MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mavamaarten | 2026-01-04 11:13:59+00:00
Yeah, fractional scaling is absolutely the one thing that I miss on Linux. On X11 it's too slow and laggy. On Wayland I have... Wayland issues.

I don't entirely love MacOS (mostly because I can't run it on my desktop, lol). But it does fractional scaling so well, I always choose the "looks like 1440p" scaling on 4K resolution, and literally every app looks perfect and consistent and I don't notice any performance impact.

On windows the same thing, except some things are blurry.

On Linux yeah I just have to bear huge UI (x2 scaling) or tiny UI (X1) or live with a noticeable performance delay that's just too painful to work with.
by casualscience | 2026-01-04 11:14:01+00:00
Yeah I hear you. My understanding is that on youtube you can make ~2k per 1M views with the default ads. I'm hoping that I can be funded by some combination of that and something like patreon/membership/merch. But we will see, it's something I've wanted to do for years and I am getting too old to put off longer.
by deng | 2026-01-04 11:14:11+00:00
And again, yes, by the original definition of NAT in RFC1631, you are technically correct, which as we all know is the best kind of correctness and will move things forward. However, here in the real world, practically all NAT implementations are stateful and ignore (effectively: drop) incoming packets for which no corresponding connection can be found, meaning they do "NAT filtering" as "defined" (it's not really defined there) by RFC4787. When we say "this box here is doing NAT" everyone expects this behavior. To call this "NAT and firewall" is pointless semantics, and even the people writing RFCs agree here, which is quite something. You will see that RFC4787 says "This section describes various filtering behaviors observed in NATs", and they also say that NATs provide "firewall behaviors" without calling it "a firewall".
by zeta0134 | 2026-01-04 11:14:25+00:00
KDE Plasma switched to Wayland by default sometime last year, and so far the main issue I run into is that a few screen recording tools I like stopped working. (Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point.) Other than some initial instability with accelerated rendering on my GPU, which was quickly addressed, it kinda just works. I mostly don't notice.

Actually, GPU acceleration was why I initially switched. For whatever reason, this GPU (Radeon VII) crashes regularly under X11 nearly every time I open a new window, but is perfectly stable under wayland. Really frustrating! So, I had some encouragement, and I was waiting for plasma-wayland to stabilize enough to try it properly. I still have the X11 environment installed as a fallback, just in case, but I haven't needed to actually use it for months.

Minor pain points so far mostly include mouse acceleration curves being different and screen capture being slightly more annoying. Most programs do this OS-level popup and then so many follow that up with their own rectangle select tool after I already did that. I had some issues with sdl2-compat as well, but I'm not sure that was strictly wayland's fault, and it cleared up on its own after a round of updates. (I develop an SDL2 game that needs pretty low latency audio sync to run smoothly)
by xzjis | 2026-01-04 11:16:05+00:00
As a free-software advocate, I believe competition should be based on investment in industrial machinery and labour, not on secretly guarded know-how. If Samsung, Micron, and SK-Electronics weren't an oligopoly trying to squeeze maximum profit out of consumers and instead offered good prices, China wouldn't be able to—and would have no interest in—subsidizing private companies to get them on the same level. It's only the greed of these three companies in their oligopoly that has put them in such a fragile position, where the slightest competition could be fatal to them.
by lucketone | 2026-01-04 11:18:21+00:00
It is irrelevant, if both are available as base package.

I guess you want to point out that choices are subjective.

That subjectivity is relevant within their classes (air—food-water, security-health-plumbing-heating, smartphone-car-vacation, yaht-designerBrands)
Definitely there will be one person who choses to die, just to get latest smartphone, but most people will not.

These classes get less clear/useful as you go up, but most people will agree on the basics.

Tangent: it is important for me personally for my neighbour to have the basics (and more), as that increases my basics like security, sanitary conditions.
Show HN: I built a 5-app Monorepo CRM on a single Convex back end
by hamzasaleem | 2026-01-04 11:18:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I've spent the last 2 years building a CRM suite (Client Commander) to compete with HubSpot.

It’s a Turborepo monorepo powering 5 distinct apps (Web Dashboard, iOS, Android, Marketing, Admin) all syncing state in real-time from a single Convex backend.

The Tech Stack:
* Backend: Convex (1.28.0) - handles all real-time subscriptions and optimistic updates.
* Repo: Turborepo for shared UI packages and type-safety across web/mobile.
* Mobile: React Native (Expo) sharing 60% of code with the web app.
* AI: Python agents for lead scoring (running on Modal).

Why I'm sharing:
I recently realized that while I love the architecture (building the "Context Graph" and real-time engines), I don't enjoy the sales/marketing side of running a SaaS. I'm currently looking to pivot back to a Senior/Principal IC role, so I thought I'd share the architecture here as a case study in how far you can push a "Backend-as-a-Service" today.

Happy to answer questions about the monorepo setup or Convex limits!

Link: https://clientcommander.com
by skeledrew | 2026-01-04 11:18:45+00:00
It may not be the grand unifier if they aren't willing to compromise. Currently I'd say conda is the "grand unifier", giving users 100% what they ask for artifacts-wise, albeit rather slowly. On the other hand, uv provides things super fast, but those things may break 5% of the time in unusual ways on unusual configs. I have no issue using both for the fullest experience.
by noduerme | 2026-01-04 11:19:16+00:00
The entire purpose of answering questions as an "expert" on S.O. is/was to help educate people who were trying to learn how to solve problems mostly on their own. The goal isn't to solve the immediate problem, it's to teach people how to think about the problem so that they can solve it themselves the next time. The use of AI to solve problems for you completely undermines that ethos of doing it yourself with the minimum amount of targeted, careful questions possible.
by mayflowjay | 2026-01-04 11:19:20+00:00
I appreciate that :) Thanks for replying.

Those storage.googleapis.com URLs are just Supabase Storage (it sits on Google Cloud Storage). I’m not using it for anything user related or anything like that, it’s mostly static stuff + app data. Not sure how to get around that, unless I host everything myself, which I dont have the capacity to do.

jwnozfjzczoufsdzwfvd.supabase.co is just the Supabase project endpoint (db/auth/storage).
by mytailorisrich | 2026-01-04 11:20:06+00:00
Reunite is not incorrect in the broader sense.

We use the term "reunification" for Germany but the Federal Republic never "held territory" in the Democratic Republic. However, of course both states were the result of a split of "Germany". This is the same with the ROC and PRC so bringing both sides together, whatever the mean, is a reunification in that sense.

The narrative of rejecting the term can be said to be broadly propaganda but plays on a peculiarity that both sides don't recognise each others.
by whilenot-dev | 2026-01-04 11:21:55+00:00
That seems like a horrible core idea. How is that different from data labeling or model evaluation?

Human beings want to help out other human beings, spread knowledge and might want to get recognition for it. Manually correcting (3 different) automation efforts seems like incredible monotone, unrewarding labour for a race to the bottom. Nobody should spend their time correcting AI models without compensation.
by safety1st | 2026-01-04 11:22:11+00:00
Looks to me like he's a belligerent personality, but probably not wrong when he says Redhat has an agenda that involves suppressing progress on Xorg and forcing Wayland on users instead.

