MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-12 01:03:35+00:00
Tried 3 months ago with Gnome (PopOS) and a 4k screen at 125% scaling, apps were blurry, especially Brave, which was a big disappointment.

I give Linux a try each time I need to set up a new computer, and each time run into new issues. Last time (2 years ago) the hdmi connection with the screen would drop randomly twice a day. Same for the keyboard, and the wifi card didn't have drivers available. It became quite annoying, reducing my productivity as I had to reboot and pray. I then installed Windows, which solved all of the issues (unfortunately?)

Maybe I'm just unlucky.
by williamcotton | 2026-01-12 01:04:03+00:00
Over the last few days I made this ggplot2-looking plotting DSL as a CLI tool and a Rust library.

https://github.com/williamcotton/gramgraph

The motivation? I needed a declarative plotting language for another DSL I'm working on called Web Pipe:

GET /weather.svg
|> fetch: `https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=52.52&longitude=13.41&hourly=temperature_2m`
|> jq: `
.data.response.hourly as $h |
[$h.time, $h.temperature_2m] | transpose | map({time: .[0], temp: .[1]})
`
|> gg({ "type": "svg", "width": 800, "height": 400} ): `
aes(x: time, y: temp)
| line()
| point()
`

"Web Pipe is an experimental DSL and Rust runtime for building web apps via composable JSON pipelines, featuring native integration of GraphQL, SQL, and jq, an embedded BDD testing framework, and a sophisticated Language Server."

https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe

https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp

https://williamcotton.com/articles/basic-introduction-to-web...

I've been working at quite a clip for a solo developer who is building a new language with a full featured set of tooling.

I'd like to think that the approach to building the BDD-testing framework directly into the language itself and having the test runner using the production request handlers is at least somewhat novel!

GET /hello/:world
|> jq: `{ world: .params.world }`
|> handlebars: `<p>hello, {{world}}</p>`

describe "hello, world"
it "calls the route"
let world = "world"

when calling GET /hello/{{world}}
then status is 200
and selector `p` text equals "hello, {{world}}"

I'm married with two young kids and I have a full-time job. Before these tools there was no way I could build all of these experiments with such limited resources.
by npodbielski | 2026-01-12 01:04:06+00:00
That is looks interesting. An idea to configure server on run via symtemd would probably mean that migrating from machine to machine would be very easy. It always meant for me at least two days of carefull planning, copying od files testing and fixes because I always forgot about some obscure config changes I did somewhere, like adding DNS entry somewhere or disabling default SMTP on debian.
by protocolture | 2026-01-12 01:04:21+00:00
"What they do to obtain" ah nice goal post shift.

When legally obtained, training is fine. Training doesnt violate copyright. Unauthorised copying and distribution does. Which is why OpenAI should have just paid for physical copies of all those books and scanned them.

>We just need a very old system about copyright to catch up already so we can ban the practice.

No we really don't need copyright to get worse. Its pretty damn harmful as it is.
by rvz | 2026-01-12 01:04:52+00:00
> that’s not what I said. you honestly seem like you just want to argue about stuff (e.g. not elaborating on the “no” when I basically repeated and agreed with what you said). and you seem to consistently miss my point

I have repeated myself many times and you decide to continue to ignore the reliability points that inherently impede LLMs in many use-cases which exclude them in areas where predictability in critical systems is required in production.

Vibe coders can use them, but the gulf between useful for prototyping and useful for production is riddled with hard obstacles as such a software like LLMs are fundamentally unpredictable hence the risks are far greater.

> I’m saying these non-deterministic neural networks are already widespread in industry with these regulations, and it’s fine.

So when a neural network scales beyond hundreds of layers and billions of parameters, equivalent to a production-grade LLM, explain exactly how is such a black-box on that scale explainable when it messes up and goes wrong?

> they can be explained despite your repeated assertions they cannot be.

With what methods exactly?

Early on, I said formal verification and testing on CPUs for explaining when they go wrong at scale. It is you that provided absolutely nothing of your own assertions with the equivalent for LLMs other than "they can be explained" without providing any evidence.

> also the entire point on CPUs which you may have noticed I dropped from my responses because you seemed distracted arguing about it). this is not productive and we’re both clearly stubborn, glhf

You did not make any point with that as it was a false equivalence, and I explained why the reliability of a CPU isn't the same as the reliability of a LLM.
by jonquest | 2026-01-12 01:04:55+00:00
iMessage, Apple Pay (w/Touch ID), native Apple Music client, iCloud (if you're invested in the iCloud ecosystem) along with its seamless integrations with photo apps like Photomator (among others), shared music and movie library across my Mac, iPhone, and Apple TV.

