MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by subscribed | 2026-01-17 13:05:07+00:00
I mainly use various Linux distributions since 90s, also while working in systems administration for most of that time, but to say that "all Linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software" and suggest that's all is a vast...... understatement to say the least.

Different kernels, different system libraries, GPU drivers either no free or open source, kernel patches available or not (because there's a conflict no one has time to fix), security patches' availability (with distinct difference between RHEL-adjacent distributions and the others), different init, even filesystems and window managers with their quirks.

It's bordering on false to suggest all the tasks can be easily replicated in all the distributions, which is also the sentiment among the users. Oh well, perhaps, if you spend infinite amount of time preparing a very specific ansible playbook which will bend and coerce this specific flavour to install all the necessary libraries and patches, kick the kernel just right, and backport the Improvements from the incompatible distribution to the chosen one.

Then yeah.

Perhaps. But you're basically saying MacOS is FreeBSD.
by reactordev | 2026-01-17 13:05:18+00:00
This isn’t remotely true. Solar / wind / nuclear / coal / gas / any electrical source including from neighboring grids can be inbound or outbound from your grid using, the grid. There are capacitors and transformers, relays and transmission lines. Any energy source can provide power. Solar used to give money back to its owners by selling power back to the grid but they killed that initiative quickly and will just use your energy you provide.

The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries…

If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-17 13:06:08+00:00
Chengyu battle now? Noob score-win soup! Selftroll win-nolose! (Edited)

(Ah yes dunno why I went for "Texan", not that I am even half-good at desouping the 2)

I was just thinking a few hours ago, that baby seems to be squalling for "quantales". Have you ever asked an LLM about it? I have (in relation to what I've been thinking hard about).. Did you find the answer useful? it's good I don't remember what it said, because it seems to be too adult a name, & I don't feel like I've ever made such a kid of myself.

I did algolia what you've written about it so far (2 hrs ago?). Hows the Kleene implementation? It should actually be immediately useful to me!! (And... You win!!)

The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense, too,
and for a thousand years or two mathematics was more or less stagnating,
because nobody was around to make such childish steps . . .

--Letter to R. Brown

PS: Ah but the whole point might be that rationalism don't need no inner party? (And, in CH, such decoupling falls out of a hat, there's no need for further "design work" on the process (in principle?)-- Thus.. is it really the kind of decoupling i thought I was talking about? It seems to be! But I can't ELI5! (Sincere question))

U: chart is flattering^W enlightening, quite. yep I saw that vid ~ march? last year
by bruce511 | 2026-01-17 13:06:17+00:00
I've got solar. We switched things like pool pump, hot water and so on (things already on timers) from night to day.

Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast.

I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day.

Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining.

So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
by Traumen | 2026-01-17 13:06:18+00:00
After watching many people struggle with automation, I noticed something consistent: the problem isn’t the tools, it’s starting with the wrong one.

This article shares a simple decision framework to choose between Zapier, Make, n8n, or AI agents based on your skill level, real needs, and long-term cost — not hype or feature lists.

No promotion, no affiliates. Just the explanation I wish I had before wasting months.
by baranul | 2026-01-17 13:06:31+00:00
Wikipedia has a number of notorious and strange editors who have taken it over as if it was their personal kingdom, where they censor and revert at their pleasure. It's their Wikipedia versus for the public. MrOllie is among the most infamous (somehow has over 258,000 edits - WTH) of this type of editor (or sadistic censor), with a number of articles and posts elsewhere on the Internet about him[1][2].

Complaints about him seem to do nothing, as he appears to have support and students of his brand of sadism and censorship. For instance, Remsense (over 97,000 edits). The group that they are part of, backs each other up and gangs up on others, to make sure they'll get their way.

[1] https://thomashgreco.medium.com/artificial-intelligence-bots...

[2] https://x.com/docmilanfar/status/1928609721835045047
by JPKab | 2026-01-17 13:06:39+00:00
Brown University has 1 administrator for every 2 students.

This is a widely known and discussed phenomenon and is actually a running joke here in the comments.

Honestly, I'm shocked that you're unaware of this, to a degree where you're calling my comment out. I don't know what your news sources are, but they're not keeping you informed.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-17 13:06:43+00:00
You are not wrong.

The Australian grid shows that when solar is the dominant part of the grid, it can still work pretty well. But you need to plan for when the sun is not shining and adapt to the notion that base load translates as "expensive power that you can't turn off when you need to" rather than "essential power that is always there when needed". The notion of having more than that when a lot of renewables are going to come online by the tens of GW is not necessarily wise from a financial point of view.