I was open minded toward Wayland when the project was started... in 2008. We are 18 years down the road now. It has failed to deliver a usable piece of software for the desktop. That's long enough for me to consider it a failed project. If it still exists, it's probably for the wrong reasons (or at the least, reasons unrelated to any version of desktop Linux I want to run, like perhaps it has use in the embedded space).
by carra | 2026-01-04 11:22:39+00:00
I find this quite worrying: with this much decline SO might end up disappearing. This would be a very bad thing because in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments. Also, this seems to imply that most people will just accept the solutions proposed by LLMs without checking them, or ever talking about the subject with other humans.
by Bender | 2026-01-04 11:23:50+00:00
Good article. One thing I would add is that the public key carries just as much risk as the private key in the way they are used in SSH key trusts. Every public key added to authorized keys must be audited and tied back to a real person otherwise anyone that can temporarily get root access can shim their public key into the authorized keys and get access later on long after logs have rotated out. This mapping has to be done by a checksum of the public key, not the comment. Anyone can change a comment. I know people make the argument "well if someone had root its game over" but that is a bit disingenuous and incomplete as it pertains to how ssh implements identity as there isn't one. Prosecuting someone requires forensics and subtle changes to a system can mitigate the forensic process. Not managing identity attestation of public keys can get the wrong people thrown in prison or cost them a lot of money in lawyers. This is not a theory, I have witnessed this go horribly sideways.
by kace91 | 2026-01-04 11:24:02+00:00
This is a bit hard to read. I get the information that the study is trying to communicate, and I think it is an elephant in the room in academic circles.

The problem is that reading the study feels very hostile towards the subjects, which combined with the interpretable terms of evaluation (“oversimplified terms”) gives an impression of the author just wanting to deprecate the students.

Including phrases like “breathing hard for two minutes” or “chair creaking” in the transcript pushes that idea further. It does not picture an environment where the students would be comfortable stopping to think for a while or checking sources.

Also, the choice of Dickens as the single used material, while reasonable as potential assigned material to the students, seems again like a setup against the students, because its difficulty lies precisely in the period references and social satire.

It’s an author whose difficulty increases with each passing generation as the context becomes more foreign due to time passed.
by leourbina | 2026-01-04 11:24:36+00:00
Venezuelan here. It’s not that simple: Maduro was an _absolutely_ horrible dictator and yes many Venezuelans (myself included, and likely many of the 8+ million that left) are overjoyed with him being ousted, we haven’t seen any change in over two decades. And yet, it is transparently clear that the Trump admin is here not to save Venezuela, or Venezuelans… it’s here to line its pockets and that of its shareholders.

There was a very evident omission during Trump’s press conference: Any mention of Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, the duly elected president-elect of Venezuela (who won with a super majority last July - backed by Maria Corina Machado). Instead, Trump bad mouthed Maria Corina saying that “she does not have the support or respect of the country to run it”. They ousted Maduro, but they kept his VP (Delcy Rodriguez - which along other things is in charge of running the torture centers for political prisoners) as “she will do anything we ask her”. Trump doesn’t care about democracy or regime change - these things take time and are a long, thorny road (this wouldn’t be the US’ first rodeo). Instead they’ve chosen to keep the regime obedient with the threat of force, and instead just come in and extract as many riches as humanly possible…

Dark times ahead for Venezuela and the Venezuelan people
by andy99 | 2026-01-04 11:24:45+00:00
Is “inference time computation” as discussed here different from reasoning / thinking models? I didn’t see the difference.

I do agree benchmarks are becoming irrelevant - individual benchmarks as well as the whole concept of benchmarking imo is getting saturated, certainly for automated benchmarks.

As a stopgap, I see more manual review being important, same as more manual data citation. LLMs are circling the local maximum of what automatic evals based on automatically processes training data can get you.

I also think we need to look beyond the idea of a “standardized test” to measure intelligence and capability.
by xvector | 2026-01-04 11:24:46+00:00
> then you’ve effectively endorsed a world where power, not law, decides regime change.

This has always been the case throughout the vast majority of human history including current day.

You are sovereign if you can prove it, and you aren't sovereign if you can't.

"International law" is something superpowers ignore at will. It is not "wrong" or "right", it simply is.
by jsheard | 2026-01-04 11:25:17+00:00
Not to mention that fractional scaling is practically required in order to use the majority of higher DPI monitors on the market today. Manufacturers have settled on 4K at 27" or 32" as the new standard, which lends itself to running at around 150% scale, so to avoid fractional scaling you either need to give up on high DPI or pay >2x as much for a niche 5K monitor which only does 60hz.
by atombender | 2026-01-04 11:26:00+00:00
Is C3 using a different terminology than standard design by contract?