There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of right now. Point is, if you're an iOS, macOS, and iCloud user you give up a lot of quality of life bits going to another platform. There are times I want to go back to Linux, but when I think about the stuff I'm going to loose I talk myself out of it. macOS isn't the greatest, but it's not the worst either and Apple's products and services just tie in very well with each other. I get annoyed by things like the shitty support for non-apple peripherals, needing 3rd party apps to make them work decent, crappy scaling except on the most expensive monitors and no decent font smoothing when running at native resolutions. But... I stick with it because I either like or love the tight integration and added quality of life that comes with it.
by jayofdoom | 2026-01-12 01:05:26+00:00
Thanks for posting this! It's been a nice first year as a Gentoo developer. Everyone has been kind and helpful to me as I've been figuring things out.

I want to highlight something: Gentoo's developer onboarding system is EXCELLENT. Starting as an active member of the general community, you talk an existing developer into being your mentor and fill out an open book test ( https://projects.gentoo.org/comrel/recruiters/quizzes/ebuild... ) which later is graded/corrected in a couple of meetings which I'd equate to the "job interview". I wish more open source projects (including my own) had such well-documented, straightforward processes to gain commit access. I appreciated the process of doing the quiz as it helped me close gaps in my knowledge.
by c-hendricks | 2026-01-12 01:06:02+00:00
I build a lot of custom tools, things with like a couple of users. I get a lot of personal satisfaction writing that code.

I think comments on YouTube like "anyone still here in $CURRENT_YEAR" are low effort noise, I don't care about learning how to write a web extension (web work is my day job) so I got Claude to write one for me. I don't care who wrote it, I just wanted it to exist.
by rafabulsing | 2026-01-12 01:06:11+00:00
I'm not a self-driving believer (never had the opportunity to try it, actually), but I'd say bad traffic would be the number one case where I'd want it. I don't mind highway driving, or city driving if traffic is good, but stop and go traffic is torture to me. I'd much rather just be on my phone, or read a book or something.

Agreed that public transportation is usually the best option in either case, though.
by netsharc | 2026-01-12 01:06:12+00:00
Semi-related: Windows EXE files are runnable in DOS (at least when DOS was a thing, so for Windows 3.1x or 9x), but most of the time the DOS part just prints "This program requires Microsoft Windows." and exits. An exception is regedit.exe, that one can use to import registry values even in DOS. (Huh, although, how does it do that without using Windows API?)
by jmyeet | 2026-01-12 01:06:55+00:00
Nuclear is never getting cheap [1]. Nuclear reactors need to be large to scale [2]. As for why SMR persists? Because someone makes money selling the idea. That's it.

And SMRs get sold is the very idea you state because it sounds compelling: the more you build, the cheaper it gets.

Nuclear seems like it should work. But there are massive unsolved problems like the waste from fuel processing, processing the spent fuel, who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents. Despite there being <700 nuclear reactors built we've had multiple catastrophic failures. Chernobyl still has a 1000 square mile absolute exclusion zone. Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.

Yet this all gets hand-waved away. Renewable is the future.

[1]: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/csiro-confirms-n...

[2]: https://spitfireresearch.com/scaling-example-1-small-modular...
by orwin | 2026-01-12 01:07:04+00:00
Discovery of the axles and roads.

The 'wheel' itself was discovered everywhere. Round things are easier to move, but you need an axle to make it useful. And roads or flat terrain to make use of that. Incas had pulley systems, which indicates they could probably have built an axle quite easily too, but had no use for it, because, well, no flat roads.

And even then Northern Manchurians knew about the wheel for sure, and knew about roads, but still used sleds until at least the Russian conquest.

Sorry, I'm quite boring about this, but it bothers me when people talk about 'inventing the wheel' like it was something special. The wheel itself is meh. The axles are what makes it usable, and the roads make it useful.
by jaime-ez | 2026-01-12 01:08:11+00:00
has any one experience using cloudflare tunnels in a (small scale - 5000 user/day) self hosted web service? I just got 2 dynabook XJ-40 (32 gb ram, 512 gb ssd) for 200 usd each and I'm going to replace my DO droplets with them (usd150+ per month). I plan to use cloudflare tunnel to make the service available to the internet without exposing my home network. Any downsides ? (besides that cloudflare will be MITM for the service but it is not a privacy focused business)
by sdenton4 | 2026-01-12 01:08:18+00:00
The quadratic attention problem seems to be largely solved by practical algorithmic improvements. (Iterations on flash attention, etc.)

