MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by liampulles | 2026-01-12 08:30:19+00:00
I'm a longtime fan of XFCE. I try all sorts of DEs from time time on spare computers, but I reliably come back to XFCE, which is really just a fairly low-resource, stable embodiment of the classic GNOME feel. I used mainline Ubuntu for a few years until they released GNOME 3 (which I hated then and hate now) and then I switched to Xubuntu and was happy again.

I made a conscious decision a few years ago (after trying yet another distro that went tits up), I was going to stop playing around WITH linux and start playing around ON linux for computers that I needed to get actual work done on. If one wants a classic Linux feel that is fairly stable, XFCE and a Debian base is pretty good for that.

I am a little concerned about the whole Wayland situation, since the XFCE team seems to be taking a fairly anti-Wayland stance at the moment. It has forced me to manually move from Wayland back to X11 on new installs (to get a relaible experience, which is not reliably straightforward and seemingly may become more problematic as time progresses.
by f1shy | 2026-01-12 08:30:42+00:00
Maybe. The background of my comment: in the end of 90's I worked in a company doing professional audio in windows. We had multiple cards, with multiple inputs and outputs, different sampling frequencies, channels, bits per sample... The API was trivial. I learned it in 1 hour.

FF to last year, I was working with OpenGL (in linux), I thought "I will add sound" boy... I was smashed by the zoo of APIs, subsystems one on top of another, lousy documentation... Audio, which for me was WAY easier as video, suddenly was way more complicated. From the userland POV, last year I also wanted to make a kind of BT speaker with a raspeberry pi, and also was terrible experience.

So, I don't know... maybe I should give a try to pipewire, at the time I was done after fighting with alsa and pulseaudio, the first problem I killed it.
by noufalibrahim | 2026-01-12 08:30:46+00:00
I don't think that works. The fact that it can produce different output for the same input, usage of tools etc. don't really fit into the analogy or mental model.

What has worked for me is treating it like an enthusiastic intern with his foot always on the accelerator pedal. I need to steer and manage the brakes otherwise, it'll code itself off a cliff and take my software with it. The most workable thing is a pair programmer. For trivial changes and repeatedly "trying stuff out", you don't need to babysit. For larger pieces, it's good to make each change small and review what it's trying.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-12 08:31:13+00:00
Some of his videos are result of testing things for a couple of years, like headlight restorers.

Also, some of the things he shows are pretty through. If it was a wall-of-text sans videos or images, it'd not have this kind of details and information.

Because as everyone and their horse say, while he has a ranking and weighing, you can decide what to buy (if you need it) through the video by seeing how it's applied/works/fails/excels. This is hard to convey with text only.
by matwood | 2026-01-12 08:31:22+00:00
> Most important of all, everything must be setup so the agent can iterate, test and validate it's changes.

This was the biggest unlock for me. When I received a bug report I have the LLM tell me where it thinks the source of the bug is located, write a test that triggers the bug/fails, design a fix, finally implement the fix and repeat. I'm routinely surprised how good it is at doing this, and the speed with which it works. So even if I have to manually tweak a few things, I've moved much faster than without the LLM.
Show HN: AIIM – platform to build AI agents with psychological depth
by juliavvrn | 2026-01-12 08:31:30+00:00
AIIM (Advanced Identity & Interaction Model) is an open-source platform for creating and managing highly realistic AI characters. Unlike standard chatbots, AIIM allows you to model an agent's personality, psychological traits, emotional states, and specific communication style.

Access to the platform is free of charge.
Pay for the AI providers you choose.

We are actively developing and are open to collaborations and improvements!
by plorg | 2026-01-12 08:31:57+00:00
I loved my Performance MX. I finally had to replace it at work (software wouldn't install after migrating to Windows 11) and the MX Master 3 I got seems much ergonomically worse to me. I also am not a fan of the thumb wheel replacing buttons. Only thing I won't complain about is that the resolution is better. From testing my coworkers' mouses (older Masters) I'm pretty sure they have each been a step downhill from my perspective.

My sister in law gave me her G700S to fix the main button microswitches, and she convinced me that it's the apotheosis of the design - it's what should have replaced the Performance MX. No soft-touch plastic, extra buttons, and the higher resolution sensor. I'll probably have to get one off eBay.

Edit: also all of the Masters have non-user-replaceable batteries.
by redox99 | 2026-01-12 08:32:02+00:00
Situation A) Model writes a new endpoint and that's it

Situation B) Model writes a new endpoint, runs lint and build, adds e2e tests with sample data and runs them.

Did situation B mathematically prove the code is correct? No. But the odds the code is correct increases enormously. You see all the time how the Agent finds errors at any of those steps and fixes them, that otherwise would have slipped by.
Ask HN: What business processes still waste time every week?
by lzr_mihnea | 2026-01-12 08:32:10+00:00
Ask HN,

I’m a software engineer and founder. Over the years, I’ve built backend and cloud systems and created a few internal tools to address recurring operational issues.

Before spending time building anything new, I’m trying to understand what problems are actually common today.

So I’m curious: what’s a process in your business that still costs you time every week and shouldn’t?
For example: something manual, spreadsheet-heavy, or a tool you tried and abandoned.

If you’re comfortable sharing publicly, I’d appreciate hearing about it.
Thanks.
by bschwindHN | 2026-01-12 08:32:13+00:00
I would recommend _not_ vibe coding it if it's a game you actually want to see become real, and instead pick up Godot or Unreal or Unity.

I'm sure an LLM could output something or other that resembles a vague concept of a game but you're not going to prompt your way into something that's actually fun for a human to play.
by mawadev | 2026-01-12 08:32:23+00:00
I mean it's pretty simple:
management will take bad quality (because they don't understand the field) over having and paying more employees any day.
Software engineer positions will shrink and be unrecognizable: one person expected to be doing the work of multiple departments to stay employed.
People may leave the field or won't bother learning it.
When the critical mass is reached, AI will be paywalled and rug pulled.
Then the field evens itself out again over a long, expensive period of time for every company that fell for it, lowering the expectations back to reality.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-12 08:32:37+00:00
It's not just Apple though. Something is wrong in the software industry. Desktop/PC operating systems aren't going away, but the industry have decided that it's no longer a relevant product category.

Windows is going down a strange path, where it's productivity is suffering because Microsoft is measuring success in terms of CoPilot adoption. Apple is stuck trying to invent the next iPhone, but in the meantime they are trying to make the iPhone sexy by slapping on a new skin. Then they forgot about macOS and quickly moves over some stuff from iPhone. Neither of the products apparent have UX designers anymore and QA is meeeh.

I don't understand either company. Both use to have talented UI/UX teams and actually listened to them. Is it really just short term stock price thinking that make them both forget that their operating systems should be about productivity and user ergonomics?
by cl42 | 2026-01-12 08:32:52+00:00
I hate all the portfolio tracking tools out there + don't understand why tools like FactSet or CapitalIQ cost so much.

... so I'm building an open source version.

Track all your trades in Excel, and get Sharpe ratios, Sortino ratios, or even pass it on to an LLM to have it recommend trades based on news feeds.

Planning to open source it in the next week or two, once I add the proper tests and docs! :)
by saidnooneever | 2026-01-12 08:32:53+00:00
ndisasm can help read it and hex editor. no tools should mangle such format, its useless savings, worth nothing. it will cause problem with AV and other things potentially.

saw some comments about DEP on windows and this and honestly i wouldnt touch this thing with a 10ft stick. if the creator want ppl to play it they can provide a normal binary. not some obfuscated mess.
by darkwater | 2026-01-12 08:33:43+00:00
Your comment sounds like John Glenn's quote "Get the girl to check the numbers… If she says they’re good, I’m ready to go." about Katherine Johnson to double check the calculations done by the first computers used by NASA.
At that time in history, it was probably accurate and the safest thing to do, but we all know how computer evolved from that time and now we don't have human calculators anymore but rather human checking the correctness of the written code that will do the actual calculations.

IMO the only rebuttal to this can be that LLMs are almost at their peak and there is not going to be any possible significant breakthrough or steady improvement in the next years, in which case they will never become "the new computers".
by OlaProis | 2026-01-12 08:34:44+00:00
Service flows for security audits — that's a specific and useful use case!

