MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-18 14:34:35+00:00
Given how LLMs are trained on its data, it's travesty to prevent the public from accessing it all the same.

I'm thinking it should be distributed using physical media given it's size. A 20 volume encyclopedia on hard drives? We used to do this when the internet was too slow back in the day. I've had friends give me anything from pirated encyclopedias to MSDN docs on CDs. if enough people have enough of the volumes, they could seed and keep it going. But if only a handful of people have the actual data, it's a matter of time before it's taken offline for good.
by briHass | 2026-01-18 14:36:34+00:00
This sounds similar to how in C#/.NET there are (at least) 3 methods to reading XML: XmlDocument, XPathDocument, or XmlReader. The first 2 are in-memory object models that must parse the entire document to build up an object hierarchy, which you then access object-oriented representations of XML constructs like elements and attributes. The XmlReader is stream-based, where you handle tokens in the XML as they are read (forward-only.)

Any large XML document will clobber a program using the in-memory representations, and the solution is to move to XmlReader. System.Text.Json (.NET built-in parsing) has a similar token-based reader in addition to the standard (de)serialization to objects approach.
by ilinx | 2026-01-18 14:37:25+00:00
I’ve been coaching my son’s team for the last four years, and this sounds like the breath of fresh air the program desperately needed. Keeping the kids engaged and invested has always been a struggle. Having distinct roles and more robust success criteria sounds like a great way to address that problem.
Previous years have mostly centered around a very simple core project that essentially amounts to assembling a LEGO kit and adding a simple motorized part (e.g. making something spin). We usually finish that within the first couple weeks and then ditch the very tedious workbook the program provides.

I’ve been bringing in bins of my own Technic parts and some of Yoshihito Isogawa’s idea books[0]. I try to explain basic mechanical concepts like gears, levers, differentials, and rack and pinion steering. Then the kids explore and create a second project of their own. At the festival (non-competitive at the k-5 level in our area) we present both our projects side-by-side (usually trying to integrate them and stick within the overall theme). We’re the only team that does it that way, but I would much rather focus on inspiring the kids than coloring inside the lines.

My only concern is that making the final challenge more actively competitive will force us back into that limited situation. If the builds are too simple and the challenges too basic (which I expect, because the program leans toward expecting all teams to hit the mark) I doubt we would have the same freedom to expand on the program. Side by side competition is going to have more restrictions than a private presentation to a panel of judges.

On the whole, if this helps more kids stay engaged and having fun overall, I’m happy to figure out new ways to let the kids express themselves. This sounds like a positive change. Now I really hope our program leader lets me buy some of the old Spike kits.

[0] https://archive.org/details/legotechnicideab00isog
by shiandow | 2026-01-18 14:38:12+00:00
If airflow is a layer of abstraction something is wrong.

Yes it is an additional layer, but if your orchestration starts concerning itself with what it is doing then something is wrong. It is not a layer on top of other logic, it is a single layer where you define how to start your tasks, how to tell when something is wrong, and when to run them.

If you don't insist on doing heavy compitations within the airflow worker it is dirt cheap. If it's something that can easily be done in bash or python you can do it within the worker as long as you're willing to throw a minimal amount of hardware at it.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-18 14:38:22+00:00
For the real background here see:

_Thinkpad: A Different Shade of Blue_ by Deborah A. Dell and J. Gerry Purdy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad

I've always regretted not getting one of the tablet Thinkpads, and it kills me that the Lenovo Yogabook 9i is two technologies away from being perfect for me (needs to have a Wacom EMR stylus, and to have a Trackpoint)....
by zug_zug | 2026-01-18 14:38:22+00:00
Absolutely, when I worked at (semi-well-known unicorn) a half-dozen years ago on the data-engineering team the manager told me "Hey we want to use spark next quarter, that's a huge initiative."

And I immediately asked, "in what capacity?" And the answer was don't-know/doesn't-matter, it's just important that we can say we're using it. I really wish I understood where that was coming from (his manager resume-building? somebody getting a kickback?)
by fweimer | 2026-01-18 14:38:29+00:00
I'm not completely sure, but I suspect Fedora will stick to the current baseline for quite some time.

But the baseline is quite minimal. It's biased towards efficient emulation of the instructions in portable C code. I'm not sure why anyone would target an enterprise distribution to that.

On the other hand, even RVA23 is quite poor at signed overflow checking. Like MIPS before it, RISC-V is a bet that we're going to write software in C-like languages for a long time.
by slfreference | 2026-01-18 14:38:35+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z07v-ttoJZs

When Carlin asks about the last white people America bombed, he answers his own question: the Germans, and specifically notes they're "the only ones."
But here's the key part of his argument: America didn't bomb Germany for moral reasons or because they were evil - we bombed them because "they were trying to cut in on our action. They wanted to dominate the world."
His punchline: "Fuck that, that's our fucking job."
by FrankWilhoit | 2026-01-18 14:39:13+00:00
Excellent! But: what he shows is that the entropy does not emerge from the implementation layer, but from the intentional layer. In other words, the bugs are not in the code but in the requirements. The universal development process begins with incoherent requirements and proceeds by guesswork until the compiler stops complaining. Anyone who has actually worked this process knows that pushback on buggy requirements is NOT tolerated. This is purely an organizational problem. How will he propose to mitigate it?
by joshuaisaact | 2026-01-18 14:39:58+00:00
This couldn't ring more true to me - I think one of the consequences of the rapid change in the profession we are seeing is that skills that typically were required only at more senior levels become required further down the stack.

If I was a junior today, I'd be studying business impact, effective communication, project management, skills that were previously something you could get away with under-indexing on until senior+.
by CrulesAll | 2026-01-18 14:40:09+00:00
Software 'engineers' are going to have learn the hard skills that they have gotten by without thus far. The ones who were never engineers in the first place will have to learn 'soft skills' because they are incapable. I believe @ Tsoding put it best: The only thing AI will do, in so far as coding goes, is to remove a lot of people who should never have been in it in the first place.
by jsight | 2026-01-18 14:40:14+00:00
Plenty of people that can afford them and that would likely benefit are not buying them because of preference.

In many cases, this is rational. Yeah, a used Model 3 with a great rate plan is probably worth it as a commuter, but what if you are an outlier? Even a low battery failure rate can be a risk, and extended warranties are expensive.

But also, some of it is irrational, as the FB comments effectively feed many false fear driven narratives.
by axpy906 | 2026-01-18 14:40:16+00:00
Ohh. Reply from Shawn. I love your work.
As far as I recall, we were not looking for a net of features but specifically a git like API that could manage and version the prompts. Meta data tagging, Jinja2, release labels and easy rollback. Add that up with Rest, Typescripts and Python support and it worked pretty well. Langfuse seemed way better at tracing though.
by reactordev | 2026-01-18 14:40:30+00:00
Unplug

In all seriousness. Windows is invaded by copilot, OpenAI introducing ads, Google providing Siri for Apple, it’s all just a collusion to keep you buying. Disconnect. From TV, Media, Ads, Social Networks, Predatory subscriptions, all of it. The only way to show these companies that we are not on board with this is to not participate.
by djtango | 2026-01-18 14:41:09+00:00
I never suggested I want an LLM to be the definitive answer to a question but I'm certain that there are a lot of low hanging fruit across disciplines where the limit is the awareness of people in one field of the work of another field, and the limiting factor was the friction in discovery - I can't see how a specialised research tool powered by LLMs and RAG wouldn't be a net gain for research if only to generate promising new leads.

Throwing compute to mine a search space seems like one of the less controversial ways to use technology...
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-01-18 14:41:36+00:00
I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. Ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users, but rather heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users most able to purchase an ad-free experience. The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue.

Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-18 14:41:39+00:00
There's a similar story about a progression of robot repair devices --- which has to end in a "Master Robot Repairman" profession which is the folks who repair the robots which repair other robots.

