MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roxolotl | 2026-01-11 03:57:18+00:00
Yea I guess we're having a definitional disagreement here. To be clear I think this is a good idea and the work you've done using tests from projects to have agents translate libraries is awesome.

But to me clearly that YAML snippet you provided is a specification which needs to be translated to Ruby as much as Python would. If the equivalent Python is:

def test_timeago_5_hours_ago(self):

self.assertEqual(timeago(1704049200, 1704067200)), "5 hours ago")

def test_timeago_21_hours_ago(self):

self.assertEqual(timeago(1703991600, 1704067200)), "21 hours ago")

The YAML is no more clear than the Python, nor closer to Ruby. Honestly I think it's less clear as a human reading it because it's hard to tell which function is being tested in context of a specific test case. I guess it's possible Claude is better at working with the YAML than the Python but that would be a coincidence I think.
by o2xda2s | 2026-01-11 03:57:21+00:00
I had a wince device before the iPhone existed 2005 ish.. An o2 XDA 2s ... There was flash for the OS ... All your files were stored in ram... Internet was a 56k dialup speeds... The arm CPU was anemic.... Wince also had issues if left on too long.. I.e. phone stopped giving audio in a call ... All in all was cool, the slidenout keyboard I miss but terrible software ... The lack of durable user files made it a fail.
by zdc1 | 2026-01-11 04:00:09+00:00
My last place also rolled their own feature flag service as their business logic around users/orgs/segments didn't neatly match anything off-the-shelf. It did what it was meant to and worked fine. OTOH we used Datadog for telemetry, which was expensive but made sense since we didn't have enough headcount with the skills to support something self-hosted.

At the end of the day, you just need to make good decisions based on honest analysis of your needs, resources, and context.
by t_mahmood | 2026-01-11 04:00:39+00:00
I had one client who's explorer didn't load, we tried different file browsers, all that used explorer as backend failed to load, only double commander (forgot the exact name, it's a dual pan file browser like midnight commander) that worked. And we couldn't find any solution online, at the end he was stuck with it for over an year, as it was not possible to reinstall.

On Linux everything is mostly decoupled, so this is not working not going to break the other thing, and I can replace it with something else.

People forgets that you're not working with a black box, unlike Windows
by varenc | 2026-01-11 04:01:22+00:00
> Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained?

This made me realize that so many influential figures have either absent fathers, or fathers that berated them or didn't give them their full trust/love. I think there's something to the idea that this commonality is more than coincidence. (that's the only topic of the site I've read through yet, and I ignored the highlighted word connections)
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-11 04:02:40+00:00
Actually, plenty of activists, for example Cory Doctorow, have spent a significant amount of effort discussing why the DMCA, modern copyright law, DRM, etc. are all anti-consumer and how they encroach on our rights.

It's late so I don't feel like repeating it all here, but I definitely recommend searching for Doctorow's thoughts on the DMCA, DRM and copyright law in general as a good starting point.

But generally, the idea that people are not allowed to freely manipulate and share data that belongs to them is patently absurd and has been a large topic of discussion for decades.

You've probably at least been exposed to how copyright law benefits corporations such as Disney, and private equity, much more than it benefits you or I. And how copyright law has been extended over and over by entities like Disney just so they could prolong their beloved golden geese from entering public domain as long as possible; far, far longer than intended by the original spirit of the copyright act.
by chrneu | 2026-01-11 04:03:53+00:00
The wording and repetition made me think this was likely, at minimum, written by a non-english speaker who used AI to translate it.

But looking back at it with an AI nose going, it does have a ton of AI slop feeling to it. LinkedIn slop is kind of interesting to read. The repetition is pretty obvious, though. This reads like it was written by a 10th grade english class trying to fit a very specific structure. Like every section had to check a list of requirements, which it did cuz it's AI.
by jadar | 2026-01-11 04:05:29+00:00
I have been using omz for YEARS. I have practically grown up with it. I resent that I would have never noticed that it took several hundred milliseconds to load, if it were not for this discussion. I never felt the delay particularly unless I was in a very large Git repository — which is rare. On the bright side, now I know about `fish` and am learning there are some nice features I never had in ZSH (i.e. much more advanced autosuggest.) What I basically use omz for is 1) autocomplete, 2) git aliases, and 3) my beloved prompt. In about 30 minutes, Claude helped me port my prompt from ZSH, autocomplete comes OOB, and a cursory Google search shows someone has made a Fish plugin to satiate my Git alias muscle memory. I could leave Zsh/omz in the rear view mirror tomorrow — but for why? I never would have noticed before this discussion...
by Morromist | 2026-01-11 04:06:03+00:00
The big tell is
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

Hype Phrase! (but like super over the top) "That world no longer exists." "code is cheap" "That future is already here."

repeat.

