MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-19 12:22:50+00:00
It's perfectly possible to provide binary interfaces that don't need byte-wise parsing or that work more like io_uring as part of a Plan9 approach, it's just not idiomatic. Providing zero-copy communication of any "source" range of pages across processes is also a facility that could be provided by any plan9-like kernel via segment(3) and segattach(2), though the details would of course be somewhat hardware-dependent and making this "sharing" available across the network might be a bit harder.
by Kostchei | 2026-01-19 12:23:07+00:00
Are you saying that people can't work out what to code using these? Or that code is not a worthy subject to use AI for? 'cause I got news for you...
1. Improving coding improved reasoning in the models. Having a verifiable answer that is not a single thing is a good training test.
2. Software has been used for fairly serious things. We used to have skyscrapers of people doing manual math. Now we have campuses of people doing manual code. You might argue that nobody would trust AI to write code when it matters. History tells us that if that is ever true, it will pass.
3. We are not going to run out of planet. It just feels to folks that there is not enough planet for their dreams and we get population panic, energy panic etc. There is a huge fusion reactor conveniently holding us in it's gravity well and spewing out many orders of magnitude more energy than we can currently use. Chill.

I think at Gas Country levels we will need better networking systems. Maybe that backbone Nvidia just built....
by Instantnoodl | 2026-01-19 12:23:08+00:00
Sorry for the confusion. The use-case is a little difference because the goal is to display the image as close to the original as possible with the limitation of only being able to use a forground color, background color and character per cell. The character is selected based on it's shape just like in the article. So if you get rid of the colors in Chafa you end up with something similar to the article. That's what I wanted to say :D
by sudonem | 2026-01-19 12:23:51+00:00
>>>absolutely insufferable human beings but were some kind of supernatural coders who were doing the work of 20 people

I don’t at all condone being that guy. However….

It’s pretty amazing what an engineer can accomplish if you can actually get into a flow state because people are too afraid/intimidated to interrupt you every 10 minutes and you aren’t being invited to endless (and mostly useless) meetings all day.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by closewith | 2026-01-19 12:23:58+00:00
> So yeah, I know pretty well what I’m talking about. Helping others is an explicit goal of mine that I derive satisfaction from. I’d never describe it as “delivering value/solutions”, that’s vague corporate soulless speech.

While I commend your voluntary efforts, I don't think it lends any more weight to your original comment. In fact, I think this comment highlights a deep cynicism and I think a profound misunderstanding of the internal motivations of others and why "delivering value" resonates with others, but rings hollow to you.

In the end, this debate is less about LLMs, and more about how different developers identify. If you consider software to be a craft, then mastery of the skillset, discipline, and authorship of the code is key to you.

If you consider software to be a means to an end, then the importance lies in the impact the software has on others, irrespective to how it's produced.

While you are clearly in the former camp, it is undeniable that impact is determined entirely by what the software enables for others, not by how it was produced. Most users never see the code, never care how it was written, and judge it only by whether it solves their problem.
by aw1621107 | 2026-01-19 12:24:54+00:00
I think it might be an interesting experiment to try to duplicate as much of the functionality of IKOS as possible in vanilla Rust using a no_panic-like [0] technique. My guess is that most of the checks are already done by Rust or can be covered by such a technique, albeit perhaps with more hand-holding than for IKOS. The pointer alignment and comparison checks are the ones I'm least certain about since Rust is relatively lax with those.

[0]: https://docs.rs/no-panic/latest/no_panic/
by mfalcon | 2026-01-19 12:25:00+00:00
The truth is that no one really knows.

My approach is to "ride the wave", don't resist, just try to use it as an advantage and if not possible, adapt and look where I can keep adding value to the world.

Currently I'm trying to get my own company started because that way I can iterate the product faster using AI and if it goes well I can slowly migrate from coder to manager. I've come to terms that my days as a pure coder are coming to an end but I've been coding for at least 15 years.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-19 12:25:55+00:00
Right, but unless you have a specific page about "This is how to treat AI texts", people will (if they haven't already) bombard you with "This text is so obviously AI written, do something" and by having a specific page to answer to those, you can just link that instead of general "Here's how text on Wikipedia should be" guidelines. Being more specific sometimes helps people understand better :)
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-19 12:26:06+00:00
> and there's a significant hoop to pay someone in crypto

Not sure why that would be. Being paid in Bitcoin is very easy. Download a non-custodial Wallet such as Phoenix Wallet or Wallet of Satoshi (new version is non-custodial) and you can receive on-chain bitcoin, or even better, lightning payments right away. You create an invoice as a link or QRcode and send it to your employer, and done.

The payer (employer) most likely will need to convert fiat/cash to bitcoin first, but since the kacet project aims to attract companies in that space, there shouldn't be an issue.
by empiko | 2026-01-19 12:26:20+00:00
EU is in a tough place. Economically and security wise, we are in a bad situation due to the EU-Russian split, which was actually started by the US with their moronic NATO expansion policy during the GWB presidency. Now, when we are weakened, the bully comes and takes our lunch money. EU politicians should start taking realpolitik lessons, the rest of the world is playing with us.
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-19 12:26:24+00:00
I hope in 2028 the electeds take a different path than Biden did in his administration. Currently, dem leadership seems to think this ends with them just getting elected. But it doesn't. Just taking power back and pretending that everything is normal again won't do it.

We need meaningful punishments for the people committing crimes within the Trump administration and we need systems in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
by barishnamazov | 2026-01-19 12:26:32+00:00
The turkey is fed by the farmer every morning at 9 AM.

Day 1: Fed. (Inductive confidence rises)

Day 100: Fed. (Inductive confidence is near 100%)

Day 250: The farmer comes at 9 AM... and cuts its throat. Happy thanksgiving.

The Turkey was an LLM. It predicted the future based entirely on the distribution of the past. It had no "understanding" of the purpose of the farmer.

This is why Meyer's "American/Inductive" view is dangerous for critical software. An LLM coding agent is the Inductive Turkey example. It writes perfect code for 1000 days because the tasks match the training data. On Day 1001, you ask for something slightly out of distribution, and it confidently deletes your production database because it added a piece of code that cleans your tables.

Humans are inductive machines, for the most part, too. The difference is that, fortunately, fine-tuning them is extremely easy.
Show HN: Professional Headshot AI – A Tool for Realistic Headshots Using AI
by ZHUDAN509 | 2026-01-19 12:27:04+00:00
I recently launched Professional Headshot AI, a tool that focuses on creating realistic, professional headshots without the heavy editing often found in other AI tools. Unlike many AI headshot generators that optimize for beauty, my tool preserves facial identity while matching professional lighting, clothing, and composition.

As an independent developer, I was inspired by the need for authentic professional headshots that don't feel overly edited. After working on the project for some time, I realized how much value there is in creating an AI tool that produces natural, studio-quality results in just a few minutes.

What sets this tool apart is its focus on delivering high-quality headshots suitable for platforms like LinkedIn, resumes, and personal branding, without the need for expensive photo shoots. Users simply upload their photos, choose their style, and get high-quality results in no time.

Would love to hear thoughts from the community – any feedback or suggestions for improvement are welcome.

You can try it here: https://www.professionalheadshotai.ink

Looking forward to the discussion!
by brushfoot | 2026-01-19 12:27:06+00:00
I'm not trolling. I'm just not aware of major differences between them.

When I make a change with a Copilot Agent, it checks for issues, builds my project, runs tests, and iterates until things work. Multiple agents can do that in parallel.

My impression was that this does more or less the same thing.

That said, I'm definitely open to learning more about them both.

What are the advantages of this in your experience?
by entrox | 2026-01-19 12:27:23+00:00
> They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"

That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI.

