MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-12 05:29:38+00:00
Hattmall said it well with this:

> The usefulness is a function of how quickly the consequences from poor coding arrive and how meaningful they are to the organization.

I would just add that these hypothetical senior devs we are talking about are real people with careers, accountability and responsibilities. So when their company says "we want the software to do X" those engineers may be responsible for making it happen and accountable if it takes too long or goes wrong.

So rather than thinking of them as being irrationally fixated on the artisanal aspect (which can happen) maybe consider in most cases they are just doing their best to take responsibility for what they think the company wants now and in the future.
by Tanoc | 2026-01-12 05:29:55+00:00
When it comes to harm on this scale, always expect the worst, because the harm will be generational. More importantly, Trump doesn't give a flying fuck about anything outside of the executive branch and below the federal level, because the federal level executive has control of the instruments of war. And he has already proven that nobody manning those instruments of war will disobey him. The Marines got recalled, but the National Guard didn't. This latest thing with Venezuela is just one more section of the window that's been wiped clear enough for him to see what he can do. The final bit that's still obscured is whether or not he can give direct orders to the military and security agencies to subjugate the state levels of government. I've got a large amount of certainty that within the next week or two even that bit of obscurity won't remain.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-12 05:29:58+00:00
I haven't tried it yet, but the evil twin to this practice is to nuke everything periodically to ensure that your agent isn't relying on any filesystem state that it hasn't specified builds for (i.e. https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/).

They tend to slip out of declarative mode and start making untracked changes to the system from time to time.
by Snacklive | 2026-01-12 05:29:58+00:00
I was thinking the same. Maybe if he tried to think instead of just asking the model. The premise is interesting "We optimize languages for humans, maybe we can do something similar for llms". But then he just ask the model to do the thing instead of thinking about the problem, maybe instead of prompting "Hey made this" a more granular, guided approach could've been better.

For me this is just a lost of potential on the topic, and an interesting read made boring pretty fast.
by techchintan | 2026-01-12 05:30:12+00:00
Location: Surat, GJ, India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Next.js, React.js with TypeScript, JavaScript, Tailwind CSS, Vercel, AI-SDK and Any JAMStack.

Resume/CV: https://chintansudani.com/projects

Website: https://chintansudani.com

Contact info:

Website: https://chintansudani.com/contact

Email: csudani7@gmail.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/techchintan/

Short Intro: “I help founders and business owners transform their ideas into quick, editorial web platforms with Sanity CMS, Next.js, and Vercel. I mainly talk about CMS, web vital performance, and JAMstack.”
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-12 05:30:12+00:00
For the past month, I've been building a distributed, phase-coherent clock synchronization system over standard consumer 2.5GbE copper, bypassing the need for dedicated white rabbit hardware.

It started as a way to fix audio drift in my multi-room setup without using large jitter buffers, but it turned into a standalone project where I started learning more about NIC driver latency. I found that if you isolate a specific CPU core (isolcpus), disable all interrupt coalescing and busy-poll the RX ring buffer with a custom AF_XDP socket, you can characterize the PHY and PCIe bus latency jitter to within a standard deviation of few ns on generic realtek hardware.

I'm using this disciplined clock to do TDOA (time difference of arrival) triangulation of RF signals inside my home. I have three anchor nodes running this stack connected to SDRs. I can currently track the physical location of my dog's collar to within 15cm in 3D space by correlating the signal peaks. The hardest part is writing the solver for the multipath interference. I'm implementing a custom unscented kalman filter to reject the signal reflections bouncing off my refrigerator and radiators. I know what you're thinking. Yes, it sounds totally excessive but getting sub-microsecond synchronization without an FPGA switch feels like magic.
by Rayosay | 2026-01-12 05:30:15+00:00
I'm hoping that the new Snapdragon X2 Elite based laptops coming out this year will beat it. Qualcomm seems to have been trying to upstream driver support for them earlier than the X1. Then it's up to what kinds of laptops OEMs offer with them.

Personally I'd still just get a used ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 on eBay at this point if I were going to buy another one today because they're available for around $400, and I don't see anything better that's passively cooled, with great battery life, and great Linux support available at the moment. I hope there will be a better, faster alternative in the near future. I'd gladly upgrade.
by novemp | 2026-01-12 05:30:41+00:00
I feel like I'm being punked, being told that this "bullish vs bearish flash card" thing and this "here's your user agent, something people have been doing for thirty years" thing, are "cool stuff". This guy seriously needed AI to make those?