Very ai. Ai loves to summerise stuff in cheesy little bits like that. Very linkedin. Very bad writing too.
by rustmailer | 2026-01-11 04:09:25+00:00
I’m the author of Bichon, so let me clarify this.

First, rustmailer is my GitHub username. Under this GitHub account there are two main projects: RustMailer and Bichon.

RustMailer is a middleware product with the same name. It is commercially licensed. I hope it can help developers save time on email-related development and also generate a bit of income for me, so this middleware requires a license key to run long-term.

Bichon, on the other hand, is an independent project built on the experience of developing RustMailer. It does reuse a lot of similar code, but it is licensed under the AGPL. These are two completely different projects. RustMailer provides many API interfaces similar to EmailEngine and is positioned as middleware, while Bichon is an email archiving (or unified search) project.

Bichon is positioned as a permanently free project. Users never need to worry that if you use Bichon today you will be asked to pay later — you can use it with confidence, and all of its code is fully open and transparent.
by Eridrus | 2026-01-11 04:11:07+00:00
I have no personal experience with the SRE agents, but I used Codex recently when trying to root cause an incident after we're put in a stop gap, and it did the last mile debugging of looking through the code for me once I had assembled a set of facts & log lines and accurately pointed me to some code I had ignored in my mental model because it was so trivial I didn't think it could be an issue.

That experience made me think we're getting close to SRE agents being a thing.

And as the LLM makers like to reiterate, the underlying models will get better.

Which is to say, I think everyone should have some humility here because how useful the systems end up being is very uncertain. This of course applies just as much to execs who are ingesting the AI hype too.
by altairprime | 2026-01-11 04:11:12+00:00
Formally announced all the way back in whatever year 10.15 was:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

Scripting Language Runtimes Deprecations

> Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. Future versions of macOS won’t include scripting language runtimes by default, and might require you to install additional packages. If your software depends on scripting languages, it’s recommended that you bundle the runtime within the app. (49764202)
by rustmailer | 2026-01-11 04:12:45+00:00
Bichon can run on a laptop, and restarts or reboots are not a problem — you just need to make sure it starts automatically when the system boots. It is a standalone executable that is configured via command-line arguments or environment variables.

I’ve also been considering packaging it as a desktop application so that non-technical users can use it more easily, since there are Rust projects that can help wrap Bichon into a desktop app.
by lern_too_spel | 2026-01-11 04:12:52+00:00
GP didn't claim that Snowden worked for both countries. Snowden certainly did offer details of compromised Chinese networks to SCMP, which is now a propaganda rag for the PRC, in a failed attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chi...

Snowden gave the full set of documents to Greenwald, Poitras, and The Intercept. Greenwald's opsec in particular is highly questionable, and I would be shocked if Russia and China didn't get a full copy from him. China had no need to barter with Snowden.
by t_mahmood | 2026-01-11 04:14:29+00:00
Not the op, I've been gaming on Linux for over 10 years I think, I have an rtx2080, and using Arch Linux, Nvidia support has gotten better by a lot.

Steam performs exceptionally well. Initially there were issues, but I haven't face any for really long time now.

I don't play mp games though. So that part I can't say much.
by jesenator | 2026-01-11 04:15:10+00:00
Yeah would also be interested to see the responses without RLHF. Not quite the same, but have you interacted with AI base models at all? They're pretty fascinating. You can talk to one on openrouter: https://openrouter.ai/meta-llama/llama-3.1-405b and we're publishing a demo with it soon.

Agreed on RLHF dominating the results here, which I'd argue is a good thing, compared to the alternative of them mimicking training data on these questions. But obviously not perfect, as the demo tries to show.
by jasonfarnon | 2026-01-11 04:15:22+00:00
"The same thing might be happening to tobacco and alcohol consumption."

I believe the data on smoking was the opposite. Showing people the terrible consequences of smoking (including very graphic images) turns out to have minimal or no effect. There was a large randomized trial in the pacific northwest some decades ago. A lot of people now point to taxes as the main driver in the decrease.
by kaicianflone | 2026-01-11 04:15:28+00:00
I haven’t seen this mentioned much, but Tailwind’s rise closely followed a shift away from runtime CSS-in-JS toward build-time, deterministic styling.

Many JSX-era libraries (MUI, styled-components, Emotion) generate styles at runtime, which works fine for SPAs but creates real friction for SSR, streaming, and time-to-first-paint (especially for content-heavy or SEO-sensitive domains).

As frameworks like Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and now RSC all moved server-first, teams realized they couldn’t scale entire domains as client-only SPAs without performance and crawler issues.

Tailwind aligned perfectly with that shift: static CSS, smaller runtime bundles, predictable output, and zero hydration coupling. It wasn’t about utility classes. It was about build-time certainty in a server-rendered world :)
by defrost | 2026-01-11 04:15:45+00:00
> we have easy access to vaccines, top tier hospitals, medicine, and low wait times. It’s expensive and overpriced, and unevenly distributed, but also better in many ways than anywhere else.