What's practically limiting context size IME is that results seem to get "muddy" and get off track when you have a giant context size. For a single-topic long session, I imagine you get a large number of places in the context which may be good matches for a given query, leading to ambiguous results.

I'm also not sure how much work is being put into reinforcement in extremely large context inference, as it's presumably quite expensive to do and hard to reliably test.
by rossu | 2026-01-12 01:08:27+00:00
> ... stop telling me that instead of interacting with the compiler directly its absolutely necessary that instead I describe what I want to a well meaning idiot, and patiently correct them, even though they are going to forget everything I just said in a moment.

This perfectly describes the main problem I have with the coding agents. We are told we should move from explicit control and writing instructions for the machine to pulling the slot lever over and over and "persuading the machine" hoping for the right result.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-12 01:09:27+00:00
> What I know not to be true is the idea that similar strategies would not work also in C.

Is your argument that developers at MS and Google haven’t been trying to employ these strategies for existing C codebases? It’s a bold position to take and one I’d say devoid of evidence; all the evidence suggests it’s really hard to reason about ownership in complex systems and abstractions only help you do so error free up to a very limited point.
by Anamon | 2026-01-12 01:09:37+00:00
The response may be tired when asked in this personal way, but in general, it's a fair question. Nobody is forced to share their work. But with all the high praises, we'd expect to see at least some uptick in the software world. But there is no surge in open source projects. No surge in app store entries. And for the bigger companies claiming high GenAI use, they're not iterating faster or building more. They are continually removing features and their software is getting worse, slower, less robust, and less secure.

Software quality has been on a step downwards curve as far as quality and capabilities are concerned, for years before LLM coding had its breakthrough. For all the promises I'd have expected to, three years later, at least notice the downward trajectory easing off. But it hasn't been happening.
by advael | 2026-01-12 01:10:05+00:00
Yea I think my own preference for self-hosting boils down to a distrust of a continuous dependency on a service in control of a company and a desire to minimize such dependencies. While there are FOSS and self-hostable alternatives to tailscale or indeed claude code, using those services themselves simply replaces old dependencies on externally-controlled cloud-based services on new ones
by rescrv | 2026-01-12 01:10:16+00:00
I appreciate you saying something. As you'll read in the book, I've got a project going to primarily help myself, but to date it's been 100% open-source.

I haven't been able to be consistent enough to both pay the bills and volunteer and work on the open source, so I focus on the former.

Would you mind saying more about what you do every day? For me, I anchor myself for at least a set time; when I sit during that time, nothing can touch me and I can deconstruct symptoms to recover any deviation from baseline.
by tzs | 2026-01-12 01:11:13+00:00
EvD is a good illustration of how we were more resilient against crackpots back then.

His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it.

We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine.

But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff.

Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things.

Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories.

Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-12 01:11:13+00:00
The culture of Rust is pretty uniform both in terms of convention (lots of good examples to learn from) and automated tooling (eg cargo clippy can fix many constructs into cleaner versions).

But sure, ultimately any code you see is limited by the talent of the author. However the safety of that code is not - it’s limited by how many unsafe blocks they wrote which you can actually grep for.
by AndyKelley | 2026-01-12 01:11:54+00:00
Thank you for the kind words.

> every line of C/Zig is unsafe

This is trivially false... for instance here's a line:

const pi = 3.14;

It's actually a pretty small subset of the language that can cause unchecked illegal behavior.

Also IMO the word "safety" should include integer overflow. I don't agree that those kind of bugs are so unimportant as to not be checked in safe builds.
Show HN: Web CLI v0.2.4 – Added YAML/JSON validators with auto-fix
by polinux | 2026-01-12 01:12:19+00:00
*New in v0.2.4:*

- YAML Validator with auto-fix (tabs→spaces, indentation, colon-in-value quoting)
- JSON Validator with jsonrepair (fixes trailing commas, comments, mismatched braces)
- Monaco Editor (VS Code engine) with syntax highlighting
- Diff view showing exactly what was fixed
by LexiMax | 2026-01-12 01:12:58+00:00
groan

> When dealing with class hierarchies, destructive move semantics becomes problematic. If you move the base first, then the source has a constructed derived part and a destructed base part. If you move the derived part first then the target has a constructed derived part and a not-yet-constructed base part. Neither option seems viable. Several solutions to this dilemma have been explored.

