MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FloatArtifact | 2026-01-12 02:50:41+00:00
> Definitely interested in the concept! Though it's not on the immediate roadmap.
>
> A few thoughts: - Obsidian's plugin system is JavaScript-based, which makes sense for Electron. For a native Rust app, we'd likely want something like WASM plugins or Lua scripting. - v0.3.0 includes plans to extract the Mermaid renderer as a standalone crate and potentially the editor widget as a library — this modular architecture would be a foundation for future extensibility.
>
> What kinds of plugins would you want? Knowing specific use cases would help prioritize. Custom renderers? File format converters? External tool integrations?
>
> In the meantime, Ferrite has a "Live Pipeline" feature that lets you pipe JSON/YAML through shell commands (jq, yq, etc.) — not a full plugin system, but useful for custom transformations.

Personally, I think there's two plugins I would really want.

1. Peer-to-peer syncing of notes. I do hope there will be a mobile version someday of your app. Most of my quick jotting of notes happens on mobile and heavy editing happens on traditional laptop/desktop. It would be nice just to scan a QR code to pair up devices and away we go. Optionally a small binary to be the sync server for self host for hub and spoke design. I love Git integration, but we want to take this at a level for those that aren't technically inclined.

2. A robust API for tool integration. Being able to plug in external tools is super helpful for streamlining workflows. In addition I've used it to make accessibility tools integrate for command and control.

I do like the fact that Obsidian has vaults that are essentially separate profiles that have separate vaults location settings and plugins.
by wanderingmind | 2026-01-12 02:51:43+00:00
Hasn't this always been the case, what is different right now is that the tech enables to do this at scale, at much higher frequency that makes them more audacious, since no regular person can keep up with it. The over saturation of lies/fake news has lead to numbness and the hyper-normalisation. So, unless something directly is affecting us currently, we won't care
by potsandpans | 2026-01-12 02:52:28+00:00
Always amusing. So sure. I like to imagine the conversations at the begining of the late bronze age collapse, or perhaps aristocrats of the western roman empire living in Gaul.

"To say anything that challenges the current trajectory is doomerism. We're in for a bumpy ride for sure, but this will all correct itself. _it has to_."
by callc | 2026-01-12 02:52:57+00:00
It’s an easy deflection. Dismiss any opinions because you’re using it wrong or not the latest.

Good for anything >= 1 month old.

Use other nonsense fear inducing argument in the mean time, continue gathering gobs of VC money, get your bag, continue till the bubble pops.

In all fairness, and putting hype and anti-hype aside, I’m really interested to see the actual value of LLM/agent services after the VC money subsidies dry out. Would people we willing to pay for services at 10x the current price?
by abustamam | 2026-01-12 02:53:06+00:00
I think all programmers are like LEGO builders. But different programmers will see each brick as a different kind of abstraction. A hacker kind of programmer may see each line of code as a brick. An architect kind of programmer may see different services as a brick. An entrepreneur kind of programmer may see entire applications as a brick. These aren't mutually exclusive, of course. But we all just like to build things, the abstractions we use to build them just differ.
by jordanb | 2026-01-12 02:53:23+00:00
This is exactly it and parallels what happened with the end of the Wiemar Republic. There was an asymmetry in response between the Nazis and the government. You can see that in the limited prosecution and light sentences of the Beer Hall Putsch perpetrators.

The tech titans like Thiel see the Trump administration as a "big bet" a startup investment. They can "shoot for the moon" and try to realize the network state. If they fail, they figure they'll just toss the Democrats some campaign contributions and all will be good.
by jordanpg | 2026-01-12 02:53:27+00:00
Stated differently, if things really are so bad (and I would be the first to agree that things are pretty bad), then why are so many comfortable people (like me) not out on the street every day?

There are a lot of reasons for that, of course, but the bottom line is that when things get bad enough -- much worse than they are today -- then more people will take to the street, along with whatever sacrifice that entails. We're just not there yet, because for many, there is far too much to lose.
by nine_k | 2026-01-12 02:53:46+00:00
What's jarring is not even that macOS Tahoe has such weird shapes of windows. What really astonishes me is that nobody seems to have anticipated how users would try to resize windows, and did not reshape the corner drag area (which I would expect to be a quarter-circle, or a quarter-ring along the rounded edge). This can't be a mistake, this can only be deliberate cutting corners by management in order to ship ASAP. And then nobody cared to issue an update.

Verily, the last UI redesign that was based on honest research and watching real users act was WinXP.
by throw0101c | 2026-01-12 02:54:21+00:00
> I can see why someone would have a issues with "a bunch of rich bankers appointed by politicians" controlling American monetary policy.

