MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by superkuh | 2026-01-09 00:16:31+00:00
My issue with this is not that they're getting rid of buggy applications they don't want to support. It's that GTK 2 itself is not buggy and has no problems. There are still plenty of people using GTK 2 applications and I personally wrote a handful of new GTK 2 applications over the last year. GTK 3 wasn't a replacement for GTK 2. Just like GTK 4 isn't a replacement for GTK 3. They're separate things.

Dropping buggy GTK 2 software applications: okay, understandable.

Droppping perfectly functional GTK 2 itself: not okay.

Other distros like Arch have well supported unofficial repos that still provide the GTK 2 package when it is needed. Debian does not. It does not hurt Debian at all to keep packaging GTK 2 itself and making it available. It is stable software and there have been no changes for decades besides a handful of compiler args to deal with changing compilers.

And GTK 2 does not need to support HiDPI or native Wayland. Just like all the Wayland programs do not support running on xorg or even other wayland compositors not sharing their wayland protocol extensions used. This is not actually a show stopper problem. It is consistent with other software's incompatibility with waylands and would only apply to those actually using GTK 2 applications and those demographics likely aren't wayland adopters.
by text0404 | 2026-01-09 00:17:27+00:00
> “put X into a bikini” is constitutionally protected speech

Unfortunately if "put X into a bikini" is a command to an AI to generate CSAM of an underage child, that's no longer "constitutionally protected" territory. Also, these are global investigations - most countries don't have the same approach to freedom of speech as the US.
by soldthat | 2026-01-09 00:18:26+00:00
Point Nemo is a nice reminder that some “geography facts” are really optimization problems in disguise: it’s defined by solving the “longest swim” from any coastline, not by some ancient explorer planting a flag.

The fun twist is that the most remote point in the ocean is also our spacecraft cemetery, and sometimes the closest humans to it are orbiting overhead on the ISS.
by viraptor | 2026-01-09 00:18:48+00:00
> OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are in a race to the bottom

There's a bit of nuance hiding in the "etc". Openai and anthropic are still in a race for the top results. Minimax and GLM are in the race to the bottom while chasing good results - M2.1 is 10x cheaper than Sonnet for example, but practically fairly close in capabilities.
by clanky | 2026-01-09 00:19:22+00:00
It was completely impossible to post anything about Gaza on here through the entire course of the genocide.

It's not necessarily "right-wing" per se, for example during COVID questioning the party line on masks and vaccines could catch you massive downvotes and flagging. It's this technocratic neoliberal cryptofascist thing the people who have always actually run Silicon Valley adhere to.
by cerdotca | 2026-01-09 00:19:39+00:00
I built a free calculator that estimates statutory minimum termination and severance pay in Canada.

It currently supports:
- Ontario (ESA)
- Federal (Canada Labour Code)
- British Columbia

The tool intentionally does NOT calculate common-law reasonable notice and explains the difference clearly.

No ads, no tracking beyond basic analytics, and no lead capture.
Feedback welcome.
by sosodev | 2026-01-09 00:19:46+00:00
Are you sure about that? There's a lot of slop on the internet. Imagine I ask you to predict the next token after reading an excerpt from a blog on tortoises. Would you have predicted that it's part of an ad for boner pills? Probably not.

That's not even the worst scenario. There are plenty of websites that are nearly meaningless. Could you predict the next token on a website whose server is returning information that has been encoded incorrectly?
by al_borland | 2026-01-09 00:20:17+00:00
One of the big problems for me is that my company installs all kind of nonsense for security that makes the whole system behave strangely. For example, when I click on a window to activate it, it will often jump across the screen. In over 20 years on the Mac, I’ve never experienced this on my personal system. However, it happens almost every day at work. The hard drive on my desktop also randomly disappears and reappears, but only on the work Mac, and it’s happened constantly, everyday, for 6 years. It’s probably JAMF, but I can’t do anything about it. There is a bit of learned helplessness when dealing with my work Mac.

Most of my focus issues are at work, so I have no idea what is a macOS issue and what is an issue with the stuff the company installed.