Add this to my "C++ chose the wrong kind of polymorphism to make first-class" tally.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-12 01:13:03+00:00
By 2011 Rust has a logo (basically its current logo), and it has a compiler written in Rust (a distant ancestor of today's main Rust compiler). It's approaching Rust 0.1 (released January 2012 apparently) which is a very different language from Rust 1.0 -- but that's a long way from "there was no Rust in 2011" to my mind.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-12 01:13:08+00:00
Hey, if tailscale is something you are worried about. There are open source alternatives to it as well but I think if your purpose is to just port forward a simple server port, wouldn't ssh in general itself be okay with you.

You can even self host tailscale via headscale but I don't know how the experience goes but there are some genuine open source software like netbird,zerotier etc. as well

You could also if interested just go the normal wireguard route. It really depends on your use case but for you in this case, ssh use case seems normal.

You could even use this with termux in android + ssh access via dropbear I think if you want. Tailscale is mainly for convenience tho and not having to deal with nats and everything

But I feel like your home server might be behind a nat and in that case, what I recommend you to do is probably A) run it in tor or https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm which uses iroh's instance but you can self host it too or B (recommended): Get a unlimited traffic cheap vps (I recommend Upcloud,OVH,hetzner) which would cost around 3-4$ per month and then install something like remotemoe https://github.com/fasmide/remotemoe or anything similar to it effectively like a proxy.

Sorry if I went a little overkill tho lol. I have played too much on these things so I may be overarchitecting stuff but if you genuinely want self hosting to the extreme self, tor.onion's or i2p might benefit ya but even buying a vps can be a good step up

> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)

Laptops have in built ups and are cheap, Laptops and refurbished servers are good entry point imo and I feel like sure its a bottomless pit but the benefits are well worth it and at a point you have to look at trade offs and everything and personally laptops/refurbished or resale servers are that for me. In fact, I used to run a git server on an android tab for some time but been too lazy to figure out if I want it to charge permanently or what
by gerdesj | 2026-01-12 01:13:27+00:00
I fail to understand how your approach is different to your parent.

perf is a shell tool. iptables is a shell tool. sshguard is a log reader and ultimately you will use the CLI to take action.

If you are advocating newer tools, look into nft - iptables is sooo last decade 8) I've used the lot: ipfw, ipchains, iptables and nftables. You might also try fail2ban - it is still worthwhile even in the age of the massively distributed botnet, and covers more than just ssh.

I also recommend a VPN and not exposing ssh to the wild.

Finally, 13,000 address in an ipset is nothing particularly special these days. I hope sshguard is making a properly optimised ipset table and that you running appropriate hardware.

My home router is a pfSense jobbie running on a rather elderly APU4 based box and it has over 200,000 IPs in its pfBlocker-NG IP block tables and about 150,000 records in its DNS tables.
by defrost | 2026-01-12 01:14:37+00:00
I more or less agree with your comment but feel it should be pointed out the CSIRO economic feasibility study is specific to Australia.

The arguments made there; why Australia is better to pursue renewables now rather than hope for nuclear eventually have no bearing on, say, China's use of nuclear for 20% of Chinese baseload.

A large part of the CSIRO argument is the greenfield standing start no prior expertise massive upfront costs and long lead time to any possible return.

China, by contrast, has an existing small army of nuclear technologists, multiple already running reactors, and many reactors of varying designs already in the design and construction pipeline.
by westurner | 2026-01-12 01:14:57+00:00
At that time they created a bunch of spammy noise which caused the social media businesses significant expense.

They did that in order to run their foreign interference in US elections agenda, and their foreign agenda of late; and we don't like foreign interference in our elections either.

Note the fathers of the sarcastic TV show South Park, all bouncing around on their satellite internet access.
by neilv | 2026-01-12 01:15:56+00:00
> How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that,

That's fine if he feels that way, but he can only speak for himself, not for all the copyright holders of the other code that was "ingested" to power LLMs.

If you want to see how most creators who care about their work and actually own it (unlike most software), look at many book authors and illustrators. Many of whom have a burning hatred for AI bros not only stealing their work, but also then using it to destroy the livelihoods of their field.

A lot of the techbros who do care about their work aren't feeling as wronged or threatened, because we're trying to pivot to get a piece of the pie, from all the exploitation and pillaging of many fields.