Yellen had a long academic career before going into public service (with various roles at the Fed before becoming Fed chair):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Yellen

Bernanke had a strictly academic career before going into public service (and was/is probably one of the foremost experts on the Great Depression, something that was handy in 2008/9):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke#Academic_and_gove...

Greenspan was in the finance world pre-Fed. Volcker was in government for his entire career pre-Fed:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Career

I think people over-estimate how many "rich bankers" are in the Fed, especially at the FOMC.

Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast with some Fed members in recent years, especially the more obscure regional ones, about their work, and how they often go out and talk to local businesses about what's happening 'on the ground'.
by istjohn | 2026-01-12 02:54:43+00:00
I understand where you're coming from. It doesn't feel like such a heavy word to me because I know it's ubiquitous. It's like germs. I don't like germs, but I know they're everywhere, so I'm not scandalized at the implication that germs might be on my hands or food. At the same time, I am repulsed by reckless disregard for sanitation.
by simpaticoder | 2026-01-12 02:54:45+00:00
>This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to...actually gain ground.

I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse.

That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to.

An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.
by sampo | 2026-01-12 02:54:46+00:00
Roomba (specifically the brand of the American company iRobot) only added lidar in 2025 [1]. Earliest Roombas navigated by touch (bumping into walls), and then by cameras.

But if you use "roomba" as a generic term for robot vacuum then yes, Chinese Ecovacs and Xiaomi introduced lidar-based robot vacuums in 2015 [2].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/627751/irobot-launches-eight-n...

[2] https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=4542
by throw0101c | 2026-01-12 02:56:24+00:00
> The Fed Funds policy interest rate is a clumsy instrument because it involves chasing the ever-shifting balancing point of an inherently unstable system.

I don't know about "inherently unstable system", given that as central bank independence has grown so has, generally speaking, monetary stability:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
by mat_b | 2026-01-12 02:56:34+00:00
This is exactly my workflow. I use an genetic IDE and:

-> discuss and investigate the feature with the agent. In depth.
-> formalize it into a plan
-> save the plan into a file so the context isn't lost
-> tell it to follow the plan
-> babysit it and review everything

This is actually more enjoyable than it sounds, to me at least. I can often work on more than 1 task at a time and I am freed from doing the coding and take more of an architect-type role, especially when creating something new.

I absolutely do not just tell Claude Code to go do something and then come back and check it in to git. I am not yet sure if terminal-based long-running agents (CC / Codex) can be used for much other than vibe coding. Use an IDE and watch it closely if you want to make production quality code.
by jonjacky | 2026-01-12 02:57:33+00:00
Its low cost and being completely self-contained made the KIM-1 unique among the 6502 computers of the 1970s. It was a small fraction of the cost of an Apple, Pet, Atari etc. which made it practical to build into an embedded controller as if it were just another part.

It did not require an external computer or terminal to use, you could program and run it from the built-in hex keypad. The simple 6502 instruction set did not require an assembler, it was quite practical to write the assembly language program on paper and then hand-assemble it by looking up the hex opcodes -- after a while you remembered the most common ones -- this was actually simpler and faster than dealing with program development tools. It only took a few minutes to key in a couple of hundred bytes, which was sufficient for many control programs -- you were not using the KIM as a personal computer, but as a (much better!) replacement for dozens of TTL chips and IC timers.

You could use it to do real work, build real devices. I built this programmable gas mixer for respiratory physiology experiments:

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1980.4...
Programmable Gas Mixer ..., Journal of Applied Physiology 49(1), 1980.
by jeffbee | 2026-01-12 02:57:44+00:00
Well that's funny you mentioned it because one of my projects was a service that let users temporarily install binary info logs collectors triggered by predicates, remotely, which at least I thought was a better model than ssh into the host or, for the advanced caveman, pdsh into many hosts. I don't really see a reason why I can't do that for gRPC, either ...

But, anyway, remote command and control of observability really is a thing in the industry, not just at one company.
by rjbwork | 2026-01-12 02:57:54+00:00
>tried to put him in jail

They really didn't. It was a dog and pony show under the belief that he would not make his way back into power. The dems/reps did not want to set a precedent of holding a president to account for doing terribly illegal things. They didn't intend to actually do anything to prevent this.

And so here we are.
by altmanaltman | 2026-01-12 02:58:07+00:00
I mean you're right in terms of it being a demanding hobby. The question is, is it worth the switch from other services.

I have 7 computers on my self-hosted network and not all of them are on-prem. With a bit of careful planning, you can essentially create a system that will stay up regardless of local fluctuations etc. But it is a demanding hobby and if you don't enjoy the IT stuff, you'll probably have a pretty bad time doing it. For most normal consumers, self-hosting is not really an option and the isn't worth the cost of switching over. I justify it because it helps me understand how things work and tangentially helps me get better my professional skills as well.
by okanat | 2026-01-12 02:58:18+00:00
Things start to break apart when you have dependencies that adopt newer standards or use broader features. There is only so much you can do unless you would like to reimplement libraries like SKIA, doctest, Qt6 or any modern game engine. It gets worse with security and updates. At some point a library will require a newer standard otherwise you have to adopt the entire codebase and assume the entire responsibility of all security updates.