But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. If nobody values the quality of human art, why should anybody value the quality of human code?
by cbdevidal | 2026-01-19 12:27:38+00:00
I once wrote an article detailing as many prepper uses for an offline phone as I could think of. Dozens of offline apps useful for a survival situation. My favorite might be ATAK, which is from the US military and allows a team to communicate encrypted over Wi-Fi or radios, completely offline. Share GPS coords, camera feeds, messages, map markers, all kinds of goodness.

And if nothing else, you can always rupture the battery and start a fire :-)
by metalman | 2026-01-19 12:27:49+00:00
While I am highly suspicious of "perdue's" motives, there is the reality of china bieng
so huge that they could easily fill all the openings in many many western universities, litteraly, without trying.
Also trying to get good comunication and verification from the Chinese end, can be a throw your hands in the air frustration, that for, in this case an admissions department, might just go, fuck it, I know I have.
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 12:28:17+00:00
Mastodon isn't doing anything similar!

Mastodon is just a bunch of isolated copies of the same app talking to each other. There is no notion of a shared identity, each server's admin is effectively a king over your account, etc. It's a fragmented patchwork of isolated sites that forward messages.

With AT, there is just one global network. Like the web. You don't post "to" someone's isolated copy of an app. You post to your own folder, and every interested app can aggregate your post.

It's a bit like email vs RSS. Very different shapes.

To give you a concrete example to ground it. Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky. They're setting up their own server with different moderation policies and are unbanning some people that Bluesky has banned (https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...). However, Blacksky posts still exist in the same "world" as Bluesky--they are not an isolated fragment.

Thanks to AT, Blacksky and Bluesky are just two different prisms through which you see a single network. Whereas with Mastodon, every app is its own network, with some limited message passing between them.
by abalashov | 2026-01-19 12:29:07+00:00
Came here to say this. I've been programming since I was 9, and it always had a strong aesthetic, artistic and creative dimension. That dimension has always been in tension with the economic demands of adult life, but I was good at finding the quiet corners in which to resolve it.

A lot of work was tedious, painstaking grind, but the reward at the end was considerable.

AI has completely annihilated all of the joy I got out of the process, and everything that attracted me to it with such abandon as an adolescent and a teenager. If someone had told me it was mostly slop curation, I would have stayed in school, stuck to my philosophy major, and who knows -- anything but this. I'm sure I'd have got reasonably far in law, too, despite the unpropitious time to be a JD.
by cubefox | 2026-01-19 12:29:54+00:00
That's interesting. 192 cameras is certainly expensive. Though they are doing 4DGS, with movement, so they have to capture every frame from different angles at the same time. I assume 3DGS for static environments (locations) would be a lot easier in terms of hardware. E.g. a single drone could collect photos for an hour and then they could create arbitrary simulated camera movements that couldn't be filmed conventionally. But again, the quality would have to be high in most cases. The nature of the Superman scene (some sort of hologram) is more forgiving, as it is inherently fake-looking, which helps excuse artifacts slipping through.
by monegator | 2026-01-19 12:30:37+00:00
>ultimately the fault of bad app devs

More like google's fault. They made a huge mess of completely different permission and behaviour changes between 11, 12, 13. At least since 14 they have stopped fucking around so much.

It is really much simpler for us to cut off all versions before 12, but it's unfeasible. So many devices still with 10/11. Now we cut off at 8.1, but will increase that every year starting next year as google mandates us an increase of minimum sdk version.
by b3lvedere | 2026-01-19 12:30:47+00:00
While, as a parent, i don't like social media in its current form and the effect it has on ALL people, one must not forget that the 'fight' between old and young people has been going for at least 2500 years now. ( https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-a... ).
I also recommend watching the movie 'The Boat That Rocked' ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1131729/ )
by abalashov | 2026-01-19 12:30:49+00:00
> Do you truly believe it won't get better, maybe even better at whole system design and implementation than people?

