MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qkeast | 2026-01-11 23:33:31+00:00
Personally, been making a low fidelity exalidraw-like calendar app: https://letswalnut.com.

There’s a real-time collaborative workspace-oriented version, too.

Professionally, working on “Magic Draft,” a feature in Ditto to help designers and writers create the “draft and a half” directly in Figma, which uses a hierarchy of all your context (text, Ditto metadata, the design, your style guides, etc) to write really good starting point copy.
by crawshaw | 2026-01-11 23:33:33+00:00
The idea that an "observability stack" is going to replace shell access on a server does not resonate with me at all. The metrics I monitor with prometheus and grafana are useful, vital even, but they are always fighting the last war. What I need are tools for when the unknown happens.

The tool that manages all my tools is the shell. It is where I attach a debugger, it is where I install iotop and use it for the first time. It is where I cat out mysterious /proc and /sys values to discover exotic things about cgroups I only learned about 5 minutes prior in obscure system documentation. Take it away and you are left with a server that is resilient against things you have seen before but lacks the tools to deal with the future.
by rowanajmarshall | 2026-01-11 23:34:10+00:00
I think the downside is the developers who love the action of coding managed to accomplish several things at once - they got to code, and create things, and get paid lots for doing it.

AI coding makes creating things far more efficient (as long as you use AI), and will likely mean you don't get paid much (unless you use AI).

You can still code for the fun of it, but you don't get the ancillary benefits.
by bsder | 2026-01-11 23:34:11+00:00
> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"?

Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.

I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-11 23:34:29+00:00
I disagree.

1) Senior developers are more likely to know how approach a variety of tasks, including complex ones, in ways that work, and are more likely to (maybe almost subconsciously) stick to these proven design patterns rather than reinvent the wheel in some novel way. Even if the task itself is somewhat novel, they will break it down in familar ways into familar subtasks/patterns. For sure if a task does require some thinking outside the box, or a novel approach, then the senior developer might have better intuition on what to consider.

The major caveat to this is that I'm an old school developer, who started professionally in the early 80's, a time when you basically had to invent everything from scratch, so certainly there is no mental block to having to do so, and I'm aware there is at least a generation of developers that grew up with stack overflow and have much more of a mindset of building stuff using cut an paste, and less having to sit down and write much complex/novel code themselves.

2) I think the real distinction of senior vs junior programmers, that will carry over into the AI era, is that senior developers have had enough experience, at increasing levels of complexity, that they know how to architect and work on large complex projects where a more junior developer will flounder. In the AI coding world, at least for time being, until something closer to AGI is achieved (could be 10-20 years away), you still need to be able to plan and architect the project if you want to achieve a result where the outcome isn't just some random "I let the AI choose everything" experiment.
by wtetzner | 2026-01-11 23:35:04+00:00
> But does any junior want to learn C++ Win32?

I'm pretty sure Microsoft can pay them enough to be happy to learn it.

> You want to learn something that leads to a long-term career development path, not a sunsetting technology.

This seems like such an odd take when web frameworks seem to be obsolete almost as soon as you start using them. C++ has and will continue to be around for a very long time.

This is just the result of bad leadership at Microsoft.
by Desafinado | 2026-01-11 23:35:06+00:00
I believe most of these people would make the time if they lived close by, but we're all in the season of parenthood where even a little bit of distance makes it hard. And a lot of distance makes it impossible. There's also relationship dynamics.

When one of our kids started school we met a few families in our neighborhood and we see them fairly regularly. The difference is with them we can step out the door and we're already together. No planning required.

I wonder if social media essentially allows us to maintain friendships artificially, beyond the normal bounds of connection. It actually creates more maintenance overhead because you've got to maintain these contacts despite the relationships being largely irrelevant.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-11 23:35:13+00:00
> For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”.

I would argue that it's the same question as whether it's possible to get into a flow state when being the "navigator" in a pair-programming session. I feel you and agree that it's not quite the same flow state as typing the code yourself, but when a session with a human programmer or Claude Code is going well for me, I am definitely in something quite close to flow myself, and I can spend hours in the back and forth. But as others in this thread said, it's about the size of the tasks you give it.
by eichin | 2026-01-11 23:35:51+00:00
indeed - https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/01/08/a-software-library-with-... appears to be exactly that - the idea that the only leverage you have for fixing bugs is updating prompts (and, to be fair, test cases, which you should be doing for every bug anyway) is kind of upsetting as someone who thinks software can actually work :-)

(via simonw, didn't see it already on HN)
by graypegg | 2026-01-11 23:36:05+00:00
I’ve been more and more confused by Apple’s product positioning for MacOS. They still have a sizeable “pro” market that spans across a very aspirational set of careers: Film, YouTubers, developers, photographers, artists, musicians, etc.

Considering how many people only buy a MacBook PRO no matter what they plan on doing with it, they really need to keep the actual salary-earning pros happy with it or else it’ll lose all credibility. A Mac in a recording booth has a look to it that sells well, but that aesthetic won’t last if you stop seeing them. Being an effective tool for the pro minority should honestly be the priority for MacOS, even at the cost of making it incongruous from iPadOS/iOS. *

* disclaimer: what do I know honestly haha, I’m sure they’ll print money anyway.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-11 23:36:22+00:00
I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.

I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)

But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.
by mickael-kerjean | 2026-01-11 23:36:32+00:00
> My prediction is that one of the many sandbox providers will come up with a nice API on top of this that lets you do something like ... No worrying about FUSE, the sandbox, where things are executed, etc. This will be a huge differentiator and make virtual filesystems easily accessible to everyone.

I've done exactly that with the Filestash [1] virtual filesystem plugin [2] that can connect to any possible storage be it sftp, s3, gdrive, dropbox, ftp, a open directory, mysql, postgres and about 20 more. It lets you make chroot and restrict user access on top of it [3] so the agent can't go crazy.

The whole thing is available as a MCP [4] and been published to the openai marketplace since around Christmas but somehow I'm still pending for review.

An example I did a demo a few days ago when devs had mounts available as /dev/ /test/ /prd/ and compliance had access to many other folders as readonly and where role came from an attribute in your AD. It tooks 5 minutes to configure

ref:

[1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

[2]: https://www.filestash.app/docs/guide/virtual-filesystem.html

[3]: https://imgur.com/Ewk3nAg

[4]: https://www.filestash.app/docs/guide/mcp-gateway.html
https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/tree/master/ser...
by diego_moita | 2026-01-11 23:36:50+00:00
Yeah, whatever...

One way or the other he still was a bullshitter, blowhard, huckster,...

That means that in the end, the "single way of thinking" was the right way of thinking.

But don't despair, there is still a lot of pseudoscience around: creationism, global warming denialism, anti-vax, astrology, etc. Some of these are even oficial policy for governments around the world.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-11 23:37:21+00:00
If you expose ports, literally everything you are hosting and every plugin is an attack surface. Most of this stuff is built by single hobbiest devs on the weekend. You are also exposed to any security issues you make in your configuration. My first attempt self hosting I had redis compromised because I didn't realise I had exposed it to the internet with no password.

Behind a VPN your only attack surface is the VPN which is generally very well secured.
by serf | 2026-01-11 23:37:30+00:00
in a country that hostile to you I would be worried about radiating any kind of EM, honestly. It's too easy to track and could cause undue targetting & victimization.

my real answer : I think at that point in time effort is best spent trying to arrange escape.

my technical answer : depends on the scene. directed optical/laser or microwave is very hard to track if that can facilitate the links you need -- but realistically most war-time off-grid comms historically has been established via runners, dropboxes, or community radio systems ; all options with very real inherent risks.
by robrenaud | 2026-01-11 23:37:53+00:00
Previously, I made a live win probability model for the 5v5 arcade game Killer Queen Arcade from their game events API.

Now I am trying to use that model to make:

1. A post game instant replay that shows the most important/pivotal moments from the most recently finished game. Some arcades have a seperate display for observers, it could work well there, or as good filler between matches on twitch streams.

2. A personalized per tournament/yearly highlights recap.

If it works well, it might be a kind of tool that generalizes well for summarizing long twitch streams for Youtube.

https://github.com/rrenaud/kq_stream_highlights
by stryan | 2026-01-11 23:37:55+00:00
Yeah I was a little confused at this line; as far as I can tell you can restart containers that are a part of a Podman pod without restarting the whole pod just fine. I just verified this on one of my MicroOS boxes running Podman v5.7.1 .

Podman was changing pretty fast for a while so it could be an older version thing, though I'd assume FCOS is on Podman 5 by now.
by nik_0_0 | 2026-01-11 23:38:26+00:00
This is awesome! This might be a great replacement to attempting to get the Windows app to work. Has anyone had luck with the iCloud app on windows?

Similar to some other folks in this thread I have ~2TB of iCloud data, a Macbook with far less than 2TB of space, an external hard drive somewhere with the external Photo Library that I need to plug in if I want to look at photos on the Macbook, and a Windows desktop with 10TB+ of rusty disks.

I was excited when they added the iCloud app + iCloud photos to Windows, but it never seems to catch up or finish what it is doing. It appears to be almost constantly download at 50MB/s, stressing both disk & internet, and yet navigating to the folder reveals that they are all 'available when online'.

It seems like there is not an option in Windows to actually grab everything in full quality (actually now that I look at it - its gotten to 944GB on disk / 1.91TB total, so it is getting there.)

I guess a real question - with these photos finally on a Windows desktop - is there a better photo browser than Microsoft photos that can show the HEIC and the Live Photo?
by dessimus | 2026-01-11 23:38:26+00:00
>The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it.

The reason most people run Windows is because that is what their jobs IT department put on their computer, and those IT departments run Windows because of the enterprise tools Microsoft has provided for lifecycle management with AD, GPO, etc.

Linux will have difficulty making progress with enterprises for the non-SecDevOps staff until it's as easy to centrally manage user and computer polices, accounts, and upgrades across the entire end-user fleet as it is with Microsoft.
Show HN: UCP Demo – Interactive Demo of the Universal Commerce Protocol
by init0 | 2026-01-11 23:38:41+00:00
I built an interactive demo to showcase how the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) works.

What is UCP? UCP is an open standard that enables AI agents and platforms to complete purchases on any UCP-enabled merchant without custom integrations.

What the demo shows:

Discovery via
/.well-known/ucp
- how platforms find merchant capabilities
Checkout Sessions API - create, update, and complete purchases
Toggle "Debug Mode" to see the actual API calls in real-time

What's implemented vs mocked:

- Discovery endpoint with capabilities and payment handlers
- Full checkout flow with line items, buyer info, payment selection
- Payment processing uses test tokens (no real charges)
- In-memory storage (resets on each session)

Links:

Demo: https://ucp-demo.web.app

UCP Spec: https://ucp.dev

Source: https://github.com/hemanth/ucp-demo

Would love feedback on the developer experience. Is the protocol discoverable enough? What's missing?
by MrDarcy | 2026-01-11 23:38:44+00:00
The best solution I’ve found for probes is to put all eggs into the basket listening on 443.

Haproxy with SNI routing was simple and worked well for many years for me.

Istio installed on a single node Talos VM currently works very well for me.

Both have sophisticated circuit breaking and ddos protection.

For users I put admin interfaces behind wireguard and block TCP by source ip at the 443 listener.

I expose one or two things to the public behind an oauth2-proxy for authnz.

Edit: This has been set and forget since the start of the pandemic on a fiber IPv4 address.
by TuringNYC | 2026-01-11 23:38:59+00:00
On a related note -- when I see the minuscule filesize of the original Zelda game on emulators, I marvel at how little text/code/information could produce how much wonder, how far-reaching impact, and how many hours of enchantment for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_(video_gam...
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-11 23:39:10+00:00
I don't see anything here that corroborates your claim that it outputs more consistent test code than most engineers. In fact your second case would indicate otherwise.

And this also goes back to my first point about writing tests that matters. Coverage can matter, but coverage is not codifying business logic in your test suite. I've seen many engineers focus only on coverage only for their code to blow up in production because they didn't bother to test the actual real world scenarios it would be used in, which requires deep understanding of the full system.
by jojule | 2026-01-11 23:39:12+00:00
When resizing, I expect to drag from the edge of a window. This is exactly how it works in macOS Tahoe, with a sufficient drag zone on the both sides. The only "strangeness" is that the drag zone extends further outside the window in the corner zone. IMO this is nice.

All that said, I REALLY would love to have a hotkey combo I can beep pressed down to resize anywhere over the window. Just like in many Unix/Linux window managers.
by epistasis | 2026-01-11 23:39:40+00:00
Nothing inherently wrong with steam, just as there's nothing inherently wrong with spinning rust hard disks or punch cards.

We are at the end of the tech curve for steam, we have pushed it hard and made some super impressive technology, but it's not advancing anymore. Supercritical CO2 might have some advantages, or other fluids.

We have zero-carbon tech that uses non-steam principles, and is currently on a tech curve that's getting cheaper than any thermodynamic cycle. We have storage tech now which is an even bigger revolution for the grid than cheap solar, because a huge limitation of the grid has always been the inability to store and buffer energy.

I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.

(BTW denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources, because they use the same mechanism, except for some natural gas turbines)
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-11 23:39:59+00:00
I agree with you that the implications are bleak. For many people they are not abstract or philosophical. They are about income, stability, and the ability to keep a life intact. In that sense the fear is completely rational.

What stands out to me is that there seems to be a threshold where reality itself becomes too pessimistic to consciously accept.

At that point people do not argue with conclusions. They argue with perception.

You can watch the systems work. You can see code being written, bugs being fixed, entire workflows compressed. You can see the improvement curve. None of this is hidden. And yet people will look straight at it and insist it does not count, that it is fake, that it is toy output, that it will never matter in the real world. Not because the evidence is weak, but because the implications are unbearable.

That is the part that feels almost surreal. It is not ignorance. It is not lack of intelligence. It is the mind refusing to integrate a fact because the downstream consequences are too negative to live with. The pessimism is not in the claim. It is in the reality itself.

Humans do this all the time. When an update threatens identity, livelihood, or future security, self deception becomes a survival mechanism. We selectively ignore what we see. We raise the bar retroactively. We convince ourselves that obvious trend lines somehow stop right before they reach us. This is not accidental. It is protective.

What makes it unsettling is seeing it happen while the evidence is actively running in front of us. You are holding reality in one hand and watching people try to look away without admitting they are looking away. They are not saying “this is scary and I do not know how to cope.” They are saying “this is not real,” because that is easier.

So yes, the questions you raise are the real ones. Do people still matter. How will they matter. What happens when economic value shifts faster than lives can adapt. Those questions are heavy, and I do not think anyone has clean answers yet.

But pretending the shift is not happening does not make the answers kinder. It just postpones the reckoning.

The disturbing thing is not that reality is pessimistic. It is that at some point reality becomes so pessimistic that people start editing their own perception of it. They unsee what is happening in order to preserve who they think they are.

That is the collision we are watching. And it is far stranger than a technical debate about code quality.
by crossroadsguy | 2026-01-11 23:40:01+00:00
I used to use the Photos desktop app to move my photos (“select from the app and drop into a folder somewhere” worked best) to a separate folder a lot (and regularly) until I started using ente. Now ente not only backs up to their e2ee cloud but its desktop app keeps those media synced to the OS of my choice on my laptop.

But I can still not escape Apple’s gonorrhoeic naming and organisation.

Pro: FOSS of course; it works, with limitations (that’s mostly Apple) and glitches (that’s entirely ente)

Cons: really subpar non-native apps (desktop app is quite a dumb app as well) :( (and barely and useful additional features that lets a user do some batch/organisational changes or so)
by syndacks | 2026-01-11 23:40:16+00:00
Can the same thing be said for using docker compose etc on a VPS to host a web app? Ie you can get the ergonomic / ease of using Fly, Renderer?

Historically, managed platforms like Fly.io, Render, and DigitalOcean App Platform existed to solve three pain points:
1. Fear of misconfiguring Linux
2. Fear of Docker / Compose complexity
3. Fear of “what if it breaks at 2am?”

CLI agents (Claude Code, etc.) dramatically reduce (1) and (2), and partially reduce (3).

So the tradeoff has changed from:

“Pay $50–150/month to avoid yak-shaving”
→
“Pay $5–12/month and let an agent do the yak-shaving”
by BoorishBears | 2026-01-11 23:40:35+00:00
I'm building a product on the Claude Agent SDK, and it is the best in a specific way.

Codex and Open Code are competition for coding, but if we talk about an open-ended agentic harness for doing useful work... well it was bad enough a year ago I'd consider anyone even claiming one exists to be a grifter and now we have one.

And while being first might not matter, I think having both post-training and the harness being developed under the same roof is going to be hard to beat.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-11 23:40:39+00:00
I'd like to see a Super Bowl ad sponsored by one or more of the big Linux players.

"Hi, I'm a Mac."

"And I'm a PC. Wow, you suck, Mac. What the hell happened?"

"Yo momma, PC."

<wild gesticulating and arguing ensues for 20-30 seconds>

"Hi, I'm Linux. Neither of these people care anything about you. You see, you're not their customer anymore. When you're ready to make computing personal again, check us out."
by turtledragonfly | 2026-01-11 23:40:46+00:00
The Dreams team made a nice talk at SIGGRAPH 2015, if you want to check it out:

* Slides (good notes): https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGR...

* video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI