MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cubano | 2026-01-11 13:34:04+00:00
I just turned 60. My first computer was a 4.77MHz IBM PC with an 8088 processor, two floppy drives, and that magnificent mechanical keyboard IBM shipped in those days. My father, clearly receiving excellent financial advice at the time, picked up a 300bps Hayes modem for the princely sum of $599. CompuServe, here I come!

For context, this was early 1982. That 599 would cost 1,900 today — still a lot for a modem, but not quite the "gazillion" I remembered. Still, it illustrates just how far we've come.

Since then, I've written software professionally for over 40 years (with varying degrees of success). I've owned well over 200 computers — roughly 90% Wintel machines and 10% MacBooks. I've built them, repaired them, debugged them, and occasionally, after particularly frustrating days, set them back together again. I like to think I know my way around a PC.

Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.

For a while, it was genuinely fun. The sheer number of options was overwhelming in the best way possible. Customization everywhere I looked. All those incredible free software packages waiting in the repositories. In the beginning, I didn't even mind that I found myself doing full reinstalls every two or three days due to random instabilities. I was living the dream. Desktop effects and visual flair? Bring it on. Why does Compiz get so much criticism these days? What's more satisfying than a beautifully animated window?

Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony. The system celebrated for its stability and reliability was the one leaving me longing for a responsive desktop environment. But that's exactly what I experienced, and I gave each distribution a fair shot.

There's also the practical reality: I'm a heavy Ableton Live user, and dual-booting has become increasingly grating. The Linux audio ecosystem has made real progress, but for my specific workflow, it's not there yet. Maybe in another year or two.

So I'm back on Windows 11. It works. It doesn't surprise me. After four decades, I'm okay with "it works" as a primary criterion.

Will I try Linux again? Maybe. The ecosystem continues to improve, and who knows what the next wave of AI-assisted tools might change. But for now, I wanted to share an honest account of what I encountered — because I genuinely wanted Linux to win.
by blurbleblurble | 2026-01-11 13:34:12+00:00
My supposition is that Nick Shirley is dog whistling you and many others, and that the stakes are way too high to not push back.

140k peoples' SNAP benefits deserve to get cut arbitrarily because of a misleading viral video? That's a travesty waiting to happen.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/minnesota-department-fi...

https://19thnews.org/2026/01/child-care-fraud-minnesota-fact...
by lioeters | 2026-01-11 13:34:36+00:00
Here's the relevant (and entire) quote from an email.

> I am on the data strategy team at NVIDIA, we are exploring including Anna's Archive in pre-training data for our LLMs.

> We are figuring out internally whether we are willing to accept the risk of using this data, but would like to speak with your team to get a better understanding of LLM-related work you have done.
by imtringued | 2026-01-11 13:35:00+00:00
This is not another package manager.

https://alpm.archlinux.page/faq.html

ALPM is not a makepkg/pacman implementation, it is a set of libraries to make it easier to build makepkg/pacman implementations.

It's kind of like the OCI image specification, but for the "Dockerfile" portion of Arch Linux package management rather than the binaries. Competitors like Debian don't even have something that is equivalent to PKGBUILD or Dockerfile. You're expected to know how to setup and build a project on your own and then have packaging be a separate step that happens at the end. They are heavily reliant on institutional knowledge of package maintainers and are impenetrable to outsiders that are unwilling to spend days on building their first package.
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-11 13:35:20+00:00
For me, the most underrated takeaway here is the state of RISC-V support.