I can't gauge the other two since I don't use those things, so maybe they are cool, idk.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-12 05:31:23+00:00
Tests and proofs can only detect issues that you design them to detect. LLMs and other people are remarkably effective at finding all sorts of new bugs you never even thought to test against. Proofs are particularly fragile as they tend to rely on pre/post conditions with clean deterministic processing, but the whole concept just breaks down in practice pretty quickly when you start expanding what's going on in between those, and then there's multithreading...
by sroerick | 2026-01-12 05:32:00+00:00
Hey, I was thinking about this same idea lately. What exactly would you want hosted by somebody?

I was thinking about what if your "cloud" was more like a tilde.club, with self hosted web services plus a Linux login. What services would you want?

Email and cloud make sense. I think a VPN and Ad Blocker would too. Maybe Immich and music hosting? Calendar? I don't know what people use for self hosting
by supriyo-biswas | 2026-01-12 05:33:05+00:00
I agree, and the corollary of this would be that the most senior engineers (who might be at a staff/principal level at a given company) who have the most amount of domain knowledge, deep understanding of various software architectures, and a product/customer oriented mindset may stand to benefit the most from AI-assisted coding, despite some narratives being peddled around by executives that they could do without senior engineers.

Unfortunately, for junior engineers the CS path has likely become more arduous, and we'd probably see something more of a doctor-like career path for CS students, where they specialize to obtain deeper architectural knowledge, before receiving employment.
by donny2018 | 2026-01-12 05:33:10+00:00
Most people are fine with Windows, including myself. I find it a good business workhorse with excellent productivity features that I can rely upon, knowing that it will handle pretty much any task I throw at it.

Another factor vs Mac (for me) is that if something to happen to my ThinkPad while I'm at a factory somewhere in rural Uzbekistan, there is always a store in the nearby city where I can grab a Windows laptop for like $400 and continue with the job, and/or have my machine serviced.

Windows has enormous userbase, and obviously you'll hear a high absolute number of criticisms, especially considering that those who actively dislike the OS for whatever reason will take take their time to bring their frustrations online, and those who are fine with it rarely comment about it.
by tjr | 2026-01-12 05:34:23+00:00
It kinda sorta did. Decades ago, all music was played by live players. Today, there are lots of albums, lots of background music on television, radio, etc., that is made mostly or entirely using MIDI-controlled virtual instruments. No longer do you need to book an actual chamber orchestra for a little 30-second spot on some cooking show.

So those musicians are no longer getting booked for that bit of music. Instead, one person produces it in their home studio. But, there’s now an industry for creating software tools that support that workflow, and there are a lot more opportunities for such music than there used to be. The amount of music used in background spots on television is astounding.

Things changed. Some jobs diminished (studio players?) or went away altogether (music copyists?). But new work came into existence.
by kelnos | 2026-01-12 05:37:24+00:00
That only works if the people who built the observability tool have thought of everything. They haven't, of course; no one can.

It's great that you were able to solve this problem with your observability tools. But nothing will ever be as comprehensive as what you can do with shell access.

I don't get what the big deal is here. Just... use shell access when you need it. If you have other things in place that let you easily debug and fix some classes of issues, great. But some things might be easier to fix with shell access, and you could very easily run into something you can't figure out without ssh.

Completely disabling shell access is just making things harder for you. You don't get brownie points or magical benefits from denying yourself that.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-12 05:38:37+00:00
It’s because you spam this thread so much with such aggressive language that it honestly is scary to deal with you.

You’re smart Darren, and so are other people, you should assume I knew the cars have remote backup operators. Again, you’re smart, you also know why that doesn’t mitigate having a scaled robotaxi service vs. nothing

I doubt you’ll chill out but here’s a little behind the scenes peek for you that also directly address what you’re saying: a big turning point for me was getting a job at Google and realizing Elon was talking big game but there’s 100,000 things you gotta do to run a robot taxi service and Tesla was doing none of them. The epiphany came when I saw the windshield wipers for cameras and lidar.

You might note even a platonically ideal robotaxi service would always have capacity for remote operation.
by staticshock | 2026-01-12 05:38:44+00:00
Efficient markets route around bottlenecks. Technological revolutions accelerate the speed at which that re-routing happens.

In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity.

Here's an excellent Casey Handmer quote from a recent Dwarkesh episode:

> One way to think about the industrial revolutions is [...] what you're doing is you're finding some way of bypassing a constraint or bypassing a bottleneck. The bottleneck prior to what we call the Industrial Revolution was metabolism. How much oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for their peasant overlord or whatever? Nowadays we would giggle to think that the amount of food we produce is meaningful in the context of the economic power of a particular country. Because 99% of the energy that we consume routes around our guts, through the gas tanks of our cars and through our aircraft and in our grids and stuff like that.