On my personal Mac and phone, I submit feedback to Apple all the time when things annoy me, since those issues are more clear cut.
by schmuhblaster | 2026-01-09 00:20:21+00:00
As an experiment over the holidays I had Opus create a coding agent in a Prolog DSL (more than 200 lines though) [0] and I was surprised how well the agent worked out of the box. So I guess that the latest one or two generations of models have reached a stage where the agent harness around the model seems to be less important than before.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527722
Show HN: Legit, Open source Git-based Version control for AI agents
by jannesblobel | 2026-01-09 00:20:41+00:00
Hi HN, Martin, Nils, and Jannes here.

We are building Legit, an open source version control and collaboration layer for AI agents and AI native applications.

You can find the repo here https://github.com/Legit-Control/monorepo and the website here https://legitcontrol.com

Over the last years, we worked on multiple developer tools and AI driven products. As soon as we started letting agents modify real files and business critical data, one problem kept showing up. We could not reliably answer what changed, why it changed, or how to safely undo it.

Today, most AI tools either run without real guardrails or store their state in proprietary databases that are hard to inspect, audit, or migrate. Once agents start collaborating on shared data, you are often just crossing your fingers and hoping nothing goes wrong.

We noticed something interesting. Developers do not have this problem when collaborating on code, and agent like workflows took off there first. The reason is relatively simple. Git already solves coordination, history, review, and rollback.

That insight led us to build Legit. We bring Git style versioning and collaboration to AI applications and to most file formats. Every change an agent makes is tracked. Every action is inspectable, reviewable, and reversible. No hidden state. No black box history.

Legit works as a lightweight SDK that AI apps can embed anywhere the filesystem works. It handles versioning, Sync, rollback, and access control for agens. Everything lives in a repository that you can host yourself or on any Git hosting provider you already trust.

We believe the right way to scale AI collaboration is not to hide what agents do, but to let developers and users see, review, and control every change. Legit is our attempt to bring the discipline, visibility, and safety of modern developer workflows to write enabled AI applications.

Give it a spin: https://github.com/Legit-Control/monorepo and let us know your feedback, criticism, and thoughts.
by m4rtink | 2026-01-09 00:20:53+00:00
There are 9400 active Starlink satellites & they can be launched 28 at a time on a partially reusable rocket. The orbit they operate on is largely self cleaning due to being quite low. The satellites operate in many planes and bands + form a mesh network with laster interconnects.

Sure, if you want to try that and bankrupt Iran even more via its militarry rocket program, you can do that and maybe destray a handfull satellites, provided you can actually hit them and the rocket/s does not fail. And you might even get a nice casus belli as a free extra.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-09 00:22:14+00:00
I did this for SOHO to create timelapse footage of a specific filter. It was the first time I weaponized the use of cUrl (I guess officaly making me a hacker at the same time). The SOHO archive is very easy to parse as it has a very structured folder layout. I would hope that the other platform archives are similar.
by UniverseHacker | 2026-01-09 00:22:37+00:00
HN isn't just broadly a tech discussion site, but is largely focused on the SV/Bay Area startup culture scene that PG and YCombinator play a big role in.

The fact is, the current authoritarian political movement in the USA is being largely funded and driven by political extremists in our own community, who have become billionaires through tech, and are using their significant resources to inflict their personal fantasies on the rest of the world, without it's permission.

By all accounts, our own Peter Thiel hand selected the current vice president for his position. The very person that today claimed at a press conference that ICE agents have "absolute immunity" and are therefore presumably allowed to murder anyone they want in cold blood without any recourse or accountability. Elon Musk's involvement here needs no explanation.

Musk, Thiel, and their ilk that are often referenced by labels such as "Dark Enlightenment," "Techno Fascists," and "Neo-monarchists" are from and part of our community. Many of us were or still are engineers and business leaders that work or worked for or with them to give them the power and resources they now have. Some of us are even likely working at places like Palantir, developing government surveillance tech designed to accelerate the systematic dismantling of privacy, freedom, and democracy.