At that point you are slowly rewriting the universe. So you can also do it in Rust tbh (which provides seamless updates and integration between epochs/editions).
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-12 02:58:41+00:00
The left is currently better at getting outraged (bottom, "delicatus"?), and the right is better at trolling (top-- so you know Scott Locklin is indeed non authoritarian just like he claims)

Long before we get to selfdeprogramming, mutual reprogramming looks the the left trolling the right, and the right learning how to get outraged
by vannevar | 2026-01-12 02:59:18+00:00
Through the flawed primary system. Relatively few people vote in the primaries, which means they skew towards extremists. Trump can motivate MAGAns to vote in Republican primaries, which makes MAGA essentially a gatekeeper to Republican seats even in districts where the electorate at large is Republican rather than MAGAn.

He's not directly controlling the judiciary yet, but he has appointed wildly extremist judges and threatened judges who rule against him with impeachment, so he's certainly making an effort.
by eru | 2026-01-12 02:59:22+00:00
See https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/git-snap-fs for my example of read-only access to git via fuse.

I built the original version in Python for a job years ago. But the version above is almost entirely vibe-coded in Rust in a lazy afternoon for fun.

However, I disagree that the filesystem is the right abstraction in general. It works for git, because git is essentially structured like a filesystem already.

More generally, filesystems are roughly equivalent to hierarchical databases, or at most graph databases. And while you can make that work, many collections of data are actually better organised and accessed by other means. See https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf for an particularly interesting and useful model that has found widespread application and success.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-12 02:59:41+00:00
>then why are so many comfortable people (like me) not out on the street every day?

because a lot of people have a kind of built-in main character syndrome and believe they're the protagonists of the world and things can't really go bad. They haven't internalized that there isn't some god behind the curtain that saves them.

That's how it goes in every country that ends up in the dirt, they all thought they were special, they all thought "surely we're not there yet" and you can pick their remains out of the rubble
by jacquesm | 2026-01-12 03:00:21+00:00
Yes, but for now the USD has more or less survived. If Trump forcibly removes the FED chair on a pretext things could go downhill very fast. You can probably kiss the USD as a reserve currency goodbye overnight and China is going to have a real problem given the amount of debt they hold. This could easily knock the last pillar that holds it all up away.
by idiotsecant | 2026-01-12 03:00:34+00:00
If Trump does try to politicize the fed he is going to do the one thing that the American political system will not tolerate - messing with the money of the most powerful capital class in the world. Normally, the incentives of this class are most aligned with grinding the rest of us into a fine powder suitable for lubrication of the engines of commerce, but hopefully just this once they'll come to the rescue. My only fear is that the short term quarterly obsessions that we've built might actually lead to some business supporting this decision out of a suicidal drive for short term gains.
by Someone1234 | 2026-01-12 03:00:49+00:00
Windows is absolutely guilty of this, and it is trivial to reproduce.

Reproduction steps:

- Start a reply to this comment in your browser, type some example words.

- Create a BAT file with the following trivial contents:

@echo off
timeout /t 15 /nobreak >nul
start notepad.exe

- Run the BAT file.

- Immediately switch back to the browser tab, and place your focus into the HN reply box. Type a word.

- Wait for notepad to open

- Continue typing. Your typing will go into Notepad and not the browser tab you had focused last.

This occurs commonly and continuously on Windows, it is damn obnoxious. The OS should never ever change focus, it should however flash the window/taskbar, that is acceptable, but not shift my typing into whatever arbitrary program opened. This used to be fixable via "ForegroundLockTimeout" which is what classic TweakUI altered, but was killed in Vista.
by callc | 2026-01-12 03:01:17+00:00
I came here to say something similar. Ever since I found out about alt + left click drag anywhere in window to move, and alt + right click drag practically anywhere on any side to resize, anything else feels user-hostile.

I rarely use windows anymore, but just like you installed a tool to get this behavior.

This UI feature saves approx 3 seconds on average for resizing windows. Plus, more importantly it more predictably works, and is an easier target to hit than a 2-10 wide pixel line or square region.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-12 03:01:21+00:00
Fucking wild. You can't get more mainstream opinion than this guy. Trump regularly has phone calls on air with this person, he's isn't a random someone on TV. He is one of the administrations goto mouthpieces for communicating this administration's policy on the largest news station. They are workshoping/normalizing MURDERING UNDESIRABLES on their MAINSTREAM MEDIA by hosts that the president ROUTINELY USE TO BROADCAST HIS MESSAGE. My point is THEY ARE OK WITH KILLING PEOPLE THEY DON'T WANT. A meak 'my bad' doesn't mean shit.