Blanking on author and title, but read it a _long_ while ago, and it had a distinctly golden age feel --- maybe Murray Leinster?
by EGreg | 2026-01-18 14:42:08+00:00
As usual - the advice is essenially rats from a sinking ship all the way. “You all need to do this narrow thing to survive now”.

2016 to truckers: “Learn to code LOL”

2026 to coders: “Learn soft skills”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436872

Look, I personally am taking full advantage of exactly the skills described. I was the one who posted the above thing on HN showing how I am 20-50x more productive now, complete with a 4 hour speedrun video. I usually try not to just talk and point out current problems, but build solutions AND show (github, youtube) with specific details so you can watch it and apply it for yourself. But I am telling you:

1) most people will not adapt, so we will need UBI for those who don’t

2) eventually even those who adapt will be replaced too, so we will need UBI for everybody

It is after all a thin layer that remains. I remember Kasparov proudly talked about how “centaurs” (human + machine working together) in chess were better than machines alone… until they weren’t, and human in the loop became a liability.

But the problem is more widespread in the last 70 years. Just look around. Industry always tells the individual they can do some individual action downstream to clean up the mess they create upstream, and it is leading the entire planet into ruin:

https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-...

In fact, the human population in modern environments has been living large on an ecological credit card and the bill is coming due for our children, because all the “individual responsibility” stuff — where you can somehow diet, exercise and recycle your way out of things corporations do upstream — is all a gient lie and always has been. So the negative externalities just build up until the next generation won’t be able to ignore them anymore, but it could be too late. Whether that’als day zero for water in cities, or factory farms for meat with antiobiotic resistance, or fossil fuels and greenhouse gases to subsidize the car industry, or ubiqitous microplastic plastic pollution around thr world (yes, personal plastic recycling was just another such scam designed to keep you docile and not organize to force corporations to switch to biodegradeable materials.) The “anthoposcene” is seeing a decline in insects and all species of animal except humans and farm animals. Coral reefs are bleached, kelp forests and rainforests are decimated, and governments work with industry to eg allow Patagonian forests to be burned for new developments and then smokey the bear says “only YOU can prevent forest fires”. Think about it.
by javast98 | 2026-01-18 14:42:53+00:00
Hydrate: AI chat for Obsidian that can actually edit your notes

I built Hydrate because I wanted Cursor-style AI assistance in my notes, not just a chatbot bolted onto the sidebar.

What it does: You chat with an AI that can read, edit, and create files across your vault. Drag in a note for context, ask it to restructure your project docs, or have it extract todos from meeting notes into your task list.

The free tier is actually usable. Core features—chat, file operations, semantic search, slash commands—all work with your own API keys. No markup, no usage limits from us.

Paid features I actually use daily:

Image input (Pro, $10/mo): I photograph whiteboard sketches and book pages, drop them into chat, and ask Hydrate to transcribe or summarize into my notes. Sounds small, but it's changed how I capture ideas.

MCP integrations (Pro): Connect external tools. I have it pulling context from our internal docs API during planning sessions.

Custom views (Max, $20/mo): This one's wild. Describe what you want—"show my recipes as cards grouped by cuisine"—and it generates a React view on the spot. I built a project dashboard in about 3 minutes of back-and-forth. Views hot-reload as you iterate.

If you like using Obsidian daily, I hope you will love using Hydrate.

It's an Obsidian plugin. Install from Community Plugins or grab it at hydrateagent.com.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or how specific features work.
by kilpikaarna | 2026-01-18 14:43:17+00:00
>J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong".

I think that's a bit harsh? Goethe's color theory is taught in every art school to this day.

Goethe and science is an interesting one. In some sense he may have been a Newton of another, separate (and in some sense orthogonal) approach towards a science of nature [0]. One that takes primarily an intuitive/integrative/phenomenological approach to the world, rather than a mathematical/analytical. Somewhat analogous to continental vs analytical philosophy (or German vs British, if you want to be reductive).

