MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cjfd | 2026-01-17 08:10:37+00:00
Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem. Almost all software that I have encountered that was painful to work with chose a framework that did not apply to their situation.

E.g., develop a generic user interface framework which makes it very quick to produce a standard page with a series of standard fields but at the same time makes it very painful to produce a non-standard layout. After that is done it is 'discovered' that almost all pages are non-standard. But that 'discovery' could also have been made in five minutes by talking to any of the people already working for the company....

Another example: use an agent system where lots of agents do almost nothing, maybe translate one enum value to another enum value of another enum type. Then discover that you get performance problems because agent traffic is quite expensive. At the same time typical java endless typing occurs because of the enormous amount of agent boilerplate. Also the agents that actually do something useful become god classes because basically all non-trivial logic goes there....
by seec | 2026-01-17 08:11:01+00:00
Translation came out much later and isn't as convenient (no auto-loading).

Form filling and login just work better on Chrome; that's not subjective at all.

Tabs syncing works better and faster with Chrome, one of the reasons I switched is that Safari implementation was laggy and buggy (happened with the password sync problem as well).

Bookmarks favicons came back, but they were removed for many versions, which was very annoying.

I don't use Google apps much, and I don't find the Apple ecosystem integration to be that useful. At best they are a convenience, but often just gimmicks.

I still mostly use Apple devices but have a PC as well. Apple iCloud for Windows is buggy and annoying as hell and requires using Chrome anyway; might as well skip the step of using Safari.

Google definitely has some walling as well, but it works with more hardware and is generally easier to integrate. Apple really plays nice with their own stuff.

I was once a defender of Apple's approach, especially for native apps and stuff like that. They have shown they can't be trusted. We are very far from the era when Apple was making Safari for Windows because they wanted to offer a better browser to everyone. Now only the bottom line matters, even though they have never been as rich as now.

The reason they fight so hard to prevent 3rd-party browser engines on iOS is because they know they would lose market share extremely fast.

Make no mistake, I would prefer to use Apple stuff but it just isn't very competitive anymore, and they really need to put a lot of effort into it.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-17 08:12:53+00:00
I agree that on monitors with insufficient resolution ancient bitmap fonts can be sharper, because they are free of artifacts caused by mismatch between the shape of the letters and the pixel grid.

Your problem is precisely that you use monitors with a too low resolution. On monitors with a high enough resolution, you approach the quality of printed paper and you can use monospace fonts that are more beautiful than any bitmap fonts, without being able to perceive the pixels.

The only problem is that big monitors also need a bigger resolution and the combination of big size with big resolution can be expensive.

While for a size of 27" or 32" the 4k monitors can be quite cheap, I believe that at such sizes a 5k resolution is the minimum for good text rendering, and 5k monitors remain expensive.
by sureglymop | 2026-01-17 08:13:06+00:00
I have adhd myself and I am designing assistive technology for myself.

My software is basically "self spyware", a (mouse/key/browser history/etc) logger for linux. In a way like an open source (though not yet) microsoft recall but even more extensive and with better search and no AI. The idea is to:

1. Be able to put in small notes easily and quickly without having to think of name, tags, etc.

2. Be able to recall what I did, when I did it and what else I did around that time, with _time_ being the main link. So you don't have to semantically link things together like in e.g. obsidian. You can, but using locality of reference should already provide good results.

I wrote some code already for the keylogging parts. Where I got stuck is when thinking about/designing the parts that require cryptography. When I have more free time I definitely want to get back to it.

What I found I need most due to my adhd:

1. A way to do anything "in the moment". Let's say I'm about to procrastinate on my phone but know I have to write an email. Then I must have the ability to do that very quickly right from my phone. If mentally the task of "turning on my laptop" and doing it there seems like too much, I won't do it. So the "preparation friction" to do any task must be as small as possible. This is somewhat a difficult problem but technologically it requires everything to be cross platform and easily accessible.