What are you calling "growth"? Adoption, or LLM progress? LLM progress has objectively slowed down, and for rather obvious reasons. The leaps from GPT-2 to GPT-4 can't be reprised forever.
by latexr | 2026-01-19 12:31:01+00:00
Yes yes, so does a street sweeper. Someone pays them because the road is dirty, and they use a broom to deliver the solution of a cleaner street, which is of value to the user.

Do you see why that’s marketing speak? You’re using vague terms which can be applied to anything. It avoids commitment and makes whatever you do seem grandiose. That’s marketing.

A few years ago, every app developer and designer was a “story teller”.

You don’t “deliver solutions”, you write software (or have it written for you).
by notarobot123 | 2026-01-19 12:31:12+00:00
> I don’t use social networks (and no, Hacker News is not a social network)

If you define social networks as a graph of connections, fair enough - there's no graph. It is social media though.

HN is Social in the sense that it relies on (mostly) humans considering what other humans would find interesting and posting/commenting for for the social value (and karma) that generates. Text and links are obviously media.

There seems to be an insinuation that HN isn't in the same category as other aggregators and algorithmic feeds. It's not always easy to detect but the bots are definitely among us. HN isn't immune to slop, its just fairly good at filtering the obvious stuff.
by vintermann | 2026-01-19 12:31:29+00:00
There was a paper recently about using LLMs to find contradictions in Wikipedia, i.e. claims on the same page or between pages which appear to be mutually incompatible.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23233

I wonder if something more came out of that.

Either way, I think that generation of article text is the least useful and interesting way to use AI on Wikipedia. It's much better to do things like this paper did.
by meetingthrower | 2026-01-19 12:31:53+00:00
Everything is still touched by human - AI is just giving suggestions to humans to speed them up. Can get them 80-90% there.

I think also you need to compare it to what was already there. No QA on the humans. Done off the side of their desk with no oversite, process, or checking. Huge amounts of manual errors.

The new solution just needs to be better than the old one, it doesn't need to be perfect.

(But I 100% agree that I wouldn't let AI live against customers. It is helping us build automations faster, and doing a "little" thinking on recommendation rules that would be very hard to implement without something highly structured, which would be frankly impossible in our environment.)
by hermitcrab | 2026-01-19 12:32:13+00:00
I trekked to the summit of Mera Peak some 25 years ago. We slept in tents every night. There were very few, if any, teahouses between Lukla and the summit back then. I guess it is good that more Nepalis are making a living from trekkers with their tea houses.

It was an incredible experience, but not for the faint-hearted. A couple of people in our group were unlucky and had serious issues (oedema and an aneurism) and were too high for helicopter evacuation, but they both survived. If you want to do something like this, go with a reputable company (such as KE Experience in the UK).
by 6510 | 2026-01-19 12:33:34+00:00
The war isn't over tho.

Warning people is the domain of influences, hipsters, propagandists and marketeers. Programmers cant really compete there but money does talk in the domain. Our world is such that if we want something we have to pay for it.

What we can do however is write code. Solving it in code makes the problem orders of magnitude more complicated to solve but [say] an Iphone is now merely a decent camera with great software enhancement. When I switched to Android, transferring the apps and data worked gloriously. While it might not be real progress the new HarmonyOS is still running most android apps.

Every year or so I realize I was conditioned to accept something obviously absurd if only superficially examined. (which I didn't do up to that point)

The warnings might not have the desired effect, it is hard to unsee the obvious so they do contribute.

Keep fighting!
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-19 12:33:39+00:00
Alternatively, straight from Wikimedia, those are the dumps I'm using, trivial to parse concurrently and easy format to parse too, multistream-xml in bz2. Latest dump (text only) is from 2026-01-01 and weights 24.1 GB. https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20260101/ Also have splits together with indexes, so you can grab few sections you want, if 24GB is too large.
by d-lisp | 2026-01-19 12:33:48+00:00
> in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.