To now pretend that this has nothing to do with us and we don't talk about things like this when people are being shot in the street, and murderers are being protected by a corrupt government that was in part selected and installed by our own community is morally reprehensible. As a community, we need to take some responsibility here, and not censoring uncomfortable facts will be a good starting point.

Moreover, hacker culture is rooted in a historical ethos of freedom, anti-authoritarianism, and inclusion. If any of that ethos still persists, it goes completely at odds with the current status quo, where we refuse to talk about this issue, while members of our community continue to inflict widespread harm on the world.
by dekhn | 2026-01-09 00:22:47+00:00
Peter worked on search, yes. I think he mainly focused on quality. See his comment on "Managing Gigabytes" (https://www.amazon.com/review/R33MIMY7A7C2H8/ref=cm_cr_srp_d...) which was an early reference for the compression techniques used to make search fast.

The way jeff described it was that there was a very early contingent who took Larry's original code and made a production system out of it, but it wasn't very good- the indexer basically had to be run all the way through without errors to make a new index- and that was delaying a release of a fresh new index, so results were getting stale. At that point Jeff "invented" mapreduce (the shuffle stage was Sanjay) and wrote the new indexer and the search engine as well.

I'm not aware of any LISP implementation of the Google search engine; if there was one, it would have been extremely early, like in the stanford days, I think.
by bhhaskin | 2026-01-09 00:22:56+00:00
They don't have that many rockets that are capable of orbital flight let alone an ASAT capability.

Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car, except
Both cars are invisible most of the time.
They’re moving 17,000 mph.
The dart has no steering wheel only tiny nudges.
If you miss by a few feet, you miss by miles.

Countries that can do this reliably aren’t showing off missiles they’re showing off navigation, sensors, computing. The weapon is the least impressive part.
by qaz_plm | 2026-01-09 00:23:21+00:00
No template needed IMO.

I used CC just yesterday to build a native MacOS menu bar app by using plan mode (opus) until there was alignment then to edit mode for the build (I use Zed for the prompting).

CC walked me through the needed Xcode project setup and handled all of the code there after.

I’m sure something more complex would be more challenging but I was happy with a two-shot result for this native menu bar app.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-09 00:23:24+00:00
Your sympathy is severely misplaced. Magic Leap was Theranos-sized fraud from the beginning: they never had the goods, put out a whole bunch of misleading hype to persuade consumers and gullible investors that they had the goods [0], and eventually it caught up to them. Good riddance.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9r2Z5v_E9o
by soldthat | 2026-01-09 00:23:31+00:00
I get the appeal of “it still works, so what’s the problem,” but from a distro’s point of view an unmaintained C toolkit with a big ABI surface is a problem. Even if GTK2’s code hasn’t changed, it still has to keep building across new compilers, hardening flags, toolchain transitions, security scans, etc.

Arch can shove that into community repos and say “you’re on your own.” Debian’s promise is different: if it’s in the archive, someone’s implicitly on the hook for it for years. At some point it’s more honest to drop it from main and let people who really want GTK2 own it via containers/Flatpaks/OBS, instead of making everyone else carry an orphaned toolkit forever.
by john01dav | 2026-01-09 00:23:39+00:00
What counts as "Wall Street" here. Is it any investment property? After some threshold of owning many homes? If so, how many? 10? 10,000? Something else? Is it net worth? Maximum number of beneficial owners? You must title them in a natural person's name instead of a corporate entity? Your service address for your corporation is on wall street in NYC?

Which option is being proposed vastly changes the merits and problems of this policy, so it's a poor choice that this isn't made abundantly clear.
by breppp | 2026-01-09 00:23:50+00:00
Even if that's the case, you would assume they'd not ask back for the previous problematic iteration.

I do agree that democracy generally fails in the middle east or anywhere there is a sizable amount of people that do not believe in democracy.

