MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nick238 | 2026-01-23 05:03:20+00:00
Spotlight search is infinitely more useful than the Windows 10+ start menu. 99% of the time I'm just using it to open an app or a recent document/download.

In Windows, if I hit [Win], type "fusion" (to open Fusion 360, an app in the "Start Menu" folder, for what that's worth nowadays), there's a 70% chance it will do a Bing search for "fusion".
by drzaiusx11 | 2026-01-23 05:05:09+00:00
There's still a ton of critical, often custom-written (read: hard to replace), corporate Windows software out there that still needs to run. If Microsoft continues their further decline of Microsoft Windows releases then a free alternative starts to look more attractive. Linux+Wine is definitely a good option today but compatibility shims add complexity and not all shops run Linux or want to.
by varun_ch | 2026-01-23 05:05:20+00:00
IIRC the animation that plays when you use ctrl+arrow keys to swap desktops is tied to the framerate so it's ridiculously slow on high refresh rate monitors.

also the passwords popup on MacOS only sometimes takes keyboard input, so if I want to insert a TOTP pin, I can't reliably use the tab key or worse the search bar to reach it.
by mrandish | 2026-01-23 05:05:21+00:00
> Far more terrifying is Big Tech having access to a closed version of the same model

Agreed. The only thing worse than everyone having access to this tech is only governments, mega corps and highly-motivated bad actors having access. They've had it a while and there's no putting the genii back in the bottle. The best thing the rest of us can do is use it widely so everyone can adapt to this being the new normal.
by georgemcbay | 2026-01-23 05:05:56+00:00
Honestly its kind of horrifying that if "Frontier" LLM usage were to become as required as some people think just to operate as a knowledge worker, someone could basically be cast out of the workforce entirely through being access-banned by a very small group of companies.

Luckily, I happen to think that eventually all of the commercial models are going to have their lunch eaten by locally run "open" LLMs which should avoid this, but I still have some concerns more on the political side than the technical side. (It isn't that hard to imagine some sort of action from the current US government that might throw a protectionist wrench into this outcome).
by mk89 | 2026-01-23 05:06:11+00:00
It's the app "stores" that encourage and push for that.

You pay less tax to them when you do subscriptions rather than one time payments, if I recall especially with Apple Store (something like 30% first year, 15% the second year of subscription).

This is why 120$ over 10 years (1$/month) is more profitable to companies than 120$ in a shot.
by Klaster_1 | 2026-01-23 05:06:41+00:00
This article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understanding. Previously, I wouldn't even know where to begin with when getting curious about something, but ChatGPT can tell you if your ideas have names, if they were explored previously, what primary sources there are. It's like a rabbit hole of exploring the world, a more interconnected one where barriers of entry to knowledge are much lower. It even made me view things I previously thought of as ultra boring in different, more approachable manner - for example, I never liked writing, school essays were a torture, and now I may even consider doing that out of my own will.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-23 05:06:48+00:00
People will still be doing about the same number of miles per year, and cars will still last a similar number of miles. So if a ride share car does 10x as many miles per year we need 1/10 the cars, but they also last 1/10 as long, so it evens out.

Sure they'll get slightly more miles out of a ride share car, but the number of miles will also go up do to dead heading and because cheaper/better transportation causes prior to use more of it.
by falkensmaize | 2026-01-23 05:06:54+00:00
“anti-ai sentiment”

No that’s a straw man, sorry. Skepticism is not the same thing as irrational rejection. It means that I don’t believe you until you’ve proven with evidence that what you’re saying is true.

The efficacy and reliability of LLMs requires proof. Ai companies are pouring extraordinary, unprecedented amounts of money into promoting the idea that their products are intelligent and trustworthy. That marketing push absolutely dwarfs the skeptical voices and that’s what makes those voices more important at the moment. If the researchers named have claims made against them that aren’t true, that should be a pretty easy thing for them to refute.
by xethos | 2026-01-23 05:06:56+00:00
For a more focused point, sticking to just one here:

> we’re tired of funding the world’s defense

Reads like "The outrageously high R&D costs of modern weapons systems are being subsidized across many customers. This must end immediately!"

What other business wants fewer customers to spread R&D across, or less revenue from fewer units sold?

Are we instead discussing how much the US spends internally on defence, then exports the largest military in the world to protect the country and her interests? Because not only is that an example of America choosing to spend her own money instead of being coerced by other nations, but the guy that just ran a snatch'n'grab on a foreign leader was enabled by that same policy. Forgive my disbelief that he'll dismantle that system any time soon.
by tartoran | 2026-01-23 05:07:20+00:00
It's not directly obvious that sitting in a certain way activates the brain more (it probably does if any balance center is activated), but sitting in better posture does have a lot of benefits from breathing better, not having muscles worn in overdrive to try to compensate and so on.