The latter showed its strength once the industrial revolution rolled around and it gave the tools to understand and design ever more impressive technology, with the Goethean approach becoming ever more fringe. And after WW1+2 the cultural sphere that nurtured it was basically done.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethean_science
by LatencyKills | 2026-01-18 14:44:35+00:00
I mentor CS students at two local universities. The best students are using gen ai to enhance their learning and understanding (i.e. they use it as a tool instead of a crutch). The worst students are using it in attempt to “level the playing field” and are failing miserably.

It is easy to determine if someone solved a problem using AI because they can’t explain or recreate “their” solution. Detecting cheating in essays is still far more difficult.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-18 14:45:05+00:00
I had a hell of a time buying a new whetstone for my kitchen knives recently. I didn't want to buy online and I also didn't want to get ripped off. Walmart and Target had nothing but those shitty little widgets you pull a knife through to fuck it up. Home Despot and Lowes only had those and also bizarre sharpening contraptions that included wetstones but also other nonsense to justify bumping the price to north of $50. I finally found what I was looking for, just a regular whetstone with no bells and whistles, for about $3 at harbor freight.

My conclusion is that very few normies care about edge quality and most of those that do are making some sort of hobby out of it and want to buy something excessively fancy. See also Japanese knives; I'm sure they're very nice but two minutes with a whetstone will get any shitty piece of metal sharp enough to cut some chicken. There's no reason to overthink this stuff.
by jolmg | 2026-01-18 14:45:17+00:00
Might be more of a difference between what to do in your working (employee) life vs in your private life. In your private life, you can't get scraps because it's generally work on things you own, like a business, personal fitness, skills, etc. In your employee life, you're generally working on things that you don't own for recognition to get a promotion or raise. There the recognition is the entire point and people may not look too deeply into who did what, so you may need to be more overt about things.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-18 14:45:22+00:00
I am not saying that they are doing it for the money. Of course the national identity is something which can't be expressed within words but my point was that Greenland and Denmark have a healthy relationship (unlike other colonies) and Greenland is happy being part of Denmark for multitude of reasons and Denmark's happy too.

So if the sovereign people of Greenland chose denmark and think its right for their country (and they are given autonomy as well by Denmark)

I just don't see how America gets any right in Greeland and wanted to debuke the claim that Denmark can get the claim as well.

Y'know the thing is America effectively tried to bribe the average Greelander to get away from Denmark but they still don't think its worth it to get into the mess, that's how happy Greenland is with Denmark and prides themselves to be part of Dane culture and neither is Denmark interested in selling Greeland (quite the contrary)

In all of these cases, as such America got literally zero argument ever and that was what I was trying to say. It's got the same argument as that of "mine" or just bullying

Denmark has sold virgin islands to America once and also for greenland, they could've gotten complete support of Danish govt/Greenland govt to make bases/mineral deals even in diplomatic ways and they literally tried to say that

Up until now. I don't see why America would want to do such a blunder not unless they just want to have the flag show Greenland as part of America just for the sake of it which is such a crazy thing when you think about it.

Also Greenland's as close to Denmark (around 2000 miles) as it is to America, so saying its in America's backyard because the map makes one think so is a crazy statement too.

Are we 100% sure that these guys didn't just look at mercator map and decided all this stupidness in it with 0 reason? This seems so silly even a teenager can tell this so much.
by woeirua | 2026-01-18 14:45:23+00:00
People are a bit too eager to jump on the emergence of ads as an indicator that things are slowing down. I view it as the opposite, mostly because of my experience with Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5. These models are incredible. I think by some definitions they’re already AGI.

So why bake in ads? My hunch is that raising funds privately can only take you so far. To keep scaling, they need more capital and have to go public. Despite all the hype they still have to show _some_ revenue to help justify the valuation they need to keep buying hardware. They are a business after all. Ads to support the lowest tiers feel like a no brainer. People already accept them for search.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-18 14:46:00+00:00
People keep their cars for longer than 2 to 4 years and an EV sold in 2 to 4 years will likely be driven by someone else.