> Right now, the AI revolution is about routing around cognitive constraints, that in some ways writing, the printing press, computers, the Internet have already allowed us to do to some extent. A credit card is a good example of something that routes around a cognitive constraint of building a network of trust. It's a centralized trust.

It's a great episode, I recommend it: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer
by kristopolous | 2026-01-12 05:39:22+00:00
xfce way back in the day was trying to clone CDE which is open source and actively maintained these days https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ (really. last release was in november 2025)

Just in case you want an even more vintage experience.

There's also people trying to keep the SGI experience alive, but this one is a clone: https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/

As for as early xfce check out https://xteddy.org/xwinman/screenshots/xfce-default.jpg (I'm actually on that site from 25 years ago: https://xteddy.org/xwinman/screenshots/twm-cjmckenzie.gif)
by josephcsible | 2026-01-12 05:40:04+00:00
> Brands: JMDHKK, KAXYUYA, JAXTIN, HUYNL, NAVFALCON, SMHAWK, AORDERN, Abyliee, Obsitwy, Suntony, SEVENPARK, PolesNow, MGMCM were tested.

Are there really zero reputable companies who make these products? I did some searching of my own too and all I can find are ones from ones from other trademark loophole alphabet soup brands like these.
by macinjosh | 2026-01-12 05:40:41+00:00
Seems to me Apple is getting ready to make the black arrow mouse pointer obsolete.

In the next generation or two iPads and MacBooks are going to essentially merge as a product line.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple abandons classic macOS (w/ Terminal and a filesystem) all together. To continue to support developers all they need is a tweaked Xcode for Apple dev and their version of WSL for everything else. All the parts are already in macOS/iPadOS (native virtualization and containerization).

iMac and Mac Pro are all but dead now too. Mac Mini and Mac Studio will be the only desktop options and will be bought by people who are Millenials and older or ML/AI praciticioners. We may even see a special AI/Local LLM Mac Studio that would be the equivalent of mac pro of the ai era.

Your fingers will need these big round edges to grab. They may let you use a bluetooth mouse but they aren't going to cater their UX to you.

They year of the Linux desktop has come as commercial desktop OS's die.
by Tiktaalik | 2026-01-12 05:40:45+00:00
The parent could be alluding to the sort of novel approaches jurisdictions barely engage in, but with even the most traditional and politically conservative policy approach to these problems, medical treatment, BC is still not really engaging in that with the effort one would expect from an announced "crisis".

If you walked up to a doctor in BC and said you have a fentanyl drug use disorder and you've hit rock bottom and you're ready for treatment, they can't help you, and you'll be put on a waiting list. I imagine many other jurisdictions across North America are the same.

Of course what happens is that in the days that follow the window of opportunity is missed, the person goes and gets some more street drugs to self medicate their addiction, the only option because there is no prescribed option, and those street drugs are cut with toxic who knows what and the person overdoses and dies (because there is no safe known dosage of street drugs that contain ???).

No real surprise that 6-7 people have been dying a day for years now.

You'd think at some point someone would build some more treatment beds but that costs money and how dare you raise taxes. So the status quo of indifference and death continues.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-01-12 05:40:53+00:00
My contention is:

> A consumer

is all that ultimately matters.

All those things you’re talking about may or may not matter some day, after years and a class action lawsuit that may or may not materialize or have any material impact on the bottom line of the company producing the toaster, by which time millions of units of subpar toasters that don’t work sideways will have sold.

The world is filled with junk. The majority of what fills the world is junk. There are parts of our society where junk isn’t well tolerated (jet engines, mri machines) but the majority of the world tolerates quite a lot of sloppiness in design and execution and the companies producing those products are happily profitable.
by thesz | 2026-01-12 05:41:36+00:00
> you can easily check whether it builds and passes tests.

This link were on HN recently: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-degrades

"...recently released LLMs, such as GPT-5, have a much more insidious method of failure. They often generate code that fails to perform as intended, but which on the surface seems to run successfully, avoiding syntax errors or obvious crashes. It does this by removing safety checks, or by creating fake output that matches the desired format, or through a variety of other techniques to avoid crashing during execution."

The trend for LLM generated code is to build and pass tests but do not deliver functionality needed.

Also, please consider how SQLite is tested: https://sqlite.org/testing.html

The ratio between test code and code itself is mere 590 times (590 LOC of tests per LOC of actual code), it used to be more than 1100.

Here is notes on current release: https://sqlite.org/releaselog/3_51_2.html

Notice fixes there. Despite being one of the most, if not the most, tested pieces of software in the world, it still contains errors.

> If you want to go further, you can even require the LLM to produce a machine checkable proof that the software is correct.