Using this kind of strategy eventually leads to the LLM recurrently advertising what it just produced as «straight to the point, no fluff, no bullshit». («Here is the blunt truth»).

Of course no matter how the LLM advertise its production, it is too often non devoid of sycophancy.
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 12:33:54+00:00
Yes. I describe this in this part of the article: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/#:~:text=One%20ch...

It's basically event sourcing. You listen to the data you care about from the network and update the local index (DB). There are also tools like Tap (https://docs.bsky.app/blog/introducing-tap) that do the plumbing work and let you backfill automatically.
by raxxorraxor | 2026-01-19 12:34:03+00:00
Also the vast majority of sw engineers just have average soft skills. There is still a difference to sales and we certainly do not need any more pretentious behaviour in technical discussions. Yes, VCs will require you to advertise yourself, but I think many also just want a realistic approach about a potential business ventures.

The most practical problem sw engineers have here that they waste hours on some frivolous technical solution that could have been cleared up with a pragmatic approach through a three minute call.

That engineers aren't people persons is a stereotype. There are as many "autists" in the social sciences. Yes, I know I shouldn't use that word for anything that is not a pathological diagnosis.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-19 12:34:08+00:00
Greenpeace got their start against nuclear weapons and nuclear waste dumping at sea.

I don't think it's entirely appropriate to ignore the risks of nuclear in the country that contains Chernobyl, and another different nuclear plant which is quite close to the front lines and was shut down by capture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
by eth0up | 2026-01-19 12:34:22+00:00
Samsung Moto? Two different companies with very different phones. I'm surprised that such a mutant exists. Reads to me Car (with square wheels).

Moto is the only big brand I ever consider for a phone, while Samsung has never been as much as a consideration. Moto has had, which is changing, a bit of freedom - enough to tweak it into resembling a pure android experience. Samsung is incorrigibly infested - and if they ever start giving phones to prisoners, they'll be Samsung.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-19 12:35:07+00:00
> Massive efforts are done to implement reforms to conform to EU standards, believing that that’s how the “superior” EU members do it (Germany, NL, Nordics…).

I can't speak for Germany or the Nordics, but here in the Netherlands the government is doing just about anything in their power to keep foreign competition from our rail network. The only lines serviced by foreign operators are the ones that would cost the national operator more than they would bring in and (some of) the international train services.

Our "high speed" rail is a joke. The trains themselves are fine, but the bridges over them are too brittle for the train to actually achieve high speeds, so it's operating at less than half the speed Spanish high speed rail is operating at. If anything, the success of the Spanish rail operators is an argument in favour of actually bringing competition to Dutch rail operators.

That said, the Dutch railway network is very different from the Spanish railway network. We're a small, densely populated country with many stops along just about any track, barely giving most trains time to accelerate even between larger city centers. The network is complex, the rails are extremely busy all hours of the day, our trains run on an idiotically low voltage and two trains with a dozen minutes in delays can back up the national train grid in no time if they slow down in the wrong spot. There are only a few long-distance high-speed rail options that make sense, some of which already sort of exist (Eurostar to the south), some of which our neighbours plainly don't want (any Dutch rail project crossing into the German border), and some of which are hardly financially viable (trains from the big cities to remote parts of the country) in a country that doesn't want to spend money on public transport.
by ranguna | 2026-01-19 12:35:12+00:00
> Pixel is also disqualified for me by the same reason.

How so?

I think all pixels starting from 6 or 7 have DisplayPort output through USB C.

I watched a movie the other day with my projector connected to my pixel 10 running grapheneOS. Other than getting a phone call halfway through the movie and a few hiccups selecting the audio Jack output, everything ran smoothly.
by Aromasin | 2026-01-19 12:36:00+00:00
I jumped mid-career, and there were a few places I started before diving into live hardware projects (which is the only way to go from student to practitioner).

FPGA basics: https://nandland.com/fpga-101/

Verilog basics: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page

Projects: https://www.hackster.io/fpga/projects