That's why coal plants are disappearing rapidly. And gas plants are increasingly operating in peaker plant mode (i.e. not providing base load). Also battery (domestic and grid) is being deployed rapidly and actively incentivized. And there are a lot of investments in things like grid forming inverters so that small communities aren't dependent on a long cable to some coal plant far away.

The economics of all this are adding up. Solar is the cheapest source of energy. Batteries are getting cheap as well. And the rest is just stuff you need to maintain a reliable energy system. None of this is cheap but it's cheaper than the alternative which would be burning coal and gas. And of course home owners figuring out that solar + batteries earn themselves back in a few short years is kind of forcing the issue.

Australian grid prices are coming down a lot because they are spending less and less on gas and coal. The evening peak is now flattened because of batteries. They actually have negative rates for power during the day. You can charge your car or battery for free for a few hours when there's so much solar on the grid that they prefer to not charge you than to shut down the base load of coal/gas at great cost. Gas plants are still there for bridging any gaps in supply.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-17 13:07:07+00:00
>The UK doesn't cease to exist though, it just shrinks.

Or as some wags have put it, when Northern Ireland unifies with the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland joins the EU as an independent state, the UK becomes the "Former United Kingdom of Wales and England" (1), or "FUK-Wangland" for short.

See FYROM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Macedonia#Naming_dispute
by spuz | 2026-01-17 13:07:50+00:00
Thinking more about the "best results". Could this not be done by transforming the ascii glyphs into bitmaps, and then using some kind of matrix multiplication or dot production calculation to calculate the ascii character with the highest similarity to the underlying pixel grid? This would presumably lend itself to SIMD or GPU acceleration. I'm not that familiar with this type of image processing so I'm sure someone with more experience can clarify.
by scott_w | 2026-01-17 13:08:58+00:00
> First: it's not the best use of our time.

I want to push back strongly on this. I think this attitude leads to more bugs as QA cannot possibly keep up with the rate of change.

I understand that you, personally, may not have exhibited this based on your elaboration. However that doesn’t change the fact that many devs do take exactly this attitude with QA.

To take a slightly different comparison, I would liken it to the old school of “throwing it over the wall” to Ops to handle deployment. Paying attention to how the code gets to production and subsequently runs on prod isn’t a “good use of developer time,” either. Except we discarded that view a decade ago, for good reason.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-17 13:09:06+00:00
Left wing thought doesn't contain any philosophy of limitations on state power, so under a left wing regime there is no limit to what it might do. No matter how terrible something is, if it can be imagined they will consider implementing it. To avoid that outcome there has to be an understanding of the flawed nature of government, and from that an ideological commitment to a state limited in power and role.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-01-17 13:09:10+00:00
PDF is THE choice for cross-platform presentation and printing, but a real PITA for collaboration, funny enough one of the places where the web version of Word is pretty decent. A lot of industries live in Word/Office, and "generate PDF" is a pretty small part of their workflow. Also remember that printing to PDF without an expensive purchase was not a thing for many decades; I've only stopped using the Win2PDF license I bought 25 years ago on my most recent computers!
Show HN: Goran AI – Turn every sales call into team intelligence and playbooks
by Mrakermo | 2026-01-17 13:09:49+00:00
Just launched Goran AI - meeting notetaker that combines the founders and sales teams meeting in order to lower ramp automatically build sales playbook.

Go from founder led sales to sales teams in no time.

For hackernews, 5 meetings for free.
by nobodyandproud | 2026-01-17 13:10:27+00:00
Because the phrase and mindset leads to the wrong lessons and actions.

In aviation, there is little room for error. It’s also the case that resources and time are limited. So there are multiple constraints.

We both agree that Boeing is the big problem. I’d also say its a problem of the FAA and the aviation industry.

But UPS? Why would they be taking action “out of an abundance of caution”?

The worst you can say for UPS is they could have sought a second opinion out of “an abundance of caution”, and recommendations of next actions and how.

Keep in mind UPS core competency isn’t aerospace and aeronautical engineering.

Would they even be able to assess the risk of changing said bearings en masse?

The actual lesson here is that most of the advisories and self-certifying from Boeing over the past 30 years need to be reconsidered; most likely redone, by independent third parties and also an FAA with a mandate to be fully independent.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-01-17 13:11:25+00:00
>> They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows.

I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
by tim-kt | 2026-01-17 13:12:12+00:00
This seems like an interesting problem and an interesting fix, but there is so much code and so little explanation that I am lost after "The Code That Looked Perfectly Fine". It also reads very much like AI. And FYI the "output" code blocks are (at least for me on Firefox) a dark gray on a darker gray background, so very unreadable.
by padolsey | 2026-01-17 13:12:20+00:00
The incumbants Goodreads and their owner Amazon have indeed done such a poor job at this. Seven years ago I tried creating a basic graph using collaborative-filtering (effectively using our actual reading patterns as the embeddings space instead of semantics [human X likes book Y so likers of Y might like other things that human X has enjoyed]). It works well to this day (ablf.io) but the codebase is so ugly I've not had the bravery to update its data in a couple of years.
by DFHippie | 2026-01-17 13:12:32+00:00
The weird thing about Adams was that he believed Trump was Dogbert, not the pointy-haired boss.

If he'd stayed apolitical people would have kept clipping his strips and putting them up on cubical walls. Dogbert was not an appealing character. His sharper edge kept the sharp edges of Dilbert and the other engineers more out of one's attention. Then Adams revealed that he believed Dogbert was the one to emulate and tried to prove his theories (and he said black people were scary -- there was that) and he polarized himself. Much of his audience recoiled. He gained new, more ICE-esque followers, and then still more of his audience recoiled.

To his credit he pioneered the PR death spiral later made famous by Kanye and Rowlings. This was not the career capper he was looking for.
by greenacred | 2026-01-17 13:12:33+00:00
At least there are some signals that AI was used without any review/clean-up.

For example: , —, …, “ ”, ’ ‘, emojis, 
, 
, 
, 
, [BOS], [EOS], [PAD], [CLS], [SEP], [MASK], [UNK], U+00A0–U+00AD, U+200B–U+200F, U+2012–U+2015, U+202A–U+202E, U+2060–U+206F, U+FE00–U+FE0F, U+FEFF, U+FF01–U+FF5E, U+E0000–U+E007F.
by strken | 2026-01-17 13:14:17+00:00
No, loud conversation on a train during commuter hours really is rude where I live.

Most patrons have a conversation at a normal volume where the words are clear to their conversation partner but not to people sitting further away.

Speaking loudly enough to be understood from a significant distance is rude because it prevents other people from having their own conversations, and it forces people who are not having a conversation to listen to you. Speaking at an appropriate volume is not anti-social, it is pro-social: other people can't be social themselves if you're too loud.

The unwritten rules loosen up at night, during events, or at other times when there's a boisterous crowd.
by smokel | 2026-01-17 13:15:24+00:00
If they use unmodified Linux, then they only have to provide (a link to) the source code to that kernel on request. No source code is required for proprietary add-ons, unless they are kernel modifications.

The GPL also does not state that the source code should be easy to find. In the early days, one had to write a letter, send it by mail, in hopes of getting a tape or CD-ROM with the source code. For which you then had to pay as well.
by throwaway17_17 | 2026-01-17 13:16:10+00:00
I would love for this to turn out to be some internal constraint where the LLM can not ‘reason’ about LEM and will always go to an understanding based in constructive logic. However, I am more ready to accept that LLM aren’t actually ‘reasoning’ about anything and it’s an inherent flaw in how we talk about the algorithms as though they were actually thinking ‘minds’ instead of very fancy syntax completion machines.
by alecco | 2026-01-17 13:16:27+00:00
I have a much better solution: make a mission to tell everybody around you to stop consuming and stop frying their brains. But be mindful they are addicts so they will say you are mean, ugly, stupid, boring, etc. Keep at it and don't negotiate down. Remind them you gain nothing from this and you care for their wellbeing. Eventually most of them come around.

The window to fix this is closing.
by finghin | 2026-01-17 13:17:11+00:00
I've been working on something similar (didn't get to this stage yet) and was planning to do something very similar to the circle-sampling method but the staggering of circles is a really clever idea I had never considered. I was planning on sampling character pixels' alignment along orthogonal and diagonal axes. You could probably combine these approaches. But yeah, such an approach seemed particularly powerful for the reason you could encode it all in a table.
by api | 2026-01-17 13:18:13+00:00
Look at the contrast.

We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.

Then look at our leadership class. Look at the leaders of the most powerful countries. Look at the most powerful leaders in finance and business.

Look at that contrast. It’s very clear where the actually smart people are.

But those actually smart people keep putting leaders like that in power. It’s not a conspiracy. We do it. We need them for some reason.

I have two hypotheses.

One is familiar: they are sacrificial lightning rods. Sacrifice the king when things don’t go well.

The other is what I call the dopamine donor hypothesis. Compared to the speed and complexity of the modern world, most human beings are essentially catatonic. Our dopamine systems are not calibrated for this. So we sit there and do nothing by default, or we play and invent but lack the intrinsic motivation to do the hardest parts.

So we find these freaks: narcissists, delusional manic prophets, psychopaths. They’re deeply dysfunctional people but we use them. We use the fact that they have tireless non stop motivation. Dopamine always on. Go go go.

We place them in positions of authority and let them drive us, even to the point of abuse, as a hack to get around the fact that our central nervous systems don’t natively do this.

