MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jesse__ | 2026-01-19 04:30:00+00:00
I think OPs point is that people are going to eventually abandon the sinking Windows ship, because gamers are going to soon abandon ship en-masse. That certainly tracks for me (mostly a non-gaming Windows user).

It follows that, at some threshold number of users, it becomes much cheaper to ship a Linux distro than to continue to support Windows proper.

:shrug:

Guess we'll see in 15 years.
by wackget | 2026-01-19 04:30:02+00:00
~Sorry, I can't view the image due to annoying Imgur restrictions (and they restrict proxies/VPNs too).~

Edit: I was able to find a proxy which works and I can see the image.

Your layout is kind of similar but not really - the Windows taskbar can be configured to work in both rows and columns, or a combination of the two.

So you can have a layout like my original screenshot above, or:

* in columns like this:
https://i.ibb.co/Y4jJN6jh/image.png

* a mixture of columns and rows like this:
https://i.ibb.co/5WsVmLgb/image.png

* at the top or either side of the screen like this:
https://i.ibb.co/9mGmjnxs/image.png

* and in any position it can be resized:
https://i.ibb.co/HLmh89qF/image.png

Shame they ditched all this in Windows 11 though.
by eddythompson80 | 2026-01-19 04:31:29+00:00
We truly are living in the dumbest timeline aren’t we.

I was just having an argument with a high level manager 2 weeks ago about how we already have an outbound proxy that does this, but he insisted that a mitm proxy is not the same as fly.io “tokenizer”. See, that one tokanizes every request, ours just sets the Authorization header for service X. I tried to explain that it’s all mitm proxies altering the request, just for him to say “I don’t care about altering the request, we shouldn’t alter the request. We just need to tokenize the connection itself”
by maxglute | 2026-01-19 04:32:01+00:00
China WAS a developing nation in Kyoto 1997, GDP per capital $800, high income $7000.

China WAS a developing nation in Paris 2015, GDP per capita $11000, high income $13000 USD.

China JUST around developed nation in 2025, GDP per capita $14000, high income $14000.

They're on trend to peak emissions last year, see study below for PRC emissions trending down for last 18 months. What happens is we have these things called satellites that can detect emissions live, so you get the PREVIOUS study that confirms they have likely already peaked emissions.

Every country SHOULD scale manufacturing, no other country can scale as much as PRC into making stuff commodity tier. If PRC peak domestic emissions and global clean tech exports displaces 5x more emissions than US oil and produce net global reduction in emissions then that's aggregate emission reduction. If other countries can/wants to do that they ought to. It's not about handwaving emissions, it's about realizing 50% of world are developing, they're going to consume and generate massive amounts of shit, aka poverty alleviation, which is moral good, which will require magnitude increase in power and the most sustainable pathway to that is use as much clean tech as possible, clean tech that net displaces more emissions, which is only possible by making clean tech cheap, which PRC is uniquely able to do.
by fsckboy | 2026-01-19 04:32:36+00:00
>In 2017 I predicted that most programmers would lose their employer <-> employee bargaining power in the next 15-25 years. This was a pretty controversial take at the time, and I never wrote about it publicly, so it’s hard to claim too much credit for being right.

but that didn't happen either

the highest skilled programmers still make bank. the huge influx of more marginal "boot camp engineers" are in more precarious economic positions, but they weren't in the population of programmers that form the baseline for your comparison.
by ryuzaburo | 2026-01-19 04:32:56+00:00
As a System Architect who recently uncovered a critical infrastructure flaw in iCloud (the 27.2KB sync corruption issue), I am often seen as a critic of Apple. However, I wanted to step back and analyze their architecture through the lens of trade-offs.

Many people criticize Apple for being "closed," but from a large-scale migration perspective (30k+ users), I’ve started to see their constraints as a deliberate choice to lower cognitive load. I’d love to hear how other architects balance "User Freedom" vs. "System Predictability" in their own infrastructures.
by botacode | 2026-01-19 04:32:59+00:00
Absolutely, it is an embarrassment that we design systems that continue to neglect this fact and, worse still, we judge and punish folks who have to interact with them at the "attention" end for mistakes.