While other distributions are struggling to bootstrap their package repositories for new ISAs and waiting for build farms to catch up, Gentoo's source based nature makes it architecture agnostic by definition. I applaud the risque team for having achieved parity with amd64 for the @system set. This proves that the meta-distribution model is the only scalable way to handle the explosion of hardware diversity we are seeing post 2025. If you are building an embedded platfrm or working on custom silicon, Gentoo is a top tier choice. You cross-compile the stage1 and portage handles the rest.
by mmcnl | 2026-01-11 13:35:39+00:00
Agreed. Trackpads on Windows are very good (approaching Mac quality) but on Linux it's hit and (mostly) miss. Gnome gestures are borderline unusable. Sometimes Gnome forgets how many fingers I'm using and every single finger mouse movement is suddenly a gesture, have to retry gestures to switch workspaces because the first two times it fails, etc. It becomes worse with more windows open. No back swipe gesture in Chrome, etc. Basic stuff that is annoying in every day use. Flawless mouse/touchpad support is not too much to ask.
by dotancohen | 2026-01-11 13:36:10+00:00
For PHP 8.5 code to work with PHP 5.3 you'd have to forego short array syntax, finally blocks, scalar type hints and nullable types (OK, you mention this), the ?? operator, the ?-> operator, traits, and probably a million other things that we use every day.

For PHP 5.3 code to work on PHP 8+ you'd have had to completely forego error catching because that was completely upended in 7.0 or 7.2 (I forget which), not used short open tags, never used the class name as a constructor (that happened a lot in PHP 5), have no mcrypt functions, not used __autoload(), have had the foresight to use PDO instead of mysql_ (was PDO available in 5.3? I'd never seen it that early I think), you'd have had to be fortunate enough to not used ereg_, I think that older versions used # in ini file comments (I remember that breaking at some point, don't remember when), never used each(), not used safe_mode for mysql (strange because that was the default I think), and probably a million other issues that I hadn't encountered. If you have codebase written for PHP 5.3 that still works on modern PHP, I'd love to see it. I honestly don't believe such a codebase exists beyond the most trivial.
by nonameiguess | 2026-01-11 13:36:25+00:00
I'd never heard of this until right now, but Jesus Christ, Hacker News, this is an awful lot of griping for a project that appears to be completely additive with zero impact to end users or administrators of Arch Linux. pacman is still around and still uses libalpm, not this. The FAQ and mission seem pretty clear that this exists, at least for now, solely for the benefit of packagers and maintainers. They decided making this as a modular set of specifications and libraries would be best to allow arbitrary downstreams to make use as they see fit, but the only current project using this, as far as I can tell, is a project that automates updates for package builds and possibly the Python bindings are either used by the AUR website or soon will be to extract and display package metadata.

I get the cynicism and griping when it's the latest in LLM slop, capitalist surveillance state, and corporate churn for the sake of churn, but where on Earth is the harm in this? They wanted some low-level utilities for reading, writing, and manipulating package files and metadata, for whatever reason found the existing libalpm lacking, so made this. It doesn't appear that any end-user Arch packages use it or depend upon it, you'll not need to install this or the larger Rust toolchain unless you independently decide you want to, but there's a bunch of complaining anyway.
by iamcalledrob | 2026-01-11 13:36:37+00:00
Sidenote: if you really need compile-time safety for errors, you can always use your function signature to achieve this.

func DoThing(onFoo func(), onBar func()) { ... }

It's a bit horrible, but does solve for the rare occasion when certain scenarios must be handled, and makes it clear that the change is a breaking one. Personally never needed this though.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-11 13:37:07+00:00
> New stuff is so poorly made that I’m now increasingly buying old items for my own use, and not only as gifts. The quality coming from the large online retailers is abysmal, and my safest bet is often secondhand.

This. I made the shift to buying older items a number of years back because -- generally speaking -- if it's new, it's likely to be garbage. Particularly when it comes to furniture, appliances, and clothing.

I've always bought my cars used because I've yet to see a car that is actually worth the new price. That's even more true now than ever before.
by 6510 | 2026-01-11 13:37:27+00:00
I always thought this was funny. Practical but not the usual open/close order.

aaaaa<b>aaaa<i>aaaaa</b>aaaa</i>aaaaa

I just tried this!

<table>
<tr><td>aaaaa<td>bbb
<tr><td>ccccccccccc<td>dddddddddd
<tr><td>eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
</table>

Which works and is much cleaner than the usual table tag soup. It makes sense as on their own <td> and <tr> tags have no meaning.
by rvz | 2026-01-11 13:38:27+00:00
> you could find tons of API keys on GitHub before these “agentic” tools too. that was my point, one screenshot from twitter vs one anecdote from me. I don’t think either proves the point, but posting a screenshot from twitter like it’s proof of some widespread problem is what I was responding to (N=2, 1 vs 1)

That doesn't refute the probabilistic nature of LLMs despite best prompting practices. In fact it emphasises it. More like your 1 anecdotal example vs my 20+ examples on GitHub.

My point tells you that not only it indeed does happen, but a previous old issue is now made even worse and more widespread, since we now have vibe-coders without security best practices assuming the agent should know better (when it doesn't).

> my point is more “skill issue” than “trust me this never happens”

So those that have this "skill issue" are also those who are prompting the AI differently then? Either way, this just inadvertently proves my whole point.

> yes it’s probabilistic, so is practically everything else at scale. yet it works and here we are.

The additional problem is can you explain why it went wrong as you scale the technology? CPUs circuit design go through formal verification and if a fault happens, we know exactly why; hence it is deterministic in design which makes them reliable.

LLMs are not and don't have this. Which is why OpenAI had to describe ChatGPT's misaligned behaviour as "sycophancy", but could not explain why it happened other than tweaking the hyper-parameters which got them that result.

So LLMs being fundamentally probabilistic and are hence, more unexplainable being the reason why you have the screenshot of vibe-coders who somehow prompted it wrong and the agent committed the keys.

Maybe that would never have happened to you, but it won't be the last time we see more of this happening on GitHub.
by jostylr | 2026-01-11 13:38:34+00:00
I'd be curious about their analysis of the Nvidia self-driving car project which uses world models(?) to train them in far more extensive scenarios, though simulated, than possible in real world case. That keynote was after this article of course.

But I did check their dismissive claim about the 90% coding at anthropic by watching the link they provided. The Anthropic guy said that 90% was achieved at various teams within Anthropic and also hedged about the exact nature of it; it is a messy metric to be precise about. I thought the other was not generous in interpreting it which makes me skeptical of the edge of the rest of the article.
by tarsinge | 2026-01-11 13:38:37+00:00
Conversely I have very little interest in the process of programming by itself, all the magic is about the end result and the business value for me (which fortunately has served me quite well professionally). As young as I remember I was fascinated with the GUI DBMS (4th Dimension/FileMaker/MS Access/…) my dad used to improve his small business. I only got into programming only to not be limited by graphical tools. So LLMs for me are just a nice addition in my toolbox, like a power tool is to a manual one. It doesn’t philosophically changes anything.
by mmcnl | 2026-01-11 13:38:42+00:00
Nice for experimentation, but if you want a daily driver that lasts for years: Dell Latitude (now Dell Pro), HP EliteBook or Lenovo ThinkPad. Literally laptops built to last. Will last a decade with ease. Higher segments ofcourse better than lower segments, but in general very very good if you stay away from lowest tier
by perihelions | 2026-01-11 13:38:55+00:00
Seems like a big flaw that low-orbit constellations have a dependency on GPS, which are high-altitude satellites. They're 40x further away and so have 1,600x greater path loss. Why can't they use their own satellites for this?

> "But Starlink receivers use GPS to locate and connect to satellites. “Since its 12-day war with Israel last June," The Times says, “Iran has been disrupting GPS signals.”"
by thunky | 2026-01-11 13:39:12+00:00
> And pretty much everyone, no matter how good, cannot get there with code-reading alone. With software at least, we need to develop a mental model of the thing by futzing about with the thing in deeply meaningful ways

LLMs help with that part too. As Antirez says:

Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners, too).
by porise | 2026-01-11 13:39:36+00:00
Value categories actually just are confusing in a language as complicated as C++. I'm not willing to bet that even senior C++ developers are always going to be able to deduce the correct value category.