Playing chess in one leg is a curious thing to me, I think it would initially affect the player's performance but that's just a guess.
by albertsikkema | 2026-01-23 05:07:38+00:00
Figma's API returns 400 for .make files, so I dug into the binary. Turns out it's a ZIP with a custom format: Deflate for the schema chunk, Zstandard for the data, then Kiwi binary decoding. Scripts on GitHub if useful: https://github.com/albertsikkema/figma-make-extractor
by mountainriver | 2026-01-23 05:08:15+00:00
Same, Opus 4.5 is nothing short of amazing. I’m really shocked to see so many posts claiming it doesn’t work.

We write whole full scale Rust SaaS apps with few regressions.

I do novel machine learning research in about a 1/10 of the time it would have taken me.

A big thing is telling it to excessively log so it can see the execution
by throw10920 | 2026-01-23 05:08:17+00:00
Yes. If you "can't" read the security popup that very clearly tells you that this is a risky action and you should only do it if you trust the repo, then it's either a reading comprehension issue, and you should take remedial classes - or you're intentionally ignoring it, and so deeply antisocial and averse to working with other people.

Both of those things are extremely bad in any work environment and I would never hire someone displaying either of those traits.
by culebron21 | 2026-01-23 05:08:33+00:00
Android isn't any better, every new version every year, it's becoming a buggier and buggier Tamagotchi that demands attention every half an hour, and has a gazillion contradictory settings that never work. My phone, model 2023, has night mode that turns on automatically. You can turn it off for 30 minutes, or permanently. There are clocks that work independently. I wanted a better one, because this one would reset all its widgets every minute, and no app could play music or radio in the background.

So I got a newer one, from 2025. Fortunately, radio & media do work. But product managers wouldn't have been product managers without spoiling something. Somebody decided the alarm and night mode must work together in unison, and also they dropped the turn-off-for-30-min feature, and they decided to make night mode smart, that it doesn't turn on if the phone was active at the time. So, now you can get spam calls or sms make it ring loudly at night, because night mode didn't turn on, because you used the phone. Next time when you notice night mode should be on, but isn't, you turn it on. But now it's permanent -- till the end of the universe, unless you turn it off. And alarm clock won't ring, because deep in there, a "waking up alarm" box is unchecked, that should have made it work despite the night mode. Did any human actually test it work on themselves?
by snek_case | 2026-01-23 05:09:19+00:00
In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to.

What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.
by efnx | 2026-01-23 05:09:30+00:00
In zcash the wallet is what’s responsible for what is “default”. Zashi is private by default, but the optional transparency of zcash is a feature that makes zcash tenable from a regulatory standpoint.

The trusted ceremony is solved now, btw.

Also, Monero is not all that anonymous - the anonymity set is only about 11 transactions, compare that to zcash’s anonymity set of every shielded transaction ever.
by mkozlows | 2026-01-23 05:09:54+00:00
No. That use case was grafted onto it later. You can look at the original 1998 XML 1.0 spec first edition to see what people were saying at the time: https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210#sec-origin-goals

Here's the bullet point from that verbatim:

The design goals for XML are:

XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
XML shall be compatible with SGML.
It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
The XML design should be prepared quickly.
The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
XML documents shall be easy to create.
Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

Or heck, even more concisely from the abstract: "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML."

It's always talking about documents. It was a way to serve up marked-up documents that didn't depend on using the specific HTML tag vocabulary. Everything else happened to it later, and was a bad idea.
by dartharva | 2026-01-23 05:10:59+00:00
Of course it has, I doubt this is uncommon.

All my childhood I dreamed of a magic computer that could just tell me straightforward answers to non-straightforward questions like the cartoon one in Courage the Cowardly Dog. Today it's a reality; I can ask my computer any wild question and get a coherent, if not completely correct, answer.
by guiambros | 2026-01-23 05:12:30+00:00
Ha, same! On a TRS-80 Color, nonetheless. But I think I used four times, because no one else in the country had a BBS at the time (small city in Latin America).

It took a couple of years until it would catch on, and by then 1200 and 2400 bps were already the norm - thankfully!
by bdcravens | 2026-01-23 05:13:03+00:00
I've kept almost every bit of scrap PLA I've had from printing. You can melt it into silicon molds, grind it up and feed it into a pellet extruder, pass it on to those who recycle it into filament (like https://erikaprintsshop.wordpress.com/), or for the hard-core DIYers, create your own filament recycling operation. (Though more approachable commercial options are starting to come to market (https://crowdfunding.creality.com/)
by kstenerud | 2026-01-23 05:13:36+00:00
In Japanese culture the failed hero is also revered, but in a solemn rather than comedic way.

Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Kusunoki Masashige, The Standing Death of Benkei, Saigo Takamori (the last samurai), the Kamikaze pilots, even Yukio Mishima...

What's interesting is that unlike the British fatalism, Japanese failed heroes are driven by duty and honor and tradition above all (even at the cost of themselves). To an outsider they are foolishly stubborn and unwilling to accept an imperfect or changing world. But in Japan that is something to be admired.
by nilsbunger | 2026-01-23 05:14:10+00:00
The dynamics in the US are different for a reason: Car dealerships are independently owned due to laws preventing car manufacturers from directly selling cars to consumers.

This means multiple dealers (of the same car brand) compete with each other to sell you a car, thus driving their margin down. They try to make it back by selling you add-on packages and financing at the time of sale, ongoing service relationships, and handling warranty/recall issues (paid by the corporate brand).
by thorum | 2026-01-23 05:14:29+00:00
I agree that LLMs can be useful companions for thought when used correctly. I don’t agree that LLMs are good at “supplying clean verbal form” of vaguely expressed, half-formed ideas and that this results in clearer thinking.

Most of the time, the LLM’s framing of my idea is more generic and superficial than what I was actually getting at. It looks good, but when you look closer it often misses the point, on some level.

There is a real danger, to the extent you allow yourself to accept the LLM’s version of your idea, that you will lose the originality and uniqueness that made the idea interesting in the first place.

I think the struggle to frame a complex idea and the frustration that you feel when the right framing eludes you, is actually where most of the value is, and the LLM cheat code to skip past this pain is not really a good thing.
by KK7NIL | 2026-01-23 05:15:51+00:00
> Optimality is contextual. You can engineer a context that motivates suboptimal decisions in fact, though it isn’t easy.

I agree with your post but I'd just like to nitpick that this first phrase is not true, the equilibrium point is independent of what your opponent does.
I'm pretty sure you know this as you then go on to describe not a context where the equilibrium changes but where it becomes hard for humans to find the equilibrium.

So we agree, it's just a small nitpick of how you worded.
by KomoD | 2026-01-23 05:16:09+00:00
So it wasn't really the firmware but the hardware that they thought looked suspicious and the fact that you placed a black box in a hotel restaurant and walked away. Especially suspicious since WEF guests were staying there.

Thread for those who don't have an account: https://xcancel.com/s_heyneman/status/2014519007244656652
by Incipient | 2026-01-23 05:16:17+00:00
Microsoft CHANGED the goal. Cloud makes bucket loads more than consumer - it also has awesome vendor lock-in and juicy monthly fees!

MS didn't lose sight of anything. They've been after the money for a while, and they just followed the money.

I don't like what Microsoft has done, but I annoyingly admit they're doing what's in the best interest of their bank balance.
by rramadass | 2026-01-23 05:16:58+00:00
You are exactly right!

However, i would say Satya Nadella is quite different from other American CEOs (whose mantra is "greed is good") in that he comes from an Indian middle class family whose focus was on education/good-work and also being forced to take care of a son who suffered from cerebral palsy. All of these shaped his worldviews to be more empathetic of the "common man" which is reflected in his style of leadership.
by vishnugupta | 2026-01-23 05:17:44+00:00
I can somewhat relate to this in the sense that LLMs help me explore different paths of my thought process. The only way to do this earlier was to actually sit down and write it all out and carefully look for gaps. But now the fast feedback loop of LLMs speeds up this process. At times it even shows some path which I hadn't thought of. Or it firms up a direction which I thought only had vague connection.

To take one concrete example, it helped me get a well rounded picture of how British despite having such low footprint in India (at their peak there were about 150K of them) were able to colonise it with 300+ million population.
by nilsbunger | 2026-01-23 05:20:01+00:00
We recently got a tire at the dealer. My wife got a flat while she was trying to get to work. The car comes with roadside assistance, and the "easy path" was to let them tow it to the dealer.

We could've done the work to find a private shop to change the tire and redirect the tow truck there, but it takes effort, my wife gets intimidated by car stuff, and she was busy with some work meetings (which she took at the roadside).

In the end it cost us an extra $100, but probably saved us $1000 of marriage counseling :) That's ROI !
by figers | 2026-01-23 05:20:02+00:00
I did MP3s on my plex server for a while but with endless new music added to my playlists it became a hassle and Apple Music was just convenient and Shazam adding any song I hear and like is just too easy...it also plays perfectly on my Apple Watch over cellular when I go for a run, but everyone has their own use case and where they want to spend their time...
by ytch | 2026-01-23 05:21:51+00:00
The basic workflow at Gateway side is inspecting all HTTP port 80 traffic (with iptables or others), If the URL is about internet detection, reply a 301 redirect to the captive portal URL.

