MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amterp | 2026-01-28 15:01:33+00:00
This is exactly the frustration that lead me to write Rad [0] (the README leads with an example). I've been working on it for over a year and the goal is basically to offer a programming language specifically for writing CLIs. It aims for declarative args (no Bash ops parsing each time), automatic --help generation, friendly (Python-like) syntax, and it's perfect for dev build scripts. I'll typically have something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env rad
---
Dev automation script.
---

args:
build b bool # Build the project
test t bool # Run tests
lint l bool # Run linter
run r bool # Start dev server
release R bool # Release mode
filter f str? # Test filter pattern

filter requires test

if build:
mode = release ? "--release" : ""
print("Building ({release ? 'release' : 'debug'})...")
$`cargo build {mode}`

if lint:
print("Linting...")
$`cargo clippy -- -D warnings`

if test:
f = filter ? "-- {filter}" : ""
print("Running tests{filter ? ' (filter: {filter})' : ''}...")
$`cargo test {f}`

if run:
bin = release ? "target/release/server" : "target/debug/server"
$`./{bin}`

Usage: ./dev -b (build), ./dev -blt -f "test_auth" (build, lint, test auth), ./dev -r (just run).

Actively being developed!

[0] https://github.com/amterp/rad
by akarshc | 2026-01-28 15:01:40+00:00
I’ve worked on and shipped a few AI systems that reached real users.

This post isn’t about models or prompts. It’s about the things that kept breaking once AI moved off the happy path: async jobs, retries, silent failures, provider outages, cost blowups, and debugging without visibility.

I wrote this mostly as a way to document the mistakes I made and what I wish I had known earlier. Happy to answer questions or dig deeper into any of the failure modes.
by chickensong | 2026-01-28 15:02:12+00:00
They're real at scale. Plenty of bugs don't suface until you're running under heavy load on distributed infrastructure. Often the culprit is low in the stack. Asking the reporter the right questions may not help in this case. You have full traces, but can't reproduce in a test environment.

When the cause is difficult to source or fix, it's sometimes easier to address the effect by coding around the problem, which is why mature code tends to have some unintuitive warts to handle edge cases.
by bodge5000 | 2026-01-28 15:02:13+00:00
I'll add one; Add shell_plus. It makes the django shell so much nicer to use, especially on larger projects (mostly because it auto-imports all your models). IIRC, it involves adding ipython and django_extensions as a dependency, and then adding django-extensions (annoyingly, note that the underscore changes to a dash, this trips me up everytime I add it) to your installed apps.

Saying that, I'm sure django-extensions does a lot more than shell_plus but I've never actually explored what those extra features are, so think I'll do that now

Edit: Turns out you can use bpython, ptpython or none at all with shell_plus, so good to know if you prefer any of them to ipython
by starky | 2026-01-28 15:02:27+00:00
This is frankly one of the areas of Linux that I'm most disappointed about. I tried a number of these options for local players and found them all to be terrible. Especially considering that I really like the specific layout I've used for well over a decade on Foobar2000. I actually ended up installing Foobar2000 through Wine because of my frustration, only to find that it wouldn't start reliably.
by ritchie46 | 2026-01-28 15:02:33+00:00
Python 3.14 "spawns" by default.

However, this is not a Polars issue. Using "fork" can leave ANY MUTEX in the system process invalid (a multi-threaded query engine has plenty of mutexes). It is highly unsafe and has the assumption that none of you libraries in your process hold a lock at that time. That's an assumption that's not PyTorch dataloaders to make.
by progforlyfe | 2026-01-28 15:02:54+00:00
Every month more and more people switch to Linux and I just love it. I'm tired of one company controlling the core operating system of 85% of desktop computers and users being at their whim.

You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that own them!
by runarberg | 2026-01-28 15:03:07+00:00
I would imagine there is probably some reverse S-curve of skill loss going on. The first year you may retain like 90% (and the 10% are obscure words, rare grammar structures, expressions, etc.), then in the next 2 years you loose more and more every year, and by the 3rd year you’ve lost like 50% of the language, including some common words, useful grammar structures, but retain common greetings, basic structures, etc. and then after like year 5 the regression starts to slow down and by year 10 you may still know 20%, but it is the most basic stuff, and you won‘t be able to use the language in any meaningful way.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-28 15:03:13+00:00
Really what you're saying is it is an issue of quantity.

> if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes,

I'm going to assume the vast majority of code written does not look anything like this, but is dumb little chunks of glue for other important chunks, that are quite often imported from other libraries.

As someone that is not a SWE looking from the outside, I think there is a disconnect between what a SWE is told they are getting paid for and what a SWE is actually getting paid for by (many/most) businesses.

You are under the assumption you are getting paid for writing code. But for the vast majority of business that is just the icky bits getting ground up in the sausage factory that nobody wants to know about. Management above you only cares about what gets wrapped in casings and is ready to sell to the customer (either internal or external). They do not care if the product is technically good as long as they can sell it. For each individual person in the company becoming a better programmer is hard to measure and rarely rewarded by the company they work for. Turning out tons of lines of code and applications that have at least some semblance of working is far more likely to get you a pay raise.
by pxc | 2026-01-28 15:03:46+00:00
All three of those are "system package managers" (if you count winget as a package manager at all, which I would not). Pacman and APT are binary package managers while Homebrew is a source-based package manager. Cargo and NPM are language-specific package managers, which is a name I've settled on but don't love.

Imo there's an identifiable core common to all of these kinds of package managers, and it's not terribly hard to work out a reasonably good hierarchical ontology. I think OP's greater insight in this section is that internally, every package manager has its own ontology with its own semantics and lexicon:

> Even within a single ecosystem, the naming is contested: is the unit a package, a module, a crate, a distribution? These aren’t synonyms. They encode different assumptions about what gets versioned, what gets published, and what gets installed.
by annshress | 2026-01-28 15:03:53+00:00
I agree with most of what this article argues.

At the same time, when I think about rejecting a new idea or tool, I wonder whether we might be resisting a change that could be beneficial to the broader population in the long run. It reminds me of how, when calculators first became widely available, teachers resisted their use in early grades out of concern that they would make students “dumb”.

I don’t think we’ll ever reach a clear consensus on what is good or bad, or on which ideas should be rejected versus accepted.
by subsection1h | 2026-01-28 15:03:55+00:00
> Because no one should ever write Bash under any circumstances.

You've written 2,438 comments at HN and only two of those messages include "Linux". Two! And the most recent of those two comments includes this gem:

"fighting my way through a Linux CLI is exactly the kind of thing I use Chatgpt for professionally."

Maybe you shouldn't be telling more capable technologists what languages they should avoid.
by yobbo | 2026-01-28 15:04:02+00:00
> bureaucracy and stagnation while the same staff ends up flourishing and producing top notch tech when under a US company like Apple

Apple orders a widget from them which can be sold in an established product with existing customers. The magic was creating the Apple brand and iPhone product.

I think the problem with old European "conglomerates" is that no one has the mandate/legitimacy to make a multi-year/decade tech investment equivalent to the iphone. "Decision makers" are likely to have been promoted from other professions than engineering/products, and people promoted through management/sales lack competence and legitimacy. Their job is to apply old and approved templates for decision-making, while paying dues and respect to appropriate people.

It fails when templates for decision-making don't exist. Spin-offs or acquisitions based on new tech, rather than existing products/markets, can't work with this type of management.

I have also gotten the sense that management positions are given as rewards for "long and loyal service". It is effectively an incentives program, with the implicit assumption that management decisions don't really matter. This is not far from the the truth in old industrial companies with few but huge returning "captive" customers, which is typical in Europe eg Siemens, or high value luxury brands in fashion/jewellery/liquor/etc.

The meaning of the word "verwaltung" is different from the American "management". Verwaltung implies "preservation of stability" whereas "business management" implies something like "figure out how to sell more stuff".
by whatsupdog | 2026-01-28 15:04:24+00:00
> "An administration that has repeatedly abused its power in order to intimidate and punish political opponents"

Are you referring to how a Democratic party AG's entire campaign was to "pursue Donald Trump". And then she found a victimless "crime", that every real estate developer is guilty of, in which nobody was harmed, and the banks were equally guilty, for which the statute of limitations has expired, to get her 34 felonies just to throw the ex president in jail and to stop him from running again?
by vharuck | 2026-01-28 15:04:36+00:00
>The main thing I see these protesters doing wrong is that they seem to freak out and fight back once they get aarrested. This is not how to deal with under-trained law enforcement unless you want to die.

Actually, the less training and self-restraint an officer has, the more incentive there is for a target to do everything they can to flee or resist. If a town trusts its local police to be fair and professional, criminals are more likely to accept the offer of "Drop everything and put your hands on the ground." They trust they'll survive the arrest and avoid anything worse than a rough perp walk. But if the arresting officers are known to brutally beat and pepper spray people they detain, I would expect people to resist detainment.

Last weekend, we saw video footage of a man executed while being restrained and with no weapon in his hands. At this point, reasonable people could believe an ICE officer trying to detain them is threatening their lives. When do self-defense laws kick in?
by PrismerAI | 2026-01-28 15:04:40+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m William, and I’ve spent the last year trying to solve a problem that keeps every researcher up at night: The Fragmentation of Scientific Discovery.
The Problem: The "Context-Switching" Tax In the current research landscape, we are drowning. We face an explosion of information, a non-stop barrage of "trending" papers, and the persistent "reproducibility crisis." But the silent killer is the tool-switching tax.
Every time you move from reading a paper to writing notes, then to a different environment for code replication, and finally to a separate experiment tracker, your "flow state" is shattered. We spend more time managing tools than enjoying the thrill of exploration.
The Failure: The All-in-One Trap We started Prismer for AI4S in early 2025 with a grand vision: an all-in-one platform for reading, writing, and experimenting. We iterated version after version. But honestly? The feedback was mediocre. We fell into a cycle of disappointment and frustration. We realized that by trying to do everything, we weren't doing any single thing well enough to break a researcher's existing habit. We decided to tear it all down and focus on perfecting individual components—starting with the paper-reading experience.
The Turning Point: Why Open Source? Then OpenAI released Prism. It was a wake-up call. We realized that the future of AI for Science (AI4S) shouldn't be locked inside a single lab or a proprietary "walled garden."
Scientific workflows are deeply personal and highly specialized. No single company can build the perfect workflow for every researcher. That’s why we’ve decided to open-source our entire codebase.
What Prismer is now: Instead of a rigid platform, we are providing modular components that researchers can use to build their own custom AI4S workflows. We want to empower the community to co-create the infrastructure of discovery, rather than just being "users" of it.
We’re at a stage where we’ve traded our frustration for a new sense of purpose. We’d love to hear your thoughts on:
1. What part of your research workflow feels the most "broken"?
2. What are your biggest hurdles in AI4S reproducibility?
by kjshsh123 | 2026-01-28 15:05:01+00:00
US homeowners have increased their net worth like $15 trillion since the start of the pandemic.

Besides, there's this thing called tax incidence and it's not as simple as "tax the billionaires" because it's not clear how that plays out in terms of people's wages or middle class investments.

On the other hand, land value taxes would actually be incident on landowners.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-01-28 15:05:05+00:00
>needed to kill

She was intentionally obstructing for four minutes before the video, dancing to her horn while blocking traffic.

She ignored orders to stop and get out of the vehicle.

She pressed the car in drive enough to spin the tires with a federal agent in front of the car.

THEN he drew his gun from the holster and fired.

She hit him with her car.

Good forced him. She made every bad decision and reality came quick.
by gf000 | 2026-01-28 15:05:37+00:00
I don't really get your first 2 paragraphs. We are talking about connecting remotely to another computer, you can't do much at the other end of a network call with a server allocated buffer - at most you can cache stuff there. But that ain't helping with a video or any kind of fancier than a solid rectangle graphics.

And sure, simple UIs have their place - but they will also work just as well with a proper transport protocol, hell, they would compress even better. So just waypipe that simple UI as you see it fit.
by nusl | 2026-01-28 15:06:29+00:00
I'd switch if it weren't for anticheat breaking the games I play. I really, really hate Windows, and Windows 11 even more than normal levels of Windows hate. I had to do some really weird shit to get it to a place that feels sane.

"The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won't run. But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux."

Fair point though :P
by eth0up | 2026-01-28 15:06:30+00:00
Dependencies may be becoming less properties of software, and more so properties of the distro's systemd wiring.

More and more software will assimilate systemd features. Free distros will patch, shim, emulate, flounder. Or in GPT parlance "Dependencies are no longer intrinsic properties of software; they are emergent properties of a distribution's systemd orchestration layer"

Meanwhile, gripes, fears etc,

'Linux' becomes interpreted vs inspectable.

Requires superfluous new literacy

Convolutes logs, tools
Obscures causality

Centralized control above Unix process model

Fair well ps aux, hello systemctl, cgtop, gls

KILL (less lethalized) superceded, replaced by service stop and mask

Surrender chains for events, ie buggy debugging or complexity accretion

General obfuscation beneath the hood

Centralized ... indexed, logs vs text streams

And....

Upstream assumes systemd

Some resist

Costs rise

Optional becomes expected

Accidental incompatibility

And... systemd ingurgitates one by one, policy, supervision, logging, identity, dependency management and the rest of the world... digests it, and from the aether emerges a sweet smiley face, disgorging forth a monolithic mutant avatar, with Linux features.

I'll be quiet happy to be wrong about everything. Feel free to slaughter everything I've written. I don't even oppose systemd - I simply perceive it as a singularity that's drawing everything around me towards it. Wrong would definitely be good, so please don't hold back. I won't seek pardon for the rant though, because true or false, it's honest.

Edit: I was reading through my threads and thought the parent was asking me, though wasn't. I've unintentionally barged in here, but I'll leave the comment anyway, as it references a very big concern of mine.
by hereonout2 | 2026-01-28 15:06:39+00:00
I went to Lidl UKs first walk out shop a few weeks ago. You get the bill and receipts about 40 minutes after you've left.

It certainly felt like it could have been sent off to a lower paid country for a human to tot up.

Also consider you're in the store for what, 10 mins - that's a lot of video processing presumably using state of the art CV models. It's quite possibly cheaper to pay a human than rent the H100 to do it.
by mghackerlady | 2026-01-28 15:06:42+00:00
Without Stallman there wouldn't be GNU, so the operating system used to host this site and the majority of the web wouldn't exist. The compiler used to build that operating system wouldn't exist. The free software movement that later birthed its little cousin "open source" wouldn't exist, neither would the free culture movement to some extent. The ideals of the free software movement inspired the architects of the World Wide Web to make it a freely available technology, so without stallman the net would be vastly different, likely staying fragmented between different protocols like it used to be. Plus, the operating system you're using likely has some GNU stuff in it somewhere
Show HN: One Thing at a Time Please – A Kanban board with one ticket slot
by agsilvio | 2026-01-28 15:06:54+00:00
I built a kanban board that only lets you have one ticket. That's the whole app.
It's for PO's that get a little too excited sometimes.

This is a novelty project, built mostly with AI in a couple of hours. The AI wrote the code and the jokes—I just steered and said "no" a lot.

Don't put anything sensitive in there.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-01-28 15:07:10+00:00
Well… she accelerated in drive with a federal agent in front of the vehicle, while ignoring other federal agents to stop and get out of the vehicle, he THEN drew his gun from the holster, she the hit him with that car.

Her mental state was clearly not peaceful or rational - while armed. If she had made better decisions she would be alive.
by robcohen | 2026-01-28 15:07:11+00:00
Would you be willing to see an ad for $1000? A million? Sure no one would pay it, but you can set whatever limit you want.

No one would want this? Again I don't think you understand what I am proposing.

It isn't a a system that selects exclusively for ads. It selects for people you know, then people they know, and so on, and fades out how often posts show up the further away you get. If someone pays more, then more people will see their message in their network as it compensates people for their attention, starting with the people who value their attention the least.

No one would want this? You think people don't want to get paid for their attention? This is essentially what a job is.
by devhouse | 2026-01-28 15:07:20+00:00
It it was a bit surreal to see it happen live. GH project went to 70k stars and got a trademark cease‑and‑desist from Anthropic, had to rebrand in one night and even got pulled into an account takeover by crypto people.

I made a timeline of what happened if you want the details: https://www.everydev.ai/p/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-clawd...

Did you follow it as it was going on, or are you just catching up now?
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-28 15:07:59+00:00
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Isaac Newton

Polars is great, but it is better precisely because it learned from all the mistakes of Pandas. Don't besmirch the latter just because it now has to deal with the backwards compatibility of those mistakes, because when it first started, it was revolutionary.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-28 15:08:02+00:00
Yeah realistically if there was actual mass repression of citizens (i.e. things like "courts" have essentially ceased to be a factor in much of anything), simply going on strike would be a pretty good start. You demonstrate peacefully, and carry arms as a deterrent so they can't crush the demonstrations the way they did in Iran.
by mgdev | 2026-01-28 15:08:07+00:00
One thing you can try is powering Clawdbot with a local model. My company recently wrote[0] about it.

Unclear what kind of quality you'll get out of it, but since the tokens are all local, kinda doesn't matter if it burns through 10x more for the same outcome.

[0]:https://www.docker.com/blog/clawdbot-docker-model-runner-pri...
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-28 15:08:41+00:00
>Not reading your own references

This could be considered in degrees.

Like when you only need a single table from another researcher's 25-page publication, you would cite it to be thorough but it wouldn't be so bad if you didn't even read very much of their other text. Perhaps not any at all.

Maybe one of the very helpful things is not just reading every reference in detail, but actually looking up every one in detail to begin with?
by thisnick | 2026-01-28 15:08:52+00:00
*Edit: Correct link is https://github.com/thisnick/agent-rdp * (submitted wrong URL, can't change it)

Hey HN! I built this after weeks of frustration with Claude's computer use for insurance workflow automation.

The problems I kept hitting:

1. Scrolling kills you — To read a multi-page doc, the AI screenshots, scrolls, screenshots again. Each scroll burns an API call. A 10-page document eats half your context window before you've done anything useful.

2. Environment mismatch — My customers are insurance brokers on corporate VPNs, with passwords saved in their browsers and MFA on their phones. None of that exists in a cloud VM.

3. Reliability — Asked it to download 20 files. After two, it decided there must be a faster way. There wasn't. It downloaded 3, hallucinated the rest, and reported success.

For browsers, this is getting solved — tools like Stagehand use the accessibility tree instead of screenshots. Full page structure in one call, click by name, no pixel hunting.

But for desktop apps? Nothing.

agent-rdp fills that gap: Windows automation over Remote Desktop with full UI Automation access. Runs locally so VPNs and MFA just work. CLI-first so AI agents can write scripts instead of fumbling through screenshots.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone else building desktop automation for AI agents.

Happy to chat — email in my profile, or nick@workflowly.ai