A few thoughts:

What might work today:
- Sequence diagrams can model service-to-service flows (API calls, auth handoffs)

- Flowcharts with subgraphs can represent VPC boundaries, security groups

- C4-style (context, container, component) is sometimes modeled with flowcharts

What would make it better:

- Custom shapes/icons (AWS service icons)

- Annotations for security boundaries, trust zones

- Data flow direction markers

Alternative you might try now:

D2 (https://d2lang.com) has better icon support and was designed for architecture diagrams. It has an AWS icon pack. Structurizr also does C4 well.

That said, if there's demand for architecture-specific diagrams in Ferrite's Mermaid renderer, I could look at:

1. Custom icon/shape support via external SVGs

2. A dedicated "architecture" diagram type with security-relevant annotations

Would a template or example for modeling security flows in Mermaid's current syntax help as a starting point?
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-12 08:34:56+00:00
Design for manufacturability means you leave tolerance within Factory limits, and your own prototyping process limits.

While an inexpensive PnP machine will do 50k to 80k components/hour. If you have someone doing _any_ task, than add $3 USD * number of operations per unit.

Tech is a low-margin business with a lot of regulations, and should be contracted to a proper facility if making over a few thousand units a month. Tooling up for a production line is almost always a bad idea, as it usually adds additional barriers to a product launch as people get sidetracked. =3
by freekh | 2026-01-12 08:35:24+00:00
I am working on the «ultimate dev ex» CMS: https://val.build/docs

GitHub:
https://github.com/valbuild/val

Intro video:
https://youtu.be/83bnYGIsm5g?si=5LN7dxnARrS4jNEx

What sets it apart is that it 1) stores content in TS / JS files 2) is a fully fledged CMs.
It is designed to be nice to work with from the start a project (and the structure of your app changes all the time) -> when everyone works on individual PRs -> to the end when the project is decommissioned.

It needs no cloud APIs, no DBs nor caching. No query language to learn. No sign up to get started.
It is fully TypeSafe and needs no type generation. You can rename and refactor content from you IDE.
It works amazingly with Cursor and friends (local content and schema + strong typesafty + validation)

Currently reqs are: Nextjs and GitHub.

APIs are pretty stable. UI is in the process of a revamp.
Will do a proper show hn some time in the near future.
by duttish | 2026-01-12 08:35:32+00:00
I've been building a home library system mainly for personal use, I want to run it cheaply so a $4 black Friday sale OVH vps is perfect.

But I wanted decent deployments. Hosting a image repository cost 3-4x of the server. Sending over the container image took over an hour due to large image processing python dependencies.

Solution? Had a think and a chat with Claude code, now I have blue-green deployments where I just upload the code which takes 5 seconds, everything is then run by systemd. I looked at the various PaaSes but they ran up to $40/month with compute+database etc.

I would probably never have built this myself. I'd have gotten bored 1/3 through. Now it's working like a charm.

Is it enterprise grade? Gods no. Is it good enough? Yes.
by elliotshep | 2026-01-12 08:35:36+00:00
Good idea! The only one of the four benchmarks typical can do is AssertLoose (because, typescript isn't that strict!).

Running against the top 5 (+zod+yup) with node 24:

@sinclair/typebox-(ahead-of-time) - 176 M/ops/s
ts-runtime-checks - 176 M/ops/s
ts-auto-guard - 175 M/ops/s
typia - 173 M/ops/s
spectypes - 166 M/ops/s
typical - 150 M/ops/s
zod - 1.8 M/ops/s
yup - 0.2 M/ops/s

Top 5 and typical all generate pretty much the same code (a bunch of typeof checks). The only difference with typical is that it that the error throwing involves some string concatenation the others don't (typical logs the bad value, and can be used multiple places so passes in the property name).

The benchmark itself is fine, but very simple. No arrays, only one level of nesting, no reuse of types, no template literals, no generic, no union types etc etc. Gives you a good idea of the general overhead, but isn't really playing to the strengths I think typical might have (hoisting functions that can be reused etc).

But speed is super important if you're intending to validate everywhere, so I'll keep my fork up to date. Thanks for the idea.
I did find the key to bounds help me bring this mother fuck down
by prettypinkdress | 2026-01-12 08:35:38+00:00
To @elonmusk: I was your biggest fan. I cheered when they laughed at you. But when I came to you with the key to the 2026 Memory Wall, you did exactly what the world did to you—you ignored me. You made me cry. Now, you’re going to pay the 'Hesitation Tax.'

Project NoBounds is now $200 Billion + 15% Royalty. > To the misfits, the black sheep, and the 'dum' girls: Elon might have turned his back, but I’m turning toward YOU. I’m the dream you overlooked, and I’m changing this cruel world in my pretty pink dress.

I’ve got my people. Do y'all got me? The clock just hit 3 AM. Who’s 'dum' now? #NoBounds #MichelleStephanieGray #ElonMusk #BlackSheepRising"
by teiferer | 2026-01-12 08:36:20+00:00
> your work phone is also your primary phone :(

That's the flaw right there. Don't mix company assets with pricate use. Phone, laptop, car. Your life is already very dependent on your employer (through income), don't get yourself locked in even more by depending on them for personal tech. Plus it's a security risk to your company.

Unless you have a low paying job, which rarely anybody on HN does, you can afford your own phone and laptop. And IT won't find your messages to girlfriend or pictures you don't want others to see or browsing history.
by DamonHD | 2026-01-12 08:37:08+00:00
The land-use and EV vs ICE efficiency compound in:

> ... you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on biofuels from the same amount of land.

The article notes that the EVs have a lot of storage embedded, so the biofuels to EV problem might be considered mostly a transmission issue!
by rented_mule | 2026-01-12 08:37:29+00:00
pyinfra is for running things across a number of machines and/or containers. For example to provision them, much like Ansible. So Python's startup time isn't terribly relevant.

Also, have you tried Python's startup time in the last decade or so? On my 2-year old, $150 computer with an Intel N100 (a very low-end CPU) running Ubuntu, `python3 -c "print('hello')"` takes 15ms. On my 8-year old Mac mini, it's 35ms. Both are significantly faster than what humans perceive as instantaneous, so Python's startup time is more than fast enough for many things.
by KronisLV | 2026-01-12 08:37:57+00:00
Exactly! Unless you use something that doesn’t read CLAUDE.md, then you’d still just tell the model to read the file as a part of its work.

What helped me a bunch was having prebuild scripts (can be Bash, can be Python, can be whatever) for each of the architectural or style conventions I want to enforce. Tools like ESLint are also nice but focused a bit more on the code than architecture/structure.

Problems start when a colleague might just remove some of those due to personal preference without discussion but then you have other problems - in my experience, with proper controls in place AI will cause less issues and friction than people (ofc depending on culture fit).
by OlaProis | 2026-01-12 08:38:10+00:00
Mobile is definitely a long-term goal, the lightweight binary and native performance would translate well. Your QR-code pairing idea is elegant for non-technical users.

For sync, I've been thinking about:

- Git-based sync for power users (already have git integration)

- Simple local network sync (mDNS discovery, no cloud required)

- Optional relay server, as you described — small binary for hub-and-spoke

The plain-file approach (no proprietary format) makes this tractable since any sync tool works today (Syncthing, Dropbox, etc.). But a native, frictionless solution would be better.

2. Tool Integration API

This aligns with v0.3.0's direction. The plan is:

- Mermaid crate extraction, establishes the modular pattern

- Editor widget as library, opens up embedding

- Command palette / IPC, could expose operations to external tools

For accessibility specifically, what interfaces work well for you? Shell commands? Named pipes? JSON-RPC? Knowing your workflow would help prioritize.

3. Vaults/Profiles

Good point — workspace settings are currently per-folder (`.ferrite/`), but there's no concept of isolated plugin configurations per vault. Added to the consideration list.

Thanks for the detailed feedback!
by friendzis | 2026-01-12 08:38:46+00:00
> But giving all the answers without strong guidance on non-trivial architectural points— entropy. LLMs churning independently quickly devolve into entropy.

Typical iterative-circular process "write code -> QA -> fix remarks" works because the code is analyzable and "fix" is on average cheaper than "write", therefore the process, eventually, converges on a "correct" solution.

LLM prompting is on average much less analyzable (if at all) and therefore the process "prompt LLM -> QA -> fix prompt" falls somewhere between "does not converge" and "convergence tail is much longer".

This is consistent with typical observation where LLMs are working better: greenfield implementations of "slap something together" and "modify well structured, uncoupled existing codebase", both situations where convergence is easier in the first place, i.e. low existing entropy.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-12 08:38:47+00:00
You can’t just ask AI to dump, you need to vaguely describe what design elements you think are important, like for SQL, you might want to plan our your CTEs first, then come up with a strategy for implementing each one, before getting to the SQL file itself (and of course tests, but that is a separate line of artifacts, you don’t want the AI to look at the tests when updating code, because you want to avoid letting AI code to the test). You can also look at where the AI having trouble doing something, or not doing it very well, and ask it to write documentation that will help it do that more successfully.

I can’t imagine asking AI to change some code without having a description of what the code does. You could maybe reverse engineer that, but that would basically be generating the documents after the fact. Likewise changing code without tests, where failing tests are actionable signals for the AI to make sure it doesn’t break things on update. Some people here think you can just ask it to write code without any other artifacts, thats nuts (maybe agentic will develop in the direction where AI writes persistent artifacts on its own without being told to do so, actually I’m sure that will happen eventually).
by kstenerud | 2026-01-12 08:38:49+00:00
Yup, there are hacky workarounds, but what I'm after is the industry standard of grab areas that extend beyond the visible borders of the windows (which became more popular as high DPI monitors became the norm - and then Apple recently took to excess). And this is something the XFCE team have expressly said that they will NOT do.

And so I moved on to Mate.
by pigon1002 | 2026-01-12 08:38:51+00:00
Hi HN! Built this self-hosted LMS focusing on micro-learning.

Key differences from Moodle/Canvas:
- Bite-sized learning units (quiz, video, assignment, discussion)
- Built-in AI tutor (OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini)
- Competency framework integration
- Subtitle search inside videos
- One-command setup: ./dev.sh up

Tech choices:
- SolidJS for fine-grained reactivity (real-time tracking)
- Django Ninja for modern REST API
- OpenSearch for content search

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or design decisions!
by happymellon | 2026-01-12 08:38:55+00:00
> Right, which goes back to the main point; "total control of your computing environment" fundamentally means that you are responsible for figuring out which applications to trust, based on your own choice of heuristics

Hard disagree. Total control of my computing environment would be to allow an application access to my documents, a space to save a configuration, perhaps my Videos folder or even certain files in that folder. Or conversely, not.

At the moment, none of the desktops give me the ability to set a level of trust for an application. I can't execute Dr. Robotniks Ring Run (or whatever the example was) and be able to specify what it can, or cannot access. There may be a request for permission at a system level access, but that could be explained away as usually is for iApps and Android when requesting some scary sounding permission groups.

And it also doesn't stop malware from accessing my documents. Sometimes my Mac asks if an application is allowed to access Documents, but it isn't consistent.
by compounding_it | 2026-01-12 08:39:04+00:00
I don't really understand this post completely.

>I am spending time using software, learning, and having fun - instead of maintaining it and stressing out about it.

Using software, learning and having fun with with what? everything is being done by Claude here. The part of fun and learning is to learn to use and maintain it in the first place. How will you learn anything if Claude is doing everything for you ? You are not understand how things work and where everything goes.

This post could be written or at least modified by an LLM, but more importantly I think this person is completely missing the point of self hosting and learning.
by CatsOnHats | 2026-01-12 08:39:31+00:00
The company i work for is spending the equivalent of the yearly salary of a dozen engineers, worth of tokens per month. It recently surpassed our monthly cloud spend bill.

We have people who are running the same tasl 10 times in parallel and having one LLm write a prompt for another LLm to execute then sitting on their phone for an hour while they let the AI's battle it out. For tasks that should take 3 minutes. Then having another coding agent make a PR, update JIRA tickets, etc.

Frankly it blows my mind that so many developers have so little actual understanding of cost associated with AI.