But the URL is too complex among different vendor:

https://captivebehavior.wballiance.com/

I don't know why, even I tracked the URLs, sometimes it still fails (OS refuse connecting to the URL?).

DHCP option 114 (RFC8908) can advertise the URL to client directly, but it is not widely supported:

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=q78sq5rv
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-23 05:22:01+00:00
The counterpoint about 'polished generic framings' is real, but I think there's a middle path: using the LLM as a sparring partner rather than an answer machine. The value isn't in accepting the first response - it's in the back-and-forth. Push back on the generic framing. Ask 'what's wrong with what you just said?' The struggle to articulate doesn't disappear; it just gets a more responsive surface to push against.
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-23 05:22:24+00:00
We've been running exactly this pattern for weeks - CLAUDE.md with project context, HANDOFF.md with session state, multiple Claude instances reading and updating the same files. No issues so far. The pattern works well for maintaining continuity across sessions. Curious if the ban was about the self-modification loop specifically, or something else in the prompt content that triggered detection. The lack of explanation makes it impossible to know what's actually off-limits.
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-23 05:23:02+00:00
The spot-check revealing a 'wrong venue and missing authors' rather than a fabricated citation is telling. Citation errors existed long before LLMs - bibtex from Google Scholar is notoriously unreliable, and copy-paste errors are universal. Using these as definitive AI markers seems like working backward from a conclusion. The underlying question is interesting (how much AI use in academic writing?), but the methodology here doesn't seem to actually answer it.
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-23 05:23:36+00:00
XML was designed for documents; JSON for data structures. The 'lost art' framing implies we forgot something valuable, but what actually happened is we stopped using a document format for data serialization. That's not forgetting - that's learning. XML is still the right choice for its original domain (markup, documents with mixed content). It was never the right choice for API payloads and config files.
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-23 05:24:26+00:00
The Charlie Brown counterpoint is interesting, but I think the distinction might be about narrative framing rather than outcomes. Charlie Brown fails repeatedly, but the narrative frames this as poignant perseverance. British failure comedy frames it as absurd cosmic joke - you're not meant to root for the character to eventually succeed, you're meant to recognize the futility. Arthur Dent is Adams's own synthesis: British everyman dropped into American-style adventure, surviving galaxy-ending events through baffled persistence rather than heroism.
by chasil | 2026-01-23 05:25:51+00:00
If you want an encrypted tunnel maintained by inetd or systemd socket activation, then stunnel is easier to use in this context than ssh.

Edit: I put stunnel on port 443 and have it connect to port 80 on my Apache webservers, because I like one way of doing TLS.

This guide has been useful for many years in cipher selection:

https://hynek.me/articles/hardening-your-web-servers-ssl-cip...
by nurettin | 2026-01-23 05:26:16+00:00
I often discuss ideas with peers that I trust to be strong critical thinkers. Putting the idea through their filters of scrutiny quickly exposes vulnerabilities that I'd have to patch on the spot, sometimes revealing weaknesses resulting from bad assumptions.

I started to use LLMs in a similar fashion. It is a different experience. Where a human would deconstruct you for fun, the LLM tries to engage positively by default. Once you tell it to say it the way it is, you get the "honestly, this may fail and here's why".

To my assessment, an LLM is better than being alone in a task and that is the value proposition.
by kalleboo | 2026-01-23 05:26:37+00:00
macOS Safari also has fun tab bugs.

If you have a window with only one tab in it, and drag that tab to another window to merge them, the window disappears and they merge... right? Nope, if you look in your Windows menu, you now have a phantom window with no tabs in it that you have to reveal and close manually.

Randomly when I go to close a tab it will say "you have 2 tabs selected, do you want to close both". I didn't even know selecting multiple tabs was a feature, so OK maybe I had held down shift while switching tabs at some point? Nope, switching tabs (to deselect any tabs) doesn't change it, it still thinks I have some phantom tab selected somewhere.

These have both been there for years.
by com2kid | 2026-01-23 05:26:56+00:00
I remember spending hours just trying to properly define the XML schema I wanted to use.

Then if there were any problems in my XML, trying to decipher horrible errors determining what I did wrong.

The docs sucked and where "enterprise grade", the examples sucked (either too complicated or too simple), and the tooling sucked.

I suspect it would be fine now days with LLMs to help, but back when it existed, XML was a huge hassle.

I once worked on a robotics project where a full 50% of the CPU was used for XML serialization and parsing. Made it hard to actually have the robot do anything. XML is violently wordy and parsing strings is expensive.