2. A way to very quickly confirm what I already did before or confirm that I already did something. I have to constantly confirm it because I can't remember if I did. This part is what my software tries to address.
by piyush_soni | 2026-01-17 08:15:12+00:00
After getting tired of Photoshop's magic wand failing on product photos, I built this color replacer with features most online tools don't have:

• HSV tolerance (not RGB) - Catches all blues regardless of lighting while ignoring whites/grays that RGB tools pick up

• Magnetic lasso-style edge snapping - Uses Sobel edge detection so polygon vertices snap to object boundaries automatically. Green vertices = snapped, yellow = free placement

• Multiple independent color pairs - Replace 5 different shades with tight tolerances instead of cranking up one slider and getting color bleed

• Preserve shading toggle - Change a pink shirt to blue while keeping all fabric folds, shadows, and highlights intact

• Editable polygons - Drag vertices after closing, undo points, hide overlay while keeping selection active

• Remove colors → transparency - Perfect for background removal when you know the bg color

Problem with RGB: White (255,255,255) is mathematically close to Light Pink (255,182,193). HSV separates Hue from Saturation/Value, so you can target "all pinks" while excluding "anything low-saturation" (whites/grays).

Free, browser-based, no account needed. Built for e-commerce product recoloring and design mockups where simple flood-fill tools fail.
by huhkerrf | 2026-01-17 08:16:27+00:00
> "Unfortunately, we have to ask you to pay to keep your personal information safe.”

I can't put my finger on why, but the faux "aw shucks, our hands are tied" makes me even more pissed off by the fact that they're leaking people's therapy notes. Just come out and say you're an amoral money seeker.
by seec | 2026-01-17 08:17:16+00:00
You just dismiss all my critics as irrelevant and not something I should care about.
Translation came later and isn't as convenient as on Chrome.
I don't know why you think "never use any other hardware than Apple's" is a viable argument.
I need to have both a PC and a Mac; having a browser that syncs without the hassle that is iCloud on Windows is important.

If they can't make what people want, they go somewhere else, exactly what I did.
by purplehat_ | 2026-01-17 08:17:26+00:00
For anyone else who got a little too excited at the title, ECC here is error correction codes, not elliptic curve crypto.

Very cool writeup, thanks for digging into all those data sheets and sharing it with us! I feel like the hands-on electronics stuff has always been a little bit inaccessible to me, but posts like these always make me a little more excited to start doing little projects myself. So thanks for posting.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-17 08:18:35+00:00
> I don't think the environment being cool is a factor in current data center designs is it? Otherwise, the northern US or Alaska would be candidates. Instead, a lot of the data center boom is in states like Texas or the south.

It is increasingly becoming so. And some designs work well. I only read a post about the internet archive's smart use of the server heat a couple days ago, I can't find it back now. And indeed, good point. Alaska would be great for that too.

And the US is kinda an exception, the rest of the world is watching emissions but the US is trying to screw the world up for everyone else. Including themselves but Trump followers seem to view all the disasters as an 'act of god'. I remember those poor school kids in the flooding in texas last year and there being more 'thoughts and prayers' than actual help or prevention.

I know Ireland is popular for datacenters in part because of the climate there (in another big part all the tax breaks but ok).

And yes you can cool them with renewable energy. Most datacenters are. But it also means that renewable energy can't be used for something else.
by masklinn | 2026-01-17 08:18:40+00:00
> Which is the right choice because our eyes cannot resolve that kind of DPI at that distance.

If you can’t resolve that kind of DPI at that distance you need to get an appointment because you require glasses. The low end of normal vision stops differentiating around 175 dpi at 50cm. The difference is very noticeable (and disturbing) on contrasted detailed features like text without subpixel rendering (or when the subpixel rendering does not match the physical structure of the display).
by dotancohen | 2026-01-17 08:18:43+00:00
> I have little privacy risk from the cashier glancing at my ID for a second to check my birth date.

Imagine your abusive ex is looking for you. She could go to a few alcohol vendors in the area and tell them "Respectful cashier, I suspect that my husband is reverting back to being an alcoholic. If you see the birthdate 1971-06-21 then please phone me after he leaves".
by YetAnotherNick | 2026-01-17 08:18:51+00:00
Umm. I run multiple benchmark using APIs for my work and the inference time compute allotted has clear correlation with the metrics. But time of the day certainly isn't. If it is that straightforward people can prove very easily rather than relying on the anecdotes.

They either overprovision the server during low demand or they might dynamically provision servers based on load.
by N_Lens | 2026-01-17 08:19:24+00:00
As a practitioner of meditation and a student of Buddhism, this article offers a limited perspective. In my humble opinion there are many many different modes of consciousness that do not benefit from the simple 'antidotes' described in this article.

But then again I've read Matthieu Ricard's book and find his writing to be less than compelling, very subjective and generalizing ideas that have easy to find exceptions. Not to take away from the absolute wealth of knowledge in Buddhism.
by seec | 2026-01-17 08:21:12+00:00
Yep, it's just the reality distortion field.
Apple fanboys can never admit they don't have the best stuff.

In similar veins, they'll say that Windows uses more RAM than macOS. Yet on both an iMac that was bootcamped and a custom-built hackintosh, macOS almost always used more RAM after booting.

Apple makes great hardware but the software is often very mid, its only visually pleasing.
by josecodea | 2026-01-17 08:21:52+00:00
> state it as confidently incorrect

It's funny for me to read this. They don't exhibit "confidence". You are just getting the most accurate text that it can produce. Of course, the training data doesn't contain "I don't know" for questions, that would be really bad training data! If you are getting "attitudes", it would be because you are triggering some kind of dialogue-esque data with your prompts (or the system prompt might be doing that).

Expecting the LLM to say "sorry I don't know" would be like expecting google search to return "we found some pages but deemed them wrong, so we won't show you any".
Show HN: Griit – AI translator that explains grammar as you translate
by coding_jake | 2026-01-17 08:23:34+00:00
I built this because I got tired of copy-pasting tweets into ChatGPT just to understand them.

Griit translates text and also breaks down:
- Vocabulary (with context explanations)
- Grammar patterns
- Idioms

Works with Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and 20+ languages. No signup needed to try.

Built with Django + Gemini API. Would love feedback from the HN community.
by utopiah | 2026-01-17 08:24:31+00:00
Yes... yes let's make tasks we rely on LESS predictable.

Sorry but what the heck?

We should NOT standardize irresponsible behavior, in particular for repeatable tasks. This is particularly maddening when solutions like dependency resolution, containers, distribution of self-contained and binaries DO exist.

I understand that the hype machine must feed on yet another idea to keep its momentum but this is just ridiculous.
by wilsonzlin | 2026-01-17 08:25:34+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that for some parts that use dependencies, the agent could have implemented them itself. I've begun the process of removing many of these and developing them within the project alongside the browser. A reasonable goal for "from scratch" may be "if other major browsers use a dependency, it's fine to do so too". For example: OpenSSL, libpng, HarfBuzz, Skia.

I'd push back on the idea that all the agents did was glue dependencies together — the JS VM, DOM, CSS cascade, inline/block/table layouts, paint systems, text pipeline, chrome, and more are all being developed by agents as part of this project. There are real complex systems being engineered towards the goal of a browser engine, even if not fully there yet.
by 9dev | 2026-01-17 08:26:20+00:00
The reason OP gave for trying to achieve more reach was this:

> it's been pointed out to me in harsh ways I could be easily growing if I tried a little harder, so I've invested more resources into the channel, equipment, actually trying growth, etc.

…which made me think of the tourist in the story.

Is it really more reach that they desire, transforming their content into whatever sates the algorithm, chasing metrics, investing time and money? Or is their current level of reach perhaps already enough as it is, a work of love and dedication, without someone—something—else deciding what’s best?
by jedbrooke | 2026-01-17 08:26:32+00:00
Thanks for bringing back memories of the Netflix Wii Channel. At the beginning it was on a disk. We used the Netflix wii channel until the day they dropped support. Our Wii long outlived its life as a games console by continuing on as a netflix machine. I still miss using the actual pointer to point at things, it’s just such an intuitive interface for a TV

EDIT: I just looked it up and apparently the wii netflix channel was supported until 2019, so my memory of using it until it went bust were incorrect. We prob used it until around 2012 or so
by Scaevolus | 2026-01-17 08:26:43+00:00
You have that backwards. GFS was replaced by Colossus ca. 2010, and largely functions as blob storage with append-only semantics for modification. BigTable is a KV store, and the row size limits (256MB) make it unsuitable for blob storage. GCS is built on top of Spanner (metadata, small files) and Colossus (bulk data storage).

