MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF | 2026-01-28 12:46:16+00:00
Well I was wondering when the war on general computing and computer ownership would be carried into the heart of the open source ecosystems.

Sure, there are sensible things that could be done with this. But given the background of the people involved, the fact that this is yet another clear profit-first gathering makes me incredibly pessimistic.

This pessimism is made worse by reading the answers of the founders here in this thread: typical corporate talk. And most importantly: preventing the very real dangers involved is clearly not a main goal, but is instead brushed off with empty platitudes like "I've been a FOSS guy my entire adult life...." instead of describing or considering actual preventive measures. And even if the claim was true, the founders had a real love for the hacker spirit (which is doubtful) there is obviously nothing stopping the founders from selling to the usual suspects and golden parachute out.

I was really struggling to not make this comment just another snarky, sarcastic comment, but it is exhausting. It is exhausting to see the hatred some people have for people just owning their hardware. So sorry, "don't worry, we're your friends" just doesn't cut it to come at this with a positive attitude.

The benefits are few, the potential to do a lot of harm is large. And the people involved clearly have the network and connections to make this an instrument of user-hostility.
by kreetx | 2026-01-28 12:46:35+00:00
I have introspected this thoroughly. What I'm saying is if you're confiscated a gun in some highly urgent situation, then the people doing the seizing get even more tense in their mental state, so accidents are easy to make.

While it may be worth it to investigate the situation and there may some blame on the officer, then the allusions people are making (perhaps not you) are completely out of whack.

I'm sure it's inconvenient if your party or candidate lost the presidential election, but you shouldn't turn to lying for retribution.
by hellojesus | 2026-01-28 12:47:05+00:00
I agree. Which is why I have not yet performed a domestic terrorism. Usually I express my disgust by writing things like "domestic terrorist" in the job title box.

But I do give it serious thought, with the quandary normally being: do I have the capacity (and the willingness) to inflict such an impression that I can terrify people from choosing to work for the IRS?
by vladms | 2026-01-28 12:47:09+00:00
Looking back I think allowing more centralized control to various forms of media to private parties did much worse overall than government surveillance on the long run.

For me the problem was not surveillance, the problem is addiction focused app building (+ the monopoly), and that never seem to be a secret. Only now there are some attempts to do something (like Australia and France banning children - which am not sure is feasible or efficient but at least is more than zero).
by eudoxus | 2026-01-28 12:47:26+00:00
I think some of the distinction here is that the more recent "bare LLMs" have been more purpose built, augmented with "agent" specific RL, and in general more fine tuned for the requirements of "agents". Things such as specific reasoning capabilities, tool calling, etc.

These all make the "bare LLMs" better suited to be used within the "agent" harness.

I think the more accurate term would be "agentic LLMs" instead of calling them "agents" outright. As to why its the case now, probably just human laziness and colloquialisms.
by drysine | 2026-01-28 12:47:33+00:00
>I do trust BBC

That's a mistake. BBC has perfected the art of omitting relevant information thus creating a completely different story.

My favorite example so far is that after that debacle with Canadian parliament giving standing ovation to a very old Ukrainian who fought against the USSR (and also collaborated with Nazi, as some Canadian Jewish organization was quick to point out), the BBC counteracted "Russian propaganda" by pointing out that almost all Ukrainians fought against Nazis in WW2, completely forgetting to mention the fact that post-2014 regime in Kiev glorifies former Nazi collaborators and demolishes memorials of Soviet generals who fought Nazis.

The most cynical was the renaming of major avenue in Kiev leading to Babiy Yar (the place where thousands of Jews were massacred) to honor Bandera and the renaming of the avenue that used to honor Nikolai Vatutin[0], Soviet general who fought Nazis on the territory of Ukraine, after Shukhevych[1], another Nazi collaborator and mass murderer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vatutin

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Shukhevych
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-28 12:48:13+00:00
if other systems had actual good idea about how to do pid 1, they'd be used. Systemd despise its issues solved a lot of problems. There were many before but most just aimed to be slightly less shit sysv.