Aside from being expensive, overpriced, and unevenly distributed you mean?

I'm happy with Australia, it's affordable, available to all through a hybrid scheme, mothers with new babies get regular checkups with or without private insurance, etc.

It's not perfect but it's better than anywhere else.*

* as unsubstantiated as your comment, however in this case supported by a higher national life expectancy
by utbabya | 2026-01-11 04:16:40+00:00
I managed to get around ~7W idle on a 2024 dgpu/igpu laptop, with room to further optimize. From my limited casual checks (nowhere near proper benchmark), it's better than windows.

But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.
by rustmailer | 2026-01-11 04:17:01+00:00
Bichon connects to the IMAP server via IMAP and uses a sync interval, for example 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes, Bichon downloads emails from the IMAP server to the local machine, then stores and indexes them. If an email is permanently deleted within that interval, Bichon has no way to detect it. That is indeed how Bichon currently works.
by csomar | 2026-01-11 04:18:20+00:00
If it's similar to cloudflare, then it should be usage based. That is you only pay for what is active. (ie: if you are running a task that is waiting on network for 1 hour, you don't pay for cpu but your app is loaded and you are paying for memory). So if your app is dormant (not using cpu or memory), you only pay for the storage you are using.
by amitprasad | 2026-01-11 04:19:39+00:00
If you're not looking for GPU snapshotting the ecosystem is relatively mature. Specifically, CPU-only VM-based snapshotting techniques are pretty well understood. However, if you need GPUs, this is a notoriously hard problem. IIRC Fly also was planning on using gVisor (EDIT: cloud-hypervisor) for their GPU cloud, but abandoned the effort [1].

Kata runs atop many things, but is a little awkward because it creates a "pod" (VM) inside which it creates 1+ containers (runc/gVisor). Firecracker is also awkward because GPU support is pretty hard / impossible.

[1] https://fly.io/blog/wrong-about-gpu/
by ogurechny | 2026-01-11 04:20:18+00:00
File systems aren't databases, but journaling file systems use journals just like databases. It can theoretically define any granularity for something that might happen to a file to become an irreversible transaction. I suppose that file systems have to remain “general purpose enough” to be useful (otherwise they become part of the specific program or library), and that's why complex features which might become a pitfall for the regular users who expect “just regular files” rarely become the main focus.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-11 04:20:19+00:00
Yes that last point was what I meant. I see no reason that the metadata's size field should get updated without some realloc of the memory it points to. I think I'll need to look into the actual code to see what's going on there, though, because we may both be misunderstanding. It just seems very error prone to categorize how you free memory based on a field that by the time you get to `free` has no guaranteed relationship with where the memory came from. I think that should be fixed. What was done in the blog is more of a band-aid imo.
by hahahahhaah | 2026-01-11 04:21:37+00:00
Seen people tripped up with dynamodb like stores, especially when they have a misleading sql interface like Azure tables.

You cant be "agile" with them, you need to design your data storage upfront. Like a system design interview :).

Just use postgres (or friends) until you are webscale. Unless you really have a problem amenible to key/value storage.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-11 04:22:09+00:00
It sounds pretty reasonable to me that they sell a subscription without API access at a different price than the one with that feature. It's obviously a very useful feature or the workaround wouldn't exist, right?

To me it sounds like the CLI subscription is a loss-leader designed to get you hooked so you'll upgrade once you realize it's valuable enough to pay extra for the "premium" features. It also sounds pretty reasonable to ban products designed to cheat them out of the difference in cost.

Am I missing some nuance, or is this just internet people being cheap?
by dang | 2026-01-11 04:22:37+00:00
To get meaningful feedback on HN, you'd need to write up a description of what this project is: why did you start it, what's the goal, what are people looking at, how is it implemented.

Without that context, it's too hard to tell what's going on here, and it's unlikely to get meaningful responses.

If you give the backstory of how you came to work on this and explain what's different about it, that tends to seed discussion in a good direction. Good luck!
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-11 04:22:58+00:00
These yellow dots are usually on a different grid than your document's rasterized content. You would have to modify the rasterizer in CUPS for it, and I have no idea whether printer firmwares have protections against this (I'm assuming to use ghostscript/postscript printing mode).

I know that airprint and sending printers the pdf files directly usually use the on-device rasterizer that you can't influence or modify without reverse engineering and patching the printer's firmware.

My experience with writing a custom rasterizer was with a Samsung partner model from Dell ca 2016, so there might have been a lot of more protection mechanisms added since then. I know that e.g. the EURion star constellation and other patterns are in the firmware, but I have no idea how the update pipeline from central banks to vendors works when new banking note designs are introduced.