And you waive it away. 'Bro said my bad dude, what more do you want? You think he shouldn't be an administration mouthpiece just because he wants extra-judicial killing? Cancel culture'. You are literally Martin Niemöller:

"First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist"
...

He was literally you. He justified their calls for 'only killing Communists and only because they are bad and want to do bad things....' just like you.

Edit: oh you are just being disingenuous got it. I'm not burning another comment on you and getting throttled so here:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=brian+kilmeade+...
by throw0101c | 2026-01-12 03:01:22+00:00
> I think the real test will be, not whatever this administration does, but how much of that survives into the next one - how much is the new normal versus how much is a temporary aberration.

A reminder that this is the second time that Trump has been elected.

(People were saying what you're now saying after he was kicked out—an event that he says was rigged—the first time.)
by defrost | 2026-01-12 03:01:23+00:00
Tricky, yes. Insurmountable, no.

Despite the difficulty the former US administration was able to diplomatically achieve cooperation from China on this matter which bore fruit and gained traction until a seris of wild accusations and tariffs from a later administration killed a number of US / China working arrangements.

See, for example, The Hidden Cost of Trump’s Trade War on China (March 18, 2025) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade... written by a former deputy assistant secretary for US international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.
by tzs | 2026-01-12 03:01:34+00:00
That's interesting. I'll need to find some Dr Pepper Zero and try it. My history of Dr Pepper and of diet sodas goes like this.

1. I only drank non-diet sodas. Pepsi was my favorite, Dr Pepper or root beer was the runner up at restaurants the had Coke (which I hate) rather than Pepsi.

2. At some point I started trying to reduce the percent of my calories that came from carbs. I was able to continue drinking non-diet soda and meet my goal but only because (1) I usually only drank a small glass with each meal, and (2) I was able to reduce carbs from other things enough to leave room for the soda.

3. That reducing from other things enough to leave room for the soda got annoying, so I made myself drink diet sodas for a few days. I quickly got used to Diet Dr Pepper and started to enjoy it. Diet Pepsi became OK, but Diet Dr Pepper was better. Once this switch was made and I didn't need to make room for soda carbs I could stick to my carb goal pretty easily.

4. After a few years of that, I had oral surgery. They advised me to not drink carbonated beverages for a week or so afterwards, so I drank water. I was actually fine with that so after two weeks I finished off the 2L bottles of Diet Dr Pepper in my fridge and then just drank water at home for the next few years. I would still have a Diet Dr Pepper or a Diet Pepsi or Pepsi Zero or Diet root beer on the few occasions I ate out.

If I ate out at a place that did not those I would sometimes get a non-diet Dr Pepper or Pepsi and it was terrible. It seemed too sweet. It tasted like someone had mixed some thick sweetener into it so not only was the flavor off the feel of the drink was wrong.

It was bad enough that I would no longer eat out at those places. I'd only get food to go from there.

So now I'm really curious if Dr Pepper Zero will taste good to me or not. If my problem with regular Dr Pepper is just due to the sugar I should probably be OK with Dr Pepper Zero. But if what I really now dislike is non-diet Dr Pepper's flavor it sounds like I'll also dislike Dr Pepper Zero.
by moonlet | 2026-01-12 03:01:58+00:00
I’m saying I don’t think sandbox is a noun, I think it’s a verb. I also don’t get why this is such an issue to you? A container simply is not a sandbox by itself. The collection of technologies that can sandbox can be used to sandbox a container, or an app running in a container, or whatever you want. A door lock isn’t security, a door lock is used to lock your door, which gives you part of a security strategy. Same principle.
by legojoey17 | 2026-01-12 03:02:18+00:00
I just got around to a fresh NixOS install and I couldn't be happier as I've been able to do practically everything via Codex while keeping things concise and documented (given it's nix, not a bunch of commands of the past).

I recently had a bunch of breakages and needed to port a setup - I had a complicated k3s container in proxmox setup but needed it in a VM to fix various disk mounts (I hacked on ZFS mounts, and was swapping it all for longhorn)

As is expected, life happens and I stopped having time for anything so the homelab was out of commission. I probably would still be sitting on my broken lab given a lack of time.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-12 03:02:40+00:00
The approaches used by Claude Code and Cursor are inefficient. It's possible to calculate a covering set for a piece of code and provide that to an agent directly via a tool, and it turns out that this can reduce context usage in SWE-bench style tasks by >90% over RAG and grep/read.

If you're interested in learning more, https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/scribe