Which is why I put a used EV as being better for the environment vs a new one.

But both will be better for the environment in their lifetime than keeping a used ICE on the road.

It's more economical to keep your current car until it starts seeing major mechanical issues. However, environmentally an EV will (almost) always beat an ICE, the sooner you get one the better. Especially in a place like the EU where you can get even more environmentally friendly EVs due to the lower amounts of driving. You can, for example, grab the BYD seagull which has a 30kWh battery pack. That alone significantly reduces the new EV environmental impact beyond what some of the older numbers would have shown.
by OptionOfT | 2026-01-18 14:46:09+00:00
I remember when Netflix took out a whole page ad for their Orange is the new Black show.

John Oliver had a piece on it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

This is a natural extension of it.

But what is revolutionary is the scale that this is now possible.

We have so many people out there who now blindly trust the output of an LLM (how many colleagues have you had proudly telling you: I asked Claude and this is what it says <paste>).

This is as advertiser's wet dream.

Now it's ads at the bottom, but slowly they'll become more part of the text. And worst part: you don't know, bar the fact that the link has a refer(r)er attached to it.

The internet before and after LLMs is like steel before and after the atomic bombs.

Anything after is contaminated.
by brisray | 2026-01-18 14:46:27+00:00
Here are my sites:

Ray's Miscellany - https://brisray.com/ - Everything I'm interested in

HMS Gambia - https://hmsgambia.org/ - A history of the cruiser HMS Gambia

Bristol Gunners - https://bristolgunners.org/ - A history of artillery units in Bristol

Icehouse Offroad - https://ihor4x4.com/ - Offroad adventures
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-18 14:46:30+00:00
I get hyper-targeted ads trying to sell me electrical distribution equipment and air handling units because I run commercial electrical work (mostly mechanical equipment focused) and search for a lot of equipment part numbers. They’re on target, but ineffective.

None of the ads could ever be effective, I have my supply houses that I buy from and they don’t advertise online.

I do have a decent amount of buying power at work (single digit millions a year) but no internet ad from an electrical distributor is ever going to influence my purchasing decision.
by mritchie712 | 2026-01-18 14:47:26+00:00
happy middle ground: https://www.definite.app/ (I'm the founder).

datalake (DuckLake), pipelines (hubspot, stripe, postgres), and dashboards in a single app for $250/mo.

marketing/finance get dashboards, everyone else gets SQL + AI access. one abstraction instead of five, for a fraction of your Snowflake bill.
by tsoukase | 2026-01-18 14:47:34+00:00
Living in the coldest corner of my country that is getting hotter and hotter by the year, I confirm the global observations. Specifically I estimate the temperature increase of the latest 3 years to be about 2-3C comparing with 20 years ago. A vital decease in heating costs with a whole month without heating is welcome. The future becomes from manageable to fate.
Show HN: Miito- Added TikTok like videos to Google Meet to fix my attention span
by miemex | 2026-01-18 14:47:55+00:00
OP here.
I built this because "Zoom Fatigue" for me is actually "Understimulation Fatigue".

I noticed the trend of "sludge content" (split screen videos with gameplay) actually helped me focus on audiobooks, so I ported the concept to Google Meet.

It's a Chrome Extension that injects a draggable, resizable `<iframe>` container over the meeting grid.

- Caption Sync: It uses a `MutationObserver` to scrape the live caption node from Google Meet's DOM and renders it into the overlay, so you can watch the loop and read the meeting simultaneously.

- State Management: Handles the fragility of Meet's DOM updates (which break observers constantly) by re-attaching listeners dynamically.

- Privacy: 100% client-side. No meeting audio/video is recorded or sent to a server.

It's a weird solution to a modern problem, but it works for my ADHD brain.

Happy to answer Qs about the implementation!