Design by contract (as implemented by Eiffel, Ada, etc.) divides the set of conditions into three: Preconditions, postconditions, and invariants. Pre- and postconditions are not invariants by predicate checks on input and output parameters.

Invariants are conditions expressed on types, and which must be checked on construction and modification. E.g. for a "time range" struct with start/end dates, the invariant should be that the start must precede the end.
by the_why_of_y | 2026-01-04 11:26:39+00:00
Examples of other operating systems allegedly not designed by professionals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager

The Desktop Window Manager is a compositing window manager, meaning that each program has a buffer that it writes data to; DWM then composites each program's buffer into a final image.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040925095929/http://developer....

The Quartz Compositor layer of Mac OS X comprises the window server and the (private) system programming interfaces (SPI) implemented by the window server. In this layer are the facilities responsible for rudimentary screen displays, window compositing and management, event routing, and cursor management.

The window server is a single system-wide process that coordinates low-level windowing behavior and enforces a fundamental uniformity in what appears on the screen. It is a lightweight server in that it does not do any rendering itself, but instead communicates with the client graphics libraries layered on top of it. It is “agnostic” in terms of a drawing model.

The window server has few dependencies on other system services and libraries. It relies on the kernel environment’s I/O Kit (specifically, device drivers built with the I/O Kit) in order to communicate with the frame buffer, the input infrastructure, and input and output devices.
by indubioprorubik | 2026-01-04 11:26:42+00:00
? The arab spring came from the islamic world regularly building population powder kegs, without having a modern industrial society to keep these populations educated, fed and with a perspective beyond fanatic death-cultist movements.

The arab spring exploded, because obama rerouted us-surplus food from subsidizing allied regimes (egypt) into bio-fuels, causing wild price spikes to the bread prices in egypt and the arab world. These situations are not really comparable - like at all. Not even on the surface level.
by bloak | 2026-01-04 11:27:05+00:00
This reference to Enid Blyton in that article seems somewhat misleading: "A month later, it was announced Enid Blyton's works would be expurgated as well."

It's my understanding that the books released under the Enid Blyton trademark have been continuously revised ever since they were first published, which was long before 2023.

Take a look at any recent Enid Blyton book: there's lots of references to the trademark but no claim that the text was written by a natural person with that name. Some of the books may have been ghostwritten and the Wikipedia article on "Enid Blyton" says: "updated versions of her books have continued to be popular since her death in 1968".

So there's nothing new about updating books. I suppose the problem was that some people wanted Roald Dahl to be treated like a proper author rather than a brand. Enid Blyton has been a brand for decades.
by stavros | 2026-01-04 11:28:39+00:00
Oh man, the nostalgia of buying magazines that came with shareware CDs (we didn't have the internet back then where I lived) and going to a net cafe for half an hour to download cracks, because we obviously didn't have any way to either procure or send USD half way around the world...

It was a magical time mostly because computers were full of possibilities. Someone gave me a CD with Visual Basic 4 and I figured out programming just from reading the help files. I still have no idea how I managed to stumble my way through to actually making real programs.
by noduerme | 2026-01-04 11:29:07+00:00
I mean, I'm curious what kind of code it's saving you time on. For me, it's worse than useless, because no prompt I could write would really account for the downwind effects in systems that have (1) multiple databases with custom schema, (2) a back-end layer doing user validations while dispatching data, (3) front-end visual effects / art / animation that the LLM can't see or interpret, all working in harmony. Those may be in 4 different languages, but the LLM really just can't get a handle on what's going on well enough. Just ends up hitting its head on a wall or writing mostly garbage.