And worse, in typical C++ fashion, there is still little guaranteed as far as when std::move will actually cause a move. The implementation is still given a lot of leeway. I've been surprised before and you basically have no choice but to check the assembly and hope it continues to be compiled that way as minor changes make their way into the code base.
by baxtr | 2026-01-11 13:40:05+00:00
I checked 2-3 trails and have to agree.

Take for example the OODA loop. How are the connections made here of any use? Seems like the words are semantically related but the concept are not. And even if they are, so what?

I am missing the so what.

Now imagine a human had read all these books. It would have come up with something new, I’m pretty sure about that.

https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/tempo-gradient/
by aristofun | 2026-01-11 13:40:09+00:00
That sounds to me then that the problem is not only that PE are incentivized only by profits.

But also by the system that disconnects end user’s satisfaction (families with kids on spectrum in this case) from the profit.

In other words if users of those centers were part of the profit equation - PE would not be a problem at all. Am I right?

If so then the real evil are people who created and support such a system I guess.
by oulipo2 | 2026-01-11 13:40:17+00:00
1. "if you can't convince yourself by playing anecdotically" is NOT "facts"

2. it's not because the US is incredibly bad at energy spending in AC that it somehow justifies the fact that we would add another, mostly unnecessary, polluting source, even if it's slightly lower. ACs have existed for decades. AI has been exploding for a few years, so we can definitely see it go way, way past the AC usage

also the idea is of "accelerationnism". Why do we need all this tech? What good does it make to have 10 more silly slop AI videos and disinformation campaigns during election? Just so that antirez can be a little bit faster at doing his code... that's not what the world is about.

Our world should be about humans, connecting together (more slowly, not "faster"), about having meaningful work, and caring about planetary resources

The exact opposite of what capitalistic accelerationism / AI is trying to sell us
by randunel | 2026-01-11 13:40:49+00:00
Linux user for 25-ish years here, and exclusively so.

I used to heavily configure my ubuntu distros to be keyboard exclusive with i3wm and such, but I ended up with regolith desktop, a version of ubuntu with pre installed i3wm and keyboard focus. I'm too old to keep my dotfiles updated.

Nowadays, imo you should only choose the package manager, any os using that chosen package manager (aptitude for ubuntu) definitely had a version that's close enough to your use cases.
by KarlVoit | 2026-01-11 13:41:17+00:00
Orgdown doesn't require Emacs either: https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/

https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool...

Tadaaaa!

Furthermore: Markdown requires a magic crystal ball to tell which Markdown flavor it actually is and how to process it for machines. Read the article.

Markdown would get more things done if it wasn't tied to the waist to chaos. ;-)
by pydry | 2026-01-11 13:42:17+00:00
>One of the key skills needed in working with LLMs is learning to ignore the hype and marketing and figure out what these things are actually capable of

This is precisely what led me to realize that while they have some use for code review and analyzing docs, for coding purposes they are fairly useless.

The hypesters responses' to this assertion exclusively into 5 categories. Ive never heard a 6th.
by teeeew | 2026-01-11 13:42:28+00:00
So… what?

With all due respect I don’t care about an acceleration in writing code - I’m more interested in incremental positive economic impact. To date I haven’t seen anything convince me that this technology will yield this.

Producing more code doesn’t overcome the lack of imagination, creativity and so on to figure out what projects resources should be invested in. This has always been an issue that will compound at firms like Google who have an expansive graveyard of projects laid to rest.

In fact, in a perverse way, all this ‘intelligence’ can exist. At the same time humans can get worse in their ability to make judgments in investment decisions.

So broadly where is the net benefit here?
by nickjj | 2026-01-11 13:42:56+00:00
> It would be fair to mention that this is happening for you with a decade old GPU using an EOL driver, which sucks, but is unlikely to be a common experience.

The drivers are still getting maintained by NVIDIA until August 2026. They also got classified as "legacy" on paper 1 day before I installed them.