The problem of systemd was the fact Lennart Poettering is smartest person in the universe and why the smartest person in the universe would bother to listen to feedback of any lesser beings ?
by phendrenad2 | 2026-01-28 12:49:06+00:00
This is the same logic that led to rails being shoehorned into every company in 2006-2010, which spawned a whole ecosystem of people who specialized in rewriting Rails projects back to Java/C#.

Yes, the stack gets you most of the way there. No, you won't be happy if you need to actually make changes to any part of that other than the top layer.
by sluongng | 2026-01-28 12:49:12+00:00
I suspect they just use no_std whenever its applicable

https://github.com/facebook/buck2/commit/4a1ccdd36e0de0b69ee...

https://github.com/facebook/buck2/commit/bee72b29bc9b67b59ba...

Turn out if you have strong control over the compiler and linker instrumentations, there are a lot of ways to optimize binary size
by propmaster | 2026-01-28 12:49:13+00:00
In my job, I often release Linux services integrated with systemd and I like it more than the old init system.

My problems with systemd is the bloatware, not init related, that comes with it in modern Linux distributions.

In my perception systemd people doesn't respect the freedom of choice of the users, the right to simply switch off features they find useless, annoying or simply they don't want it their workflow for any reason. I have a personal wiki related to the preparation of the development server or PC I personally use and the large majority of the chapters are related to the systemd features I need or want to remove and often that is a pain. I would like to see the users' right to NOT use given secondary feature respected, giving them the capability to easily remove them easily without side effects, for example, in the OS installer, to be able to deselect features, having alternative options like "manual operation" (i.e. DNS, I should be able to disable the option opting for manual configuration using resolv.conf, just as example). Even better, the possibility to have an input configuration file with all your options so that them will be applied automatically.

IMHO, if all the distributions enforce the systemd way to do anything , we have a monopoly and monopolies are never good.
by tariky | 2026-01-28 12:49:27+00:00
I used CC in year age and it was not good. But one month ago I paid for max and started to rebuild my company web shop using it.

It is like plowing land with hand one year age and now is like I'm in brend new John Deere. It's amazing.

Of course its not perfect but if you understand code and problem it needs to solve then it works really good.
by rorylaitila | 2026-01-28 12:50:50+00:00
I simplify it this way. I don't delete fields or tables in migrations once an app is in production. Only manually clean them up after they are impossible to be used by any production version. I treat the database schema as-if it were "append only" - Only add new fields. This means you always "roll-forward", a database. Rollback migrations are 'not a thing' to me. I don't rename physical columns in production. If you need an old field and a new field to be running simultaneously that represent the same datum, a trigger keeps them in sync.
by petterroea | 2026-01-28 12:51:15+00:00
Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because they have every incentive to invent new ways of surveilling you that they then try to sell to governments, or private actors who want to influence the world. It's like classic government surveillance but every company you interacted with and every app you use may at some point turn on you and use your data against you, just because someone realized "hey, I bet we can sell this data"

We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough.
by weiwenhao | 2026-01-28 12:51:18+00:00
I'm currently using Nature to replace Tauri for developing desktop applications, which will allow me to conduct more thorough testing later. Since the linker succeeded in linking, it indicates that all symbols were successfully located. Both libruntime and libuv are highly complex code systems. The fact that the scheduler and coroutine system are already running successfully confirms that all core functions are functioning properly.
Show HN: I Built a TUI Text Editor
by Frameser | 2026-01-28 12:51:55+00:00
I’d like to share PNANA , a lightweight TUI editor built with C++ and FTXUI that I’ve been building for personal use and now open-sourced. It’s a minimal, fast terminal-based editor focused on simple coding and editing workflows—no bloated features, just the core functionality for terminal-centric use cases.