But that's besides the point. When people say "RDBMS" or "filesystem" they mean the full suite of SQL queries and POSIX semantics-- neither of which you get with KV stores like BigTable or distributed storage like Colossus.

The simplest example of POSIX semantics that are rapidly discarded is the "fast folder move" operation. This is difficult to impossible to achieve when you have keys representing the full path of the file, and is generally easier to implement with hierarchical directory entries. However, many applications are absolutely fine with the semantics of "write entire file, read file, delete file", which enables huge simplifications and optimizations!
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2026-01-17 08:27:02+00:00
There were many "escapes", some weren't so romantic. E.g. for some escapees the drive to what they viewed as freedom was so intense that they did not hesitate to kill someone, e.g. a stewardess on a hijacked plane.

To see a bigger picture let's juxtapose these escapes with the life of Luke of Simferopol (N. F. Voyno-Yasenetsky). He was a surgeon and a bishop of the Orthodox church. He opposed the anti-church policies of the Soviet government, was sent into an exile into Siberia and nearly died there. Then the war came. So he wrote a letter to Soviet officials asking to be sent to work in a hospital near the front, where his surgical skills would be of much use. At the end he added: "When the war is over I'm ready to go back to exile".
by psyclobe | 2026-01-17 08:27:28+00:00
Uh to be perfectly honest for the past … 30 years I’ve ran with a buddies vimrc and really never took the time to understand it; it was perfectly good lol and to this day I could not recreate it if I lost it.

> lowercase a whole buffer,

Happens a lot to me actually!

That and accidentally incrementing a numeric value haha..
by Joeri | 2026-01-17 08:29:01+00:00
Realistically to maintain a modern web framework to even a minimal standard you need a few people working fulltime on it, and more than a few if you want to take it places. There needs to be some kind of long term sustainable vehicle for funding those developers, either a corporate sponsor or a foundation.

So all those frameworks have to end up somewhere, and I’d rather it be somewhere else than vercel, as they already own way too much of the web frontend space.
by dotancohen | 2026-01-17 08:29:40+00:00
Well, I did have many more recent exes in my early twenties than I do in my fifties.

But also the mechanics of the check might be important. For instance, I always go to take the baby out of the back seat when I park, even though I have not driven a baby in years. Because I do not want to ever risk leaving a baby unattended in a car. The store policy might be to check every ID, even in seemingly obvious cases.
by jurschreuder | 2026-01-17 08:30:15+00:00
A bit the same way Egyptian history experts make money.

By making LLMs for people who want to make money with LLMs.

For me though I see ChatGPT take all the hype now. I'm seeing people get more and more bored with that and in quest of a step up or sideways from that.

That goes pretty slow outside of developers people are still trying to come to grips with OpenAI.

All earlier adopters have been builders interested in the technology for tech sake. The real consumers are veeery slow to ramp up.
by tetha | 2026-01-17 08:30:45+00:00
PostgreSQL has 2 memory-related parameters you need to set for larger instances - work_mem and shared_buffers, as these need to be set to a percentage of the VMs memory to utilize it well. However, pretty much every PostgreSQL setup guide names these two values, and on a managed PostgreSQL hosting I'd expect these to be set.

Outside of memory, log_duration, temp_file_limit, a good query plan visualizer and some backup and replication (e.g. PGBackrest and Patroni) are also generally recommended if self-hosting. Patroni doesn't even need an external config store anymore, which is great since you can just run it onto 3-4 nodes and get a high quality HA, easy to manage PostgreSQL cluster.

But those two parameters are pretty much all to have a PostgreSQL process thousands of transactions per second without further tuning. Even our larger DBs hosting simple REST-applications (opposed to ETL/Data warehousing) had to grow quite a lot until further configuration was necessary, if at all.

Checkpointing probably becomes the next issue then, but modern PostgreSQL actually has great logging there -- "Checkpoints occur too frequently, consider these 5 config parameters to look at". And don't touch VACUUM jobs, as a consultant once joked, he sometimes earns thousands of dollars to say "You killed a VACUUM job? Don't do that".

So yeah, actually running PostgreSQL takes a few considerations, but compared to 10 - 15 years ago, you can get a lot with little effort.
by florian13 | 2026-01-17 08:32:05+00:00
Most AI meeting tools optimize for transcripts, summaries, and action items. Useful, but they don’t help in the moment when you’re stuck, missing a point, or struggling in a foreign language.

I’m experimenting with a different approach: real-time suggestions during the conversation, without a bot joining the call.

Curious how others here think about “in-the-moment” vs “after-the-fact” AI assistance in meetings.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-17 08:32:34+00:00
> Self driving is not a commodity, because it is not fungible - you cannot take BYD's self driving and put in in your Tesla

Currently, no. All evidence points to it as a feature approaching fungibility once it’s good enough and plentiful.

Like, tires aren’t perfectly fungible. But functionally, they’re close to it.
by atoav | 2026-01-17 08:33:23+00:00
If my elevator manufacturer sent me a note about my elevator wire, but says I have to not do anything, because it is probably nothing my number 1 question would be:

Why did you need to tell me about the wire then?

The answer is an attempt to transfer the liability to me. The liability for a thing they think could happen, but didn't tell me about.
by gusgus01 | 2026-01-17 08:34:07+00:00
DHS training manual says not to stand in front of a vehicle, so if a bullet went through the front of a vehicle I would judge whether the situation should have happened at all. But also, depending on the angle of entry, you could be quite far to the side and still shoot through the front. Ignoring the curvature of the Earth, if the car was facing North the shooter could have been in Vancouver.

Or if the direction of entry is the most important to you, most of the bullets went through the side window, what position does that indicate? Somewhere to the side, perhaps?

Or maybe none of this is important in the case of propaganda, like I implied.
by hnst1 | 2026-01-17 08:34:29+00:00
In an era where our bank accounts, family photos, and work identities live behind a login screen, the phrase “it won’t happen to me” is no longer a security strategy. With billions of data points leaked every year, your digital safety isn’t determined by if your information will be exposed, but by how well you’ve prepared for when it happens. This article explores the common pitfalls of password management and introduces the one tool that makes “impossible” security easy for everyone: the Password Manager.
by amatecha | 2026-01-17 08:34:41+00:00
Parrots and similar birds are awesome, and crazy intelligent. Seriously, watch this lil guy straight-up browsing YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_b8kWYvGkI , or this one, so awesome haha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4 , probably my favorite video ever of a bird
by josecodea | 2026-01-17 08:35:05+00:00
Tailscale Funnel, no?

For the permissions, just add basic auth in the reverse proxy and choose whom to share the passwd with.

Now if you want OAuth or something like that... well tough luck, you need to set up OIDC or whatever and that's going to be taking you some time, but it still works how you want.
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-17 08:35:39+00:00
None of this is economically profitable, which is why right now it ends up in massive landfils. The concrete base is reinforced with steel beams and weights so much that you can't move it.

Also sorry but I would require a citation for "new wind turbines are recyclable". That the tech exists doesn't mean that all installed turbines have it.
by tamimio | 2026-01-17 08:37:11+00:00
The birth rate is part of it, I think the biggest part is kids now just don't see college as how it was seen before, where a degree means stable career and life. You have OF or TikTok making in a month what they will make in a lifetime, then you have the job market, then you have the expensive tuition, and the KO was AI rendering any cert acquired in 2023 and after far less valuable than before. I personally know plenty of kids and none of them is dreaming about becoming an astronaut or an engineer or a doctor like how it was before. One wants to be a tattoo artist, another a streamer, a third in some sports, and they are around 17 years old, not children.