I have not memorized all the docs to JS, TS, PHP, Python, SCSS, C++, and flavors of SQL. I have an intuition about what question I need to ask, if I can't figure something out on my own, and occasionally an LLM will surface the answer to that faster than I can find it elsewhere... but they are nowhere near being able to write code that you could confidently deploy in a professional environment.
by mitchell209 | 2026-01-04 11:29:49+00:00
That was the first thing I noticed when I recently went back to messing with Linux distros after 15 years. Booting into Ubuntu and having to use Gnome Tweaks or whatever it’s called for basic customizations was incredibly confusing considering Linux is touted as being the customizable and personal OS. I doubt I’ll ever give Gnome another try after that.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-04 11:33:02+00:00
As per the conclusions of that great video, going back before Pong and defining a "first" video game depends heavily on your definition of both "video" and "game"

See also Wikipedia's overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_video_games

If you want Tennis for Two (1958) to be first, you have to introduce criteria that excludes
OXO (1952), Checkers (1952), and Sheep and Gates (1952)
by ur-whale | 2026-01-04 11:33:28+00:00
I must say:

1) Hugely enjoyable content - as usual - by Michael Stapelberg: relevant, detailed, organized, well written.

2) I am also an X11 + i3 user (and huge thanks to Michael for writing i3, I'm soooo fast with it), I also keep trying wayland on a regular basis because I don't want to get stuck using deprecated software.

I am very, very happy to read this article, if only because it proves I'm not the only one and probably not crazy.

Same experience he has: everytime I try wayland ... unending succession of weird glitches and things that plain old don't work.

Verdict: UNUSABLE.

I am going to re-iterate something I've said on HN many times: the fact that X11 has designs flaws is a well understood and acknowledged fact.

So is the fact that a new solution is needed.

BUT, because Wayland is calling themselves the new shite supposed to be that solution DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN they actually managed to solve the problem.

As a matter of fact, in my book, after so many years, they completely and utterly failed, and they should rethink the whole thing from scratch.

And certainly not claim they're the replacement until they have reached feature and ease of use parity.

Which they haven't as Michael's article clearly points out.
by lazarus01 | 2026-01-04 11:33:33+00:00
I like Karpathy, we come from the same lineage and I am very proud of him for what he's accomplished, he's a very impressive guy.

In regards to deep learning, building deep learning architecture is one of my greatest joys in finding insights from perceptual data. Right now, I'm working on spatiotemporal data modeling to build prediction systems for urban planning to improve public transportation systems. I build ML infrastructure too and plan to release an app that deploys the model in the wild within event streams of transit systems.

It took me a month to master the basics and I've spent a lot of time with online learning, with Deeplearning.ai and skills.google. Deeplearning.ai is ok, but I felt the concepts a bit dated. The ML path at skills.google is excellent and gives a practical understanding of ML infrastructure, optimization and how to work with gpus and tpus (15x faster than gpus).

But the best source of learning for me personally and makes me a confident practitioner is the book by Francois Chollet, the creator of Keras. His book, "Deep Learning with Python", really removed any ambiguity I've had about deep learning and AI in general. Francois is extremely generous in how he explains how deep learning works, over the backdrop of 70 years of deep learning research. Francois keeps it updated and the third revision was made in September 2025 - its available online for free if you don't want to pay for it. He gives you the recipe for building a GPT and Diffusion models, but starts from the ground floor basics of tensor operations and computation graphs. I would go through it again from start to finish, it is so well written and enjoyable to follow.

The most important lesson he discusses is that "Deep learning is more of an art than a science". To get something working takes a good amount of practice and the results on how things work can't always be explained.

He includes notebooks with detailed code examples with Tensorflow, Pytorch and Jax as back ends.

Deep learning is a great skill to have. After reading this book, I can recreate scientific abstracts and deploy the models into production systems. I am very grateful to have these skills and I encourage anyone with deep curiosity like me to go all in on deep learning.
What do people usually do with spare Android phones? Any practical use cases?
by AndroidShare | 2026-01-04 11:34:40+00:00
I’ve been thinking about practical ways people reuse spare or unused Android devices instead of letting them sit in a drawer.

I’ve seen cases where phones are used for testing, monitoring, background tasks, or other always-online purposes after a one-time setup. No user interaction, just keeping the device connected and running.

Curious what real-world use cases others have actually found useful.
Are there setups that worked well long-term, or things to avoid?

Not trying to promote anything here — genuinely interested in how people approach this.