The compositor memory leak is affecting a lot of people. Since COSMIC and niri both use the same one (smithay), there's threads on GitHub with people using modern GPUs, both NVIDIA and AMD who experience it. There's a lot of replies across all of the different open issues.

The GPU allocation issue on Wayland (separate from the memory leak) also has hundreds of replies on the NVIDIA developer forums with people using new NVIDIA cards with the latest drivers.

The thing is, most people don't talk about either of them because if you have 8+ GB of GPU memory and turn your computer off every night then you won't experience this problem since all GPU memory allocations get reset on shutdown. It happens to be more of a direct problem for me because I have 2 GB of GPU memory but that doesn't mean the problem isn't common. The root cause is still there. Even if I switched to an AMD GPU the niri / smithay memory leak would be present. Instead of rebooting twice a day, if the GPU had 8 GB of memory I'd have to reboot every 2 days (x4 basically).

Since I opened that issue on GitHub NVIDIA did acknowledge it and suggested I try their experimental egl-wayland2 library. I did try that and it hasn't fixed it fully but it has made GPU memory allocations more stable. It even fixed 1 type of leak in niri. This library is decoupled from the drivers themselves as far as I know. I mean, this same library could still be used for the 590 series, it's not 580 specific which means it's not dependent on your GPU model.
Can an economy remain stable while becoming inefficient?
by latentframe | 2026-01-11 13:43:21+00:00
We often associate economic stability with good fundamentals.

But in some cases, institutions hold, markets remain calm, and crises are avoided for long periods — while productivity slows, capital allocation becomes defensive, and innovation weakens.

There is no visible shock, no obvious correction.

I’m curious how others think about this dynamic, and whether you’ve seen real-world examples where stability itself became a constraint rather than a strength.
by plagiarist | 2026-01-11 13:43:26+00:00
I'd love to know what magic you are adding to queries so I can achieve the same results.

Search has been getting worse from the SEO arms race for at least two decades. In the last few years this has accelerated due to machines producing more convincing slop.

Searches absolutely have not been surfacing the same quality of content as they did when Google first developed PageRank.
by crakhamster01 | 2026-01-11 13:43:41+00:00
I feel like both of these examples are insights that won't be relevant in a year.

I agree that CC becoming omniscient is science fiction, but the goal of these interfaces is to make LLM-based coding more accessible. Any strategies we adopt to mitigate bad outcomes are destined to become part of the platform, no?

I've been coding with LLMs for maybe 3 years now. Obviously a dev who's experienced with the tools will be more adept than one who's not, but if someone started using CC today, I don't think it would take them anywhere near that time to get to a similar level of competency.
by robot-wrangler | 2026-01-11 13:43:45+00:00
> How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ?

Instead of asking "where are the AI-generated projects" we could ask about the easier problem of "where are the AI-generated ports". Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the training set, so the fact that this isn't easy yet must mean something.

According to claude, wordpress is still 43% of all the websites on the internet and PHP has been despised by many people for many years and many reasons. Why no python or ruby portage? Harder but similar, throw in drupal, mediawiki, and wonder when can we automatically port the linux kernel to rust, etc.
by mikeryan | 2026-01-11 13:44:32+00:00
A significant, and growing, number of schools (many of them independent and high end) are no longer offering AP/Honors classes. Which means that you now don’t have a level measure for comparing GPA.

To the original point though it’s one of many reasons why GPA + Test scores isn’t really a standard metric to be used on their own for merit based admissions. It’s really just a bar after which you have to take additional factors into account.
by alecco | 2026-01-11 13:44:35+00:00
I visited a friend in EU and we had a lot of problems charging a Renault. It takes forever and it was a pain. One of the network chargers didn't work. Problems of the car detecting the charge. And once we found a working charger we had to leave it for a long time and we lost an appointment.

Tesla has a decent supercharger network. And now Chinese manufacturers are building theirs. AFAIK none of the European brands has anything even remotely like that. I heard people buy hybrids due to this problem.