Haha. How do you reconcile a proof with actual code?
Show HN: OpenAI FM – Zero-setup AI voice tool(Inspired by repo)
by thenextechtrade | 2026-01-12 05:42:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve always been a fan of the openai/openai-fm repository, but noticed that the barrier to entry (CLI, env setup, API keys) was high for many. I built OpenAI FM to be a "ready-to-use" web version—no deployment required.

Current Status & Business Model: The project is currently in active development. Since running high-quality AI inference at scale incurs significant server and API costs, I’ve implemented a small paywall to keep the project sustainable as an indie developer.

However, I want everyone to be able to test the quality, so there is a free trial available for all users.

Roadmap & Invitation:

Coming Soon: I’m currently building a Text-to-Video pipeline to turn these voices into synchronized video content.

We need your feedback: Since we are in the early stages, I’d love to hear what features you need. More voices? API access? Specific export formats? Please leave your suggestions here, and I will actively work on integrating them.

I'm especially interested in feedback on the mobile UX and the audio latency. Looking forward to your thoughts!
by dangus | 2026-01-12 05:43:26+00:00
I like XFCE for capturing the spirit of an era, and it’s still lightweight, so in that sense it’s excellent.

If I was more purely looking for something lightweight I think I’d end up with some other choice with a more modern design language.

Even thinking about this subject still makes me a little miffed about the “need” to constantly evolve look and feel of the UI.

Liquid Glass changed looks without innovating on functionality. It added bloat and confusion without providing any innovation to justify it. The whole system is so bad that I followed through on selling my Mac to go with a Linux laptop.

At least with modern KDE/Gnome you can make a user experience argument over XFCE for why you’d upgrade. Okay, it’s not as snappy and lightweight, but you get a lot of functionality out of it.

But these commercial operating systems are changing the UI to satisfy a marketing department rather than users. It has to look different or else there’s nothing new to sell.
by feb012025 | 2026-01-12 05:44:23+00:00
The problem is, I really do believe any kind of mass support for the Iranian protesters will in fact be co-opted to start a war with Iran--at least at this particular moment in time.

And the executed protesters are a bad thing. But I don't think military intervention will lead to a better outcome.

Supporters of Palestine had pretty specific requests, none of which apply to Iran (conditioning weapons sales, divestment, etc...)
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-12 05:44:32+00:00
While I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the traditional desktop metaphor, this analysis conflates interface familiarity with architectural efficiency. It is a pleasant sentiment please don't get me wrong but technically a bit short sighted. The author praises xfce's modularity and unix-like separation of components (xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop), failing to realize that this design pattern is actually a performance antipattern in the modern display server model.

In the X11 era, the server arbitrated these components. In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context), the compositor is the server. Forcing the panel and window manager to communicate via IPC rather than sharing a memory space in a monolithic compositor introduces unavoidable frame-latency and synchronization issues. Issues specifically regarding VBLANK handling and tear-free rendering that integrated environments like plasma or sway solved years ago.
by anileated | 2026-01-12 05:44:49+00:00
If your argument is that there are more jobs that require morally dubious developments (stealing people's IP without licensing it, etc.) than jobs that don't, I don't think that's news.

There's always more shady jobs than ethically satisfying ones. There's increasingly more jobs in prediction markets and other sorts of gambling, adtech (Meta, Google). Moral compromise pays.

But if you really think about it and set limits on what is acceptable for you to work on (interesting new challenges, no morally dubious developments like stealing IP for ML training, etc.) then you simply don't have that FOMO of "I am sacrificing my career" when you screen those jobs out. Those jobs just don't exist for you.

Also, people who tag everybody like that as some sort of "anti-AI" tinfoilhatters are making a straw man argument. Most people with an informed opinion don't like the ways this tech is applied and rolled out in ways that is unsustainable and exploitative of ordinary people and open-source ecosystem, the confused hype around it, circular investment, etc., not the underlying tech on its own. Being vocally against these matters does not make one an unemployable pariah in the slightest, especially considering most jobs these days build on open source and being anti license-violating LLMs is being pro sustainable open-source.
by andrewflnr | 2026-01-12 05:44:49+00:00
Are you sure just switching up the colors and background image wouldn't do it for you?

I just looked at the homepage to see if it was anything different than I see on my machine, and if anything it looks nicer there. It's certainly nothing fancy, but I feel like there's hardly enough there to really count as "ugly". It all fades into the background quickly when you're doing actual work on it. But YMMV I guess.
by 3RTB297 | 2026-01-12 05:45:25+00:00
My favorite slight of hand was that all the dungeons and caves were part of a single rectangular map. Designers carved out a few specific designs, then other levels were clearly what worked with the remaining map screens available so it all fit in the space they had, with caves thrown in to take up single screen gaps.

https://ian-albert.com/games/legend_of_zelda_maps/