When I made my own rasterizer, I managed to make the printed documents unscanable and unprintable by adding that constellation on it as dotcodes which was quite fun to observe :D

Some scanners even reported it directly, and the Feds / BKA got hints about it and were visiting people that tried to scan it, you know, because of those bogus money printing reports.

It was a nice demo to teach my students about how much surveillance there is already nowadays and the (lack of) responsibilities about correctness of these reports and implied accusations.
by ajross | 2026-01-11 04:27:09+00:00
Yeah, this is structurally no different than hiring an assistant to shop for you.

The complaint isn't a moral one. It's fundamentally a trademark dispute. Manufacturers of goods want control about how their products are presented to consumers. Hermès doesn't want their stuff on the shelves at TJ-Max because it "dilutes their brand" or whatever.

Unfortunately trademark law doesn't speak to AI Agents, which is why there's a tech angle here. This is likely going to need to be solved with legislation.
by bobbiechen | 2026-01-11 04:27:42+00:00
Back when I was applying to college, there was the idea of "yield protection": a college might decline overqualified students to optimize for their "yield" (the percentage of admitted students who accepted). The yield might affect college rankings.

I'm not sure whether yield protection is actually practiced vs. just a paranoid student meme, but it was the first thing I thought of here and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article.
by tekdude | 2026-01-11 04:28:37+00:00
This won't be at a 5yo level, but here's an attempt: there are a two things specific to private equity that often leads to higher prices and worsening service:

1. PE aren't investors like you and me. We can go to our brokerage and buy shares of a public company, hold those shares, vote on directors and proposals, etc... Or we can buy and sell ETF/mutual fund shares that own companies. Then, we (or fund managers) can sell those shares after any period of time we want. Could be years, decades, or minutes. Whatever meets our investing goals. The same is actually true for hedge funds. We buy a a piece of a company, hold it as long as we want, then sell to take profit/loss. When PE buys a company though, they buy the whole company AND they have a specific timeline in mind. This is because PE firms are actually temporary private "investment funds": partners put in money and expect a certain return on investment after a certain period of time. At the end, that's when the fund needs to wind down and return capital + returns. So, there's already a ticking clock on anything a PE firm buys, and pressure to generate return before time runs out. They typically do this by taking a company public on the stock market (maybe again) or selling it to someone else. (This doesn't always succeed, but there are other options then, like continuation funds.)

2. PE funds also take on a lot of debt. They can't afford to buy whole companies or roll up entire industries just with their investors' funds, so they borrow a lot. Now, the companies they buy for their portfolios not only need to generate returns for their investors, they also need to do that AFTER making payments on that debt. It multiplies the pressure.

There are a lot of cases where PE bought struggling companies, and with discipline and incentives turned things around on a timeline. But there are also a lot of cases where PE bought stable but boring companies, used debt and pressure to force them to raise prices, cut services, lay off workers, and lower quality in order to generate returns at the pace required.

(Most of this I learned from reading Matt Levine columns, I'm not an expert and don't work in this industry at all, so I may have some details wrong.)
by grogenaut | 2026-01-11 04:29:50+00:00
what's sad is that it's not the company who is causing you to see that ad fill, few companies want you to be spammed back to back with the same ad. it's the low ad fill rate on the platform or target for you meaning the company is one of the few ads in the pool. I look at it as they're trying to support the type of content you watch but not many people are. or trying to sell to you specifically.

early on in streaming there'd be so little fill you'd be getting mad at say blizzard for spamming ads in a games related place but they were the only one buying ads and supporting those streams. it's not blizzards fault taht the rest of the advertisers didn't trust that channel and.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-11 04:30:51+00:00
> Starting in 2024, customer support workers reported symptoms that matched the known toxic effects of exposure to several chemicals used in the lab. Douglas Altshuler, a former Starlink customer support associate who lived with Crohn’s disease, experienced an allergic reaction that caused one of his eyes to swell shut. A doctor later attributed his condition to “an unknown chemical exposure,” according to a complaint he submitted to Labor & Industries. SpaceX also received more than two dozen other internal complaints from workers who reported headaches, eye irritation and allergic reactions. Altshuler’s complaint said that he was concerned the chemicals caused two women in the customer support office to have miscarriages and another man to have a liver transplant. InvestigateWest spoke with several former workers who confirmed that at least one woman miscarried. The man who allegedly had a liver transplant could not be reached for this story.

This is pretty scary. Who knows what other health problems employees have are related to this issue. And SpaceX won’t comment or share what chemicals were involved? Horrible.
by maple3142 | 2026-01-11 04:31:14+00:00
I think the problem is simply that css is too restricted that you can style a fixed piece of html in any way you want. In practice, achieving some desired layout require changing the html structure. The missing layer would be something that can change the structure of html like js or xslt. In modern frontend development you already have data defined in some json, and html + css combined together is the presentation layer that can't really be separated.