In some critical attention places it is possible to "engineer" a bit more reliability into human systems with crutches like shifts and incentives (the military sometimes succeeds at this for mission critical applications), but in most it is a failure of system designers and software developers.
by mcmoor | 2026-01-19 04:33:44+00:00
Yeah I think the funniest meme about impostor syndrome is "Am I even good enough to have impostor syndrome?". This is why I don't really subscribe to the Former Gifted Kid Syndrome myself despite having the symptoms (I think). It feels too narcissistic to describe myself as that. And turns out, it may not ever be special after all!
by throwaway17_17 | 2026-01-19 04:33:55+00:00
I’m apparently comment happy on this OP, but, the typing of it looks funny because it starts the sentence, I’m pretty sure OP was saying safER, as opposed to SAFE (as in totally safe instead of comparatively safer). I have been quite charitable to OP in some sibling comments and will do so here. I think OP is attempting to give Fil-C some credit for being an attempt to increase the overall memory safety of existing code without incurring the complexity of a new language or the complexity of rewriting long running/widely distributed code. It is a decent sentiment and a viable methodology to achieve a laudable goal, but is certainly susceptible to caveats like the performance penalty you mention.
by elC0mpa | 2026-01-19 04:35:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a Cloud Architect, and I built aws-doctor because I found myself constantly running the same manual checks across different AWS accounts to find "zombie" resources. While AWS Trusted Advisor exists, the best checks are often locked behind paid Business/Enterprise support plans, and the AWS Console can be slow when you just want a quick "health check."

What it does: It’s a TUI (Terminal User Interface) that acts as a proactive checkup for your account.

Waste Detection: Scans for stopped instances (>30 days), unattached EBS volumes, unassociated Elastic IPs, and expiring Reserved Instances.

Cost Diagnosis: Compares your current month-to-date costs against the exact same period last month (e.g., Jan 1–15 vs. Feb 1–15) to spot spending velocity issues.

Trends: Visualizes cost history over the last 6 months.

The Tech Stack:

Written in Go (1.24).

Uses AWS SDK v2.

UI built with Charm's Bubbletea and Lipgloss (for the tables/styling).

It’s completely open-source and runs locally on your machine (using your standard ~/.aws/credentials).

I’d love to hear your feedback on the code structure or suggestions for other "waste patterns" I should add to the detection logic.

Thanks!
by kimixa | 2026-01-19 04:37:10+00:00
In British English you'd be wrong for using an em-dash in those places, with most grammar recommendations being for an en-dash, often with spaces.

It's be just as wrong as using an apostrophe instead of a comma.

Grammar is often wooly in a widely used language with no single centralised authority. Many of the "Hard Rules" some people thing are fundamental truths are often more local style guides, and often a lot more recent than some people seem to believe.
by stevenhuang | 2026-01-19 04:38:15+00:00
I think like in modern pharmacology we will find that there does not exist a prescriptive best for everyone because everyone is genuinely different. We may be able to identify a "best available" for the most common cohorts, but ultimately what works best for an individual will be specific to their unique circumstances.

Eg from physical differences or other issues with their eyes, differences in the way their brains process vision information, to nothing more than cultural habits (it's what they're used to).

These differences show up knowingly or not as preference towards either dark or light mode or something in-between.

So it's reasonable to default to eg light mode since that might be suitable for the largest cohort, but ideally it's best to have the option to switch to dark for those that prefer it.
by dcx | 2026-01-19 04:38:48+00:00
Hello! I'm one of the main authors of the paper. Thanks for engaging with our work so thoughtfully – that's a very clear and valid question.

We didn't get around to addressing this within the paper itself – 80 pages is a lot, and deadlines, etc. But I have unpublished experiments that show that in a reasonably broad setting I'm doing some work in, verbalized probabilities are restoring a distribution that looks almost identical to the base distribution. It is not possible to demonstrate this on frontier models, since their public models are already mode-collapsed, and they don't share the base model or logprobs anyway. But I've established this to my personal satisfaction on large local models which offer base / post-trained pairs.

To share some intuition on why one might believe this is occurring: there are a bunch of tasks implicit in the pre-training corpus that encourage the model to learn this capability. Consider sentences in news and research articles like: "Scientists discover that [doing something] increases [some outcome] on [some population] by X%". It seems quite natural that the model might learn a pathway by which it can translate its base probabilities into the equivalent numeric tokens in order to "beat" the task of reducing loss on the "X%" prediction.

I can even almost visualize how this works mechanically in terms of what the upper layers of an MLP would do to learn this, i.e. translating from weights into specific token slots. And this is almost certainly more parameter-efficient than constructing an entire separate emulated reality for filling in X. Although I'm not ruling out that the latter might still be happening – perhaps some future interp research might be able to validate this!

I'm actually working on a paper right now that packs up some of the above findings in passing. But if helpful in the meantime, this is also building on related work by Tian et al. 2023, "Just Ask for Calibration" [1] and Meister et al. 2024, "Benchmarking Distributional Alignment of LLMs", that give some extra confidence here. Their findings indicate that whether or not they are rooted in the model's base probabilities, they seem to be useful for the purposes that people care about. (Oh, and you can probably set up an experiment to verify this independently with vLLM in a few Claude Code requests!)

Hope that was helpful – feel free to ping with follow-ups! (Although replies might be a little delayed, I happened to see this at a good time; having quite a crunchy week)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14975

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05403
by sowbug | 2026-01-19 04:39:11+00:00
I think this means that you could produce more versions of this music video from other points of view without having to shoot the video again. For example, the drone-like effects could take a different path through the scene. Or you could move people/objects around and still get the lighting right.

Given where this technology is today, you could imagine 5-10 years from now people will watch live sports on TV, but with their own individual virtual drone that lets them view the field from almost any point.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-01-19 04:39:12+00:00
I’m not really against ads. I think the problem is in the influencer style business model. People are making a living fighting to get clicks by driving negative emotions. That’s the problem. ‘Influencer’ should not be a legitimate job. There is definitely a way to allow business to advertise without the negative externalities. It just requires regulation, which is basically impossible in the modern political climate.
by fallinditch | 2026-01-19 04:41:33+00:00
--looking back at the chat session the religious sources appeared when I challenged Perplexity to ask it why it mislead me.

It then lied again when it denied that it had included religious sources.

A typical link from the sources is to Luke 21:8

"He replied: “Watch out that you are not deceived. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and, ‘The time is near.’ Do not follow them."
by dang | 2026-01-19 04:41:38+00:00
Thanks for pointing that out, because I hadn't see it getting flagged and I don't think that's fair. Fixed now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674621 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673930 are the top comments and that's about as good as HN gets.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-01-19 04:43:02+00:00
Not for coconuts, but in the real world, most products have economies of scale. If one rich guy has 99% of the money, the entire economy will be structured to serve his needs and yet nothing he buys will reach economies of scale. He just doesn't care to have that many Rolexes. So production methods will be fairly inefficient.

But if everyone has a bit of money, stuff can get mass produced, which actually makes for much greater total welfare, because the production methods are just a lot more efficient.
by throwaway17_17 | 2026-01-19 04:43:14+00:00
While I’m always thankful when people give the broad perspective and context in a discussion, which your comment does. The specifics of this particular project’s usage of almost-C is not something I could have quickly figured out, so thanks. For such a large program, an to be as old as Qt is at this point, I find it impressive and slightly amazing that it has in some sense self-limited its divergence from standard C. It would be interesting to see what something like SQLite includes in its almost-C.
by wooptoo | 2026-01-19 04:43:54+00:00
I don't want Linux to become as popular as Windows currently is. Its quality would decline drastically as it would be subjected to all sorts of corporate forces.

I don't want it to become a commercially driven, adversarial OS like Windows and Mac OS.

I want it to remain the free, stable and decent OS it currently is, in a comfortable 3rd place.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-01-19 04:44:03+00:00
Thanks for that insight as well! My needs don't tend to be so demanding so I've gotten away without knowing these details, but I suspect I the not-so-distant future this could be useful to know.

Being able to use distributed backends to process frames sounds kind of incredible, but I can't imagine my little projects ever making use of it. Still, very cool stuff.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-19 04:44:06+00:00
As a C++ developer, my experience with learning both Rust and Zig is that they're both good languages, and any reasonably skilled C++ developer could learn either language if they put their mind to it.

If you forced me to pick between Zig and Rust for a long-running project though, I'd pick Rust 10/10 times for the simple fact that it has been stable for more than a decade and already has momentum and funding behind it. Zig is a cool language - one that I've actually written more of than Rust - but it hasn't hit 1.0 yet and still has significant churn in both the language and standard library.
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-19 04:44:57+00:00
Someone else mentioned Lazarus, though that is Object/Free Pascal, not C/C++. The API is based on VCL for Delphi which was designed for the Windows API and even though Lazarus is cross-platform and can use multiple backends (actually i've been playing with writing a FLTK backend[0], though it is in primitive stages and FLTK doesn't really like exposing much of its guts), the API has some windows-isms (e.g. colors are 4 bytes where one byte is used a special marker to indicate system colors, just like in Windows) and the backends even have to implement a small subset of the Windows API to work :-P.

An alternative in C++ would be wxWidgets which has some (light) MFC inspirations, again feeling somewhat Windowsy though not full-on MFC/Win32 since from the beginning it had to work with X Windows / Motif in addition to Win32 (and AFAIK, the Motif backend still works).

Another alternative, even more lightweight would be the aforementioned FLTK. FLTK is also designed to be statically linked with your program (though it can be linked dynamically too if you want) so it only relies on common system libraries (as an example the screenshot in [0] relies only on the C library, the C++ library -because it is needed by FLTK and it is possible to also statically link to that too- and common X11 libraries like libX11, libXft, etc that existed on any Linux desktop system for decades now -- FLTK can also support Wayland, though i haven't tested that).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/W6XbLkr.png
by rmunn | 2026-01-19 04:46:15+00:00
Except for Emily Dickenson, who is an outlier and should not be counted.

Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could...

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).
by TZubiri | 2026-01-19 04:46:19+00:00
Interesting, how did you find it?

The topic is the subject of analysis in other disciplines, especially around Business Administration and Economy.

The use of the word agents is interesting is mostly a coincidence, it is used today in a sense that didn't quite exist 2 years ago (and that definition isn't yet formalized). We know that in economy the term agent was used to refer to people or organizations, possibly to programs especially in trading, but usually in the context of purchasing decisions or simulations. Of course it was used in an adjacent sense before, but in a way that isn't different to other similar words like "entity", or "decision-maker", or "being".

We can see that agents are used in this sense "The three largest nodes may represent countries, or buildings, or software agents"

In the context of agents that are computational, this has been discussed as well, especially in OOP, early OOP texts from Kay make parallels between Objects and cells, or create examples of Objects as office workers with specialized knowledge.

The phenomenon talked in this paper makes me think more of "the algorithm" as used in common parliance, rather than modern LLM agents. While these algorithms were usually controlled by a single company, this mode of analysis would consider a company as an agent as well, but it interacts financially with consumers, clients and in the case of public companies, through stock exchanges (which are connected to global markets at high speeds through HFT).

The math goes over my head, but I would say that if someone looks into it because of the current agent craze, it might be worth it to look into the broader intersection with economics, and look into the classical etymology of agents, rather than diving deep into this article just because of a deceiving word coincidence that gives the appearance of prophetical.
by its-summertime | 2026-01-19 04:48:01+00:00
Doesn't seem to support either my self-chosen name or my actual name, due to heavy assumptions about what a name is. Doesn't seem to support birth dates in alternate calendaring systems, it also doesn't specify what calendaring system is used.

Doesn't seem to allow a person to optionally identify with their place of birth, their citizenship, or their parents' existence. For some it is important to not identify with those things, for others its just as important to identify with those things.

> "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb"

I'd suggest to not use such a saying as it has a very mixed and revisioned history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water#Ot...

> and still exists under certain jurisdictions such as English Common Law.

Clarification?
by ativzzz | 2026-01-19 04:48:41+00:00
Great, then we can use AI to solve the problems given a set of requirements, and spend more time thinking about what the requirements are by understanding the users.

PM and software development will converge more and more as AI gets better.

The best PMs will be the ones who can understand customers and create low-fidelity prototypes or even "good enough" vibe coded solutions to customers

The best engineers will be the ones who use their fleet of subagents to work on the "correct" requirements, by understanding their customers

At the end of the day, we are using software to solve people's problems. Those who understand that, and have skills around diving in and navigating people's problems will come out ahead
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-01-19 04:48:41+00:00
That's really fascinating. Is your format open source? I don't know if I'd have overlapping needs for something like that (though I did investigate hdf5 early on, it seemed very promising as a place to store our outputs) but I'd be curious to explore it and see what you're doing with it.

Right now we typically read from CSV or Excel, because that's what the scientists prefer to work with. For better or worse. There's a bit of parquet kicking around. The wrappers around handling imports for DuckDB are very, very thin. It handles just about everything seamlessly

Is this the extension that was too slow? https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/hdf5
by win311fwg | 2026-01-19 04:49:49+00:00
Thing is, Scrum isn't supposed to be something you do for long.

As you no doubt know, Agile is ultimately about eliminating managers from the picture, thinking that software is better developed when developers work with each other and the customer themselves without middlemen. Which, in hindsight, sounds a lot like my previous comment, funnily enough, although I didn't have Agile in mind when I wrote it.

Except in the real world, one day up and deciding no more managers on a whim would lead to chaos, so Scrum offered a "training wheels" method to facilitate the transition, defining practices that push developers into doing things they normally wouldn't have to do with a manager behind them. Once developers are comfortable and into a routine with the new normal Scrum intends for you to move away from it.

The problem: What manager wants to give up their job? So there has always been an ongoing battle to try and bastardize it such that the manager retains relevance. The good news, if you can call it that, is that we as a community have finally wisened up to it and now most pretty well recognize it for what it is instead of allowing misappropriation of the "Agile" label. The bad news is that while we're getting better at naming it, the poor practices continue.
by 8organicbits | 2026-01-19 04:50:15+00:00
I think incentives is the right way to think about it. Authentic interactions are not monetized. So where are people writing online without expecting payment?

Blogs can have ads, but blogs with RSS feeds are a safer bet as it's hard to monetize an RSS feed. Blogs are a great place to find people who are writing just because they want to write. As I see more AI slop on social media, I spend more time in my feed reader.