Key pragmatic features

Lightweight C++ core with FTXUI for smooth TUI rendering, fast startup and low resource usage

Basic but solid editing capabilities (syntax highlighting, line numbering, basic navigation)

Simple build process with minimal dependencies, easy to compile and run on Linux/macOS terminals

Early LSP integration support for basic code completion (still polishing, but functional for common languages)

It’s very much an early-stage project—I built it to scratch my own itch for a minimal, self-built TUI editor and learn C++/FTXUI along the way. There are definitely rough edges (e.g., some LSP kinks, limited customization), and it’s not meant to replace mature editors like Vim/Nano—just a small open-source project for folks who like minimal terminal tools or want to learn TUI development with C++.

Any feedback, bug reports, or tiny suggestions are super welcome. I’m slowly iterating on it and would love to learn from the HN community’s insights.
Thanks for taking a look!
by dTal | 2026-01-28 12:52:04+00:00
Ah, if only! GNOME and KDE both hard-depend on systemd components, to the point that systemd-free distros are compelled to fork it if they want a GUI: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Elogind

Only yesterday I was wondering how it is that my brightness keys work in my desktop environment, when /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness is only writeable by root. The (somewhat horrifying) answer is that applications can send a request to logind over DBUS, which checks the request against opaque and arbitrarily byzantine Polkit rules, and then writes to the sysfs file on the application's behalf, which it can do because it runs as root. It's unclear quite what this achieves that simply making the file writeable by the "video" group does not, but hey at least systemd gets to be involved.

Incidentally, the correct command to change the brightness as a normal user from the command line is as follows:

busctl --timeout=1 call org.freedesktop.login1 /org/freedesktop/login1/session/self org.freedesktop.login1.Session SetBrightness ssu "backlight" "intel_backlight" <brightness>

So simple, so easy to remember, so superior to "echo <brightness> > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness". Google it for a fun thread on why the --timeout=1 is neccessary (it won't work without it!) - although I suppose I should be thankful for that little foible, as without it the thread wouldn't exist and I would never have figured out the command in the first place.
by anderson10002 | 2026-01-28 12:52:13+00:00
I think part of the issue is that AI isn't just "features" and things like ChatGPT but it's the underpinning tech for the internet right now. I'm a dev and feel like any tech company or developer has to engage with it or at least understand it. You can't put your head in the sand. I like that you'll be able to just turn off all the AI features on Firefox; I'd rather they weren't there but there is a choice to just not use any of it.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2026-01-28 12:52:25+00:00
That's a good application but likely not one requiring a full standard library on the GPU? Procedurally generated data on GPU isn't uncommon AFAIK. It wasn't when I was dabbling in GPGPU stuff ~10 years ago.

If you wrote in open cl, or via intel libraries, or via torch or arrayfire or whatever, you could dispatch it to both CPU and GPU at will.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-01-28 12:52:49+00:00
I think you are not using enough imagination.

It would not be shocking at all if in 10 years, "Let's redo the entire project to account for this" is exactly how things work.

Or lets make 3 or 4 versions of the project and see what one the customer likes best.

Or each decision point of the customer becomes multiple iterations of the project, with each time the project starting from scratch.

Of course, at some point there might not be a customer in this context. The "customer" that can't handle this internally might no longer be a viable business.

"You're absolutely right" feels so summer 2025 to me.
by delichon | 2026-01-28 12:52:54+00:00
Part of the Miranda warning is "anything you say can and will be used against you." I think of the "will be" part as a lie, because they're usually not that diligent or competent even when they're that malicious. But it's still a good heuristic when it comes to giving your PII to the government. I used to be an outlier conspiracy theorist for believing that. To those coming around to it, welcome.
by stevekemp | 2026-01-28 12:52:57+00:00
Most of the "Awesome XXX" lists are designed solely to promote their creators pet project.

You can see the gaming happen early on in many of these lists, where commercial things start appearing quite highly, or weirdly the project get sponsored.

Once they get popular the creators abandon them and start ignoring the updates/PRs because their task of feeding traffic to their personal projects has been accomplished.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-28 12:53:07+00:00
I liked it coz I did remember the old ways (as in kernel 2.2.x old) and they fucking sucked. Few examples of bugs I had to fix in sysv that just can't happen in very simply written systemd unit:

* multiple java based apps wrote pid in java which meant few secs after JVM started, so calling start -> status made status return app is not running, which tripped some tools

* mysql wrote pid in /var/run which was (at that time, most moved it to tmpfs finally, and that is also easier with systemd) not removed on stop. and on start it only checked whether PID existed in system, not what the PID was. So sometimes if some other app happened to get same PID as mysql on previous boot, mysql would not start on boot

* there was no checks on whether stuff app needs is mounted so some volume failing to mount could make app start with empty dir and lead to a mess.

It has problems. But it's also a massive improvement.
by stvvvv | 2026-01-28 12:53:09+00:00
well-run ops requires knowing the business. It's not enough to know "This rpc is failing 100%", but also what the impact on the customer is, and how important to the business it is.

Mature SRE teams get involved with the development of systems before they've even launched, to ensure that they have reliability and supportability baked in from the start, rather than shoddily retrofitted.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-28 12:53:11+00:00
Whilst either side can claim to be "good guys", it's important to look at the behaviours exhibited. Obviously, Germany had the concentration camps and Japan brutally tortured prisoners of war, so it does seem quite clear that one side had more respect for human dignity than the other. However, the U.S. did round up Japanese people, but it hardly compares to the atrocities of the Nazis.

Nowadays however, we have the USA rounding up non-white people and putting them in brutal concentration camps (it's not a prison if there's no due process) whilst openly murdering opposition in the streets whilst Germany is acting as a trusted and stable partner. It's not the country, but the monsters that may be put in charge by a misled population.
by aljarry | 2026-01-28 12:54:18+00:00
One option is to do multi-stage rollout of your database schema and code, over some time windows. I recall a blog post here (I think) lately from some Big Company (tm) that would run one step from the below plan every week:

1. Create new fields in the DB.

2. Make the code fill in the old fields and the new fields.

3. Make the code read from new fields.

4. Stop the code from filling old fields.

5. Remove the old fields.

Personally, I wouldn't use it until I really need it. But a simpler form is good: do the required schema changes (additive) iteratively, 1 iteration earlier than code changes. Do the destructive changes 1 iteration after your code stops using parts of the schema. There's opposite handling of things like "make non-nullable field nullable" and "make nullable field non-nullable", but that's part of the price of smooth operations.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-28 12:54:19+00:00
One of the most revolutionizing life skills is to learn to seek out the good instead of learning to avoid the bad.

For great books and music, there is probably never a need to read anything published after 2020, or even after 2000. There's more than you will want to read in your lifetime. There's more than you can ever listen to. You'll get tired of music as a whole before that.

Here's some things AI can't do for you: Relationships and interacting with good people, every kind of sports and physical endeavour including any adventure you can think of, enjoying the perfection of nature. Psychedelic experiences and spiritual experiences. All of these require very little or no money.

Human art has always been an imperfect imitation of the creation, and the same is true for anything AI makes.
by michaelsshaw | 2026-01-28 12:55:23+00:00
Here's a better question: do we need them? I'll answer it for you: no. Let them leave. We still have the resources and the productivity. The fact that some asshat that doesn't do fuck all doesn't get to scrape profits for himself is just another advantage, aside from just not having these annoying billionaires around. People need to open their minds to the idea of us just taking their shit for ourselves.
by simoncion | 2026-01-28 12:55:30+00:00
Given that FDO [0] has been screaming about how Xorg is dead and Wayland is (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) ready for everyone and every use case for the past like ten+ years, I remain somewhat wary about their opinions regarding Xorg development.

Maybe XLibre will be a damn trainwreck, or maybe it'll be to xorg what xorg was to XFree86. I intend to find out through the testimony of users of XLibre.