Then of course if things go wrong, it’s back to their other purpose: sacrificial scapegoats.

So in a sense we are both victims of these people and exploiters of them. It’s a dysfunctional relationship.

If we could find ways to tweak our systems like amphetamine but without the side effects, we could perhaps replace this system with a pill.

It would be more compassionate for the freaks too. They’re not happy people. If we stopped using them this way they might get help and be happier.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-17 13:19:01+00:00
I have switched from Windows completely to Linux more than 20 years ago, after a few years of dual-booting.

The moment when I could ditch Windows was when I got on Linux several video-related programs, e.g. a DVD player and a program that could use my TV tuner. For all other applications I had already switched to Linux earlier. Those other applications included MS Office, which at that time I continued to use, but I was using it on Linux under CrossOver, where it worked much better than on the contemporaneous Windows XP (!!). The switch to Linux was not free as in beer, because I was using some programs that I had purchased, e.g. MS Office Professional and CrossOver (which is an improved version of Wine, guaranteed to work with certain commercial programs). I did the switch not to save money, but to be able to do things that are awkward or impossible on Windows.

I do all the things that you mention, and many others, on various desktops and laptops with Linux. I do not doubt that there may be Linux distributions where you may have difficulties in combining very different kinds of applications. However, there certainly also exist distributions without such problems.

For instance, I am using Gentoo Linux, precisely because it allows an extreme customization, I really can combine any kinds of applications with minimal problems, even in most cases when they stupidly insist to use dynamic libraries of a certain version, with each application wanting a different version.

As another example, I am using XFCE as a graphic desktop environment, because it provides only the strictly necessary functions and it allows me to easily combine otherwise conflicting applications, e.g. Gnome applications with KDE applications.
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-17 13:19:20+00:00
Mmm, as someone forced to write a lot of last minute demos for a startup right out of school that ended up raising ~100MM, there's a fair bit of wiggle room in "Functional".

Not that I would excuse Cursor if they're fudging this either - My opinion is that a large part of the growing skepticism and general disillusionment that permeates among engineers in the industry (ex - the jokes about exiting tech to be a farmer or carpenter, or things like https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L) comes from seeing first hand that being misleading, abusive, or outright lying are often rewarded quite well, and it's not a particularly new phenomenon.
by paravaib | 2026-01-17 13:19:22+00:00
Personally I agree — I still prefer websites too.

What I find interesting is that a lot of information now lives outside traditional sites:

updates on social platforms

shared docs

spreadsheets

internal tools that get screenshotted or linked

In many of those cases, people aren’t really trying to “publish” in the classic sense — they just want a stable, public reference that doesn’t require joining a platform or logging in.

Search engines still matter, but it feels like a growing amount of content is accessed via direct links rather than discovery.

Curious whether you’ve seen good lightweight patterns for this that don’t turn into full websites.
by guenthert | 2026-01-17 13:19:28+00:00
> if AI (or humans) have mistranslated a natural language statement to a formal statement, we should not rely on AI to correctly translate the formal statement back into natural language.

Perhaps we must not rely on it and find a way to make sure that it cannot fail, but I like to point out that this are two different problems and it seems to me that the current crop of so called AIs are pretty good at distilling excerpts. Perhaps that's the easier problem to solve?
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-17 13:20:23+00:00
When you say 'Australian grid prices are coming down a lot' I don't think you're talking consumer prices.

I don't have the exact 'before' numbers on me, but our peak electricity costs went up from around 42c/kWh to 56c/kWh around 18 months ago.

At the same time that feed-in was halved from 4c/kWh to 2c. Having said that, I'm pretty sure 'Shoulder' and 'Off-Peak' went down slightly.

(I'll update this when I can access my spreadsheet with the actual numbers and dates)

I should also say that I'm fairly insulated from this price rise having recently gotten a battery installed, plus moving to a special EV plan, so I charge the car and the house battery at the very cheap off peak rate (special for EV owners) and run the house entirely off battery, topped up with solar.

It's a privileged setup, but one that I planned and worked towards for a fair while, having seen ever increasing electricity prices always on the horizon (even before AI started eating all the resources).
by whatox | 2026-01-17 13:20:23+00:00
Not when someone with connections and better knowledge of the WP bylaws weaponizes the Arb Com against you.

Here are some of the things you can get banned for:

- Having a too large fraction of your edits be reverts.

- Updating raw references to <ref cite> references (without changing the contents of the reference).

- Saying something on a forum that could be construed as telling people to edit a particular article in a particular way.

The Arb Com doesn't have to open up a public discussion about the matter. They can simply pronounce judgment in private and ban you. There's no prior notice, no representation, and no independent appeal. For a "supreme court", that's quite a low bar.