, beyond Nvidia no longer supporting the discrete graphics as of last year.

There was a period around Project Sputnik where they were making really good machines. Years of abuse, and it's still in good condition, though the battery has been showing its age lately.

It's rather sad that things have gone downhill since then, as there was a period there that Dell were really good.
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-11 23:23:35+00:00
I have both; for embedded and backend I prefer entering code; once in the flow, I produce results faster and feel more confident everything is correct. for frontend (except games), i find everything annoying and a waste of time manually, as do all my colleagues. LLMs really made this excellent for our team and myself. I like doing UX, but I like drawing it with a pen and paper and then do experiments with controls/components until it works. This is now all super fast (I usually can just take photo of my drawings and claude makes it work) and we get excellent end results that clients love.
by perihelions | 2026-01-11 23:23:42+00:00
This is a misidentification:

> "The CTC-1 constellation proposes to be at 510 km altitude and 97.4 degrees inclination[0]"

That's an unrelated "CTC-1"; your reference [0] describes American CubeSats. This isn't the Chinese megaconstellation that was just announced; it's a name collision.

The CTC-1 in your link is identified as a trio of CubeSats assigned to the SpaceX rideshare mission Transporter 15. Cross-referencing, SpaceX does show of trio of small satellites by the name "CTC-1" (a,b,c) launched on Transporter 15, on Nov. 28, 2025,

https://www.spacex.com/launches/transporter-15 ("Transporter-15 Mission")
by p_l | 2026-01-11 23:24:05+00:00
My understanding is that issues in scaling 68k line were already well known by then, same as with VAX (even if crucial people at Digital didn't want to believe).

The difference is that 68k was ubiquitous, reasonably cheap 32bit capable platform with MMU that had huge availability of parts and made porting software easy. Sun was working with 68k partially because they chose it in 1980, a year after it was made available, and by 1986 they published SPARC ISA and shipped first systems a year later