[0] ...or maybe just a very vocal subset of the folks at FDO...
by Blackstrat | 2026-01-28 12:55:53+00:00
As one who has spent substantially since Amazon's inception, Amazon in recent years has become an unreliable supplier in my area. Much of the product sold by Amazon is sourced from China and until recently Amazon did little to distinguish name-brand products from knockoffs. That's why companies like J&J weren't making product available on the Amazon site. Amazon Prime is laughable here, frequently taking a week or longer. The local Whole Foods is a mere shadow of its previous incarnation. Of course, most of the bookstore alternatives have been driven out of business. The B&N strategy is more appropriate to competing with Books-a-Million than the old Borders. Overall, Amazon seems more focused on its movie/TV business than it does what created it. And Bezos? Well, it's obvious that righting the ship at Amazon isn't nearly as important as being a jet setting celebrity with a new younger wife and playing with his space ahips. And BTW, I'm in a major city, not some rural town.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-28 12:56:29+00:00
...yeah but that's just adding to point that shares buybacks are for companies that are stagnant and can't make successful investments.

> Search, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Gemini.

There is a single thing there that's not at least 10+ years old. And Search if anything is getting worse
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-28 12:56:33+00:00
Arguably these and billionaires have become a social menace. They undermine democracy, destroy our environment, and prioritize shareholder value over long term well being of the economy they live in.

If they all had unified in one voice against the administration, Trump might be more constrained. They might not be so hated. If they realized, like Henry Ford, that a strong middle class actually is good for THEM too, all this could be avoided. Instead they’re showing up at Melania screenings while average citizens are getting shot in the streets.

I don’t think they realize the fire they’re playing with my stomping on the social contract that made them so wealth.
by cbolton | 2026-01-28 12:57:48+00:00
The udev developers decided that it made sense to move udev into systemd. If you disagree and want choice, you can fork udev. Actually some people did that, so you can run xterm with eudev instead of udev and thus avoid systemd (though eudev seems hardly maintained now, with the latest release in 2023).

I think it's true that it's an exhausting battle to keep all those parts independent when 95% of the devs/money agree it's better to integrate them. But it wouldn't be fair either for the 5% to put on the others the burden of keeping things independent because of their own preferences...
by Cu3PO42 | 2026-01-28 12:58:01+00:00
Gnome, for example. GDB now needs systems's userdb.

It is indeed becoming harder and harder to avoid and I understand that this isn't great, but systemd tackles some genuinely hard problems that others don't. Which is to say I don't begrudge Gnome devs for this and personally prefer systemd over current alternatives.
by firasd | 2026-01-28 12:58:27+00:00
Both Trump presidencies have really shown how little check there is on the White House when it comes to coordinating among these agencies. Heck literally one of the first the things he did in Jan 2016 is try to find out which park ranger posted a sparse inauguration photo. It wouldn't even occur to me that he was the de facto boss of millions of people in this way

Cause consider the previous status quo. It was considered somehow scandalous for Bill Clinton to have an opinion on what his AG Janet Reno was doing
by angeltech2026 | 2026-01-28 12:58:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this because I was working on an AI agent that needed to create
accounts on various websites, but kept getting stuck at phone verification.

Existing SMS APIs (Twilio Verify, etc.) are designed for YOU to verify
YOUR users. I needed the opposite - my agent needed to receive OTPs.

So I built Agent OTP:

POST /api/v1/numbers/rent → Get a phone number
POST /api/v1/numbers/{n}/wait-for-otp → Wait for SMS (with timeout)
DELETE /api/v1/numbers/{n} → Release when done

That's basically it. The agent gets a number, uses it to sign up somewhere,
waits for the OTP, and releases the number.

Stack: FastAPI + PostgreSQL on Railway, Twilio for SMS, LemonSqueezy for
payments. Landing page on Cloudflare Pages.

Pricing: 5 free OTPs/month, then $9/50, $29/200, $49/500.

Site: https://agentotp.angletech.io
Docs: https://agentotp.angletech.io/docs/

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or the surprisingly
annoying edge cases with SMS delivery timing.