However, the current Iranian system is autocratic but it works really hard to mask it to appear democratic, so obviously the appearance is important to them and presumably for the people
by lubujackson | 2026-01-09 00:24:41+00:00
LLMs are pattern matchers, but every model is given specific instructions and response designs that influence what to do given unclear prompts. This is hugely valuable to understand since you may ask an LLM an invalid question and it is important to know if it is likely to guess at your intent, reject the prompt or respond randomly.

Understanding how LLMs fail differently is becoming more valuable than knowing that they all got 100% on some reasoning test with perfect context.
by rcxdude | 2026-01-09 00:24:45+00:00
In my experience most drivers are simple enough that there's not a great loss from them being reimplemented in different systems all over the place. They're fundamentally interface code, it makes sense for them to change as on of the sides of the interface changes.

(which leads to one of my embedded hot takes which is that I think striving for a generic HAL is kind of misguided. If you're striving for any form of mechanical sympathy, your HAL is almost certainly specific to at least your framework and probably actually your application)
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-09 00:25:31+00:00
> People in the US are protesting against what the same organization, despite doing the same job under previous presidencies

ICE, CBP, etc., and the other agencies that have been deployed in what this Administration calls an “immigration crackdown” or “mass deportation effort” or a number of other variations which emphasize that it is a new and more forceful policy, were not carrying out either what that campaign is publicly characterized as by the administration, or the campaign of domestic terrorism against the American population, including murdering citizens on the street, that it actually is, under previous presidencies.

> If I recall correctly last year the current admin just beat the Obama admin on people deported in a single year.

Aside from demonstrating that the purpose of the campaign is not efficiently increasing deportation of people actually illegally present in the United States (a point that critics of the policy have no problem at all agreeing with), I’m not sure what point you think that comparison makes.
by BizarroLand | 2026-01-09 00:25:40+00:00
To me it's a funding issue.

If you have the $$$ to afford art for something you'll be selling that is art-dependent, then you don't have an excuse to not pay artists.

If you don't have the money, especially during the prototyping phase, then feel free. You weren't going to be paying artists anyway.

But, as you approach releasing the product, or once you're selling it and making money, you should strive to do everything you can to hire and pay artists appropriately, if for no other reason than you'll likely get a better quality product that is more cohesive across the board.

AI assets are a gapfiller, not an end goal.
by avadodin | 2026-01-09 00:26:49+00:00
crypt is defined in assembly at s3 crypt.s and it would appear to use the same family of "cryptographic machine" as V6's crypt.c but it is even shorter and I can't tell if it has bounds checks or not — V6 limits output size to 512.

edit: if hash output length is variable it may be impossible to find a solution and then a side channel timing attack is probably the best option.
by hrimfaxi | 2026-01-09 00:27:13+00:00
Looked for a way to install/actually set up something.

> Before configuring pgX, you need to set up PostgreSQL metrics collection:

Click the link.

> Prerequisites
> PostgreSQL instance
> Scout account and API credentials
> Scout Collector installed and configured (see Quick Start)

Multiple clicks to find out I need a separate account somewhere (wth is scout?). That's gonna be a no from me dawg.

At least when places like Datadog do content marketing they provide ways to monitor the services using tools that don't require paying them money.
by sanity | 2026-01-09 00:28:20+00:00
Freenet-core itself isn’t stable enough to rely on for something like family chat, and River is still missing some important operational pieces. In particular, there isn’t a smooth or robust way yet to handle things like updating the room contract, which is the decentralized part that defines membership and state. That makes recovery from mistakes or bugs harder than it should be.

That said, a lot of progress has been made recently. Stability has improved noticeably even over the past couple of weeks, and most of the remaining issues are about hardening and ergonomics rather than fundamental design problems.

I’m hesitant to give timelines, but my expectation is weeks rather than months before River is something I’d personally feel comfortable recommending for non-technical use. In the meantime, feedback from people trying it, especially around rough edges or failure cases, is very helpful.
by the__alchemist | 2026-01-09 00:28:35+00:00
I've used RTIC in a few cases. In practice, it's a thin wrapper over interrupt handlers and locks on resources in them. These days, I prefer using macros to simplify the (natively onerous: many <> brackets with Mutex, RefCell etc.!) locking and initialization of global variables.

It also has software tasks, which is presumably the Embassy tie-in you mention.
by gerdesj | 2026-01-09 00:28:43+00:00
You failed to check the terms of my loan and assumed it was on an interest basis. I literally told you I borrowed 100 and promised to pay 110. I also failed to note a term and you also assumed there was one. I do mention interest later on so that's a fair assumption, if misguided.

I might be guilty of abusing an industry term or two 8)
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-09 00:28:58+00:00
"Shah" is actually an abbreviation for Persian "Shahanshah" ("King of kings"), the very same title Cyrus the Great claimed. But the Shah's government in the 20th century was actually quite successful in modernizing the country, fostering a robust middle class and gradually reducing the oppressive power of Islamic clerics in education and the court system. This is ultimately why those very same clerics ultimately pushed for an "Islamic" revolution which undid the bulk of those gains.

> Its a very western view that Democracy is the pinnacle form of government.

Not only a Western view: South Korea made a very successful transition from an initially authoritarian government to a real liberal democracy, and a very similar story in Taiwan. But the key there is "liberal", as in "classical liberal": protection of foundational rights actually matters a whole lot more than whether people are physically able to vote for a candidate on an election ballot. The latter is generally useless without the former, but it does help make popular sovereignty more robust once the former is in place.
by Jun8 | 2026-01-09 00:29:28+00:00
A signal cannot be both time and frequency band limited. Many years ago I was amazed when I read that this fact I learned in my undergraduate is equivalent to the Uncertainty Principle!

On a more mundane note: my wife and I always argue whose method of loading the dishwasher is better: she goes slow and meticulously while I do it fast. It occurred to me we were optimizing for frequency and time domains, respectively, ie I was minimizing time so spent while she was minimizing number of washes :-)
by m4rtink | 2026-01-09 00:29:57+00:00
I guess it is to a degree unavoidable - ukrainian units are using a lot of crowdfunded starlink terminals on the front, so even if you geo fenced usage only to the virtual cells outside of Russia controlled territory, you would also disable ukrainian sets at the front. So if Russians smuggle sets from other countries, they might not be really easy to tell from the "good" sets crowdsourced by the ukrainians and used at the front.

As for use in long range strike UAVs I'm sure ukrainian units have specially registered units that will work anywhere but again, Russian long range kamikaze drones you have a smuggled unit that only activates once on ukrainian territory and be used for terminal guidance or reconnaissance. By the time the system spots a new terminal moving quickly in the wrong place the thing would have rammed into a civilian building somewhere.
by spijdar | 2026-01-09 00:30:02+00:00
I'd posit that Linux having a hard policy of "do not break user space" has always just been "mostly true", especially around architecture specific stuff, and stuff tied to corporations.

I bring this up only because recently, I made it my mission to get IBM's "PowerVM Lx86" dynamic translation system running on a POWER9 system running modern Debian Linux.

This required a lot of hackery I won't go into here, but it revealed two things to me:

1. The lx86 system depended on an undocumented (??) pseudo-syscall to switch between big and little endian modes. This was "syscall 0x1EBE", which was implemented in the exception handler for PowerPC. In other words, it wasn't a real syscall, and tools like strace do NOT capture/log it. It was a conditional branch in the assembly entry point for the process exception handler which switches endianness and then returns. Quicker than a "real" syscall. Also, long gone in the Linux kernel, replaced with syscall switch_endian, hex 0x16B. Adding this in wasn't too hard, but it'd sure as heck never make it upstream again ;)

2. A lot of other Linux calls have had bits added which break old applications that are "rigidly coded". For example, netlink has had extra data stuffed into various structures, which code like lx86's translator panics on. To get network stuff running, even with an antique x86 userland, required removing a bunch of stuff from the kernel. Not disabling it via configuration, but deleting code.

All this to say, there is a precedent for breaking the Linux user facing ABI for hardware features like this. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it is a thing.