MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seec | 2026-01-11 19:18:36+00:00
It has gotten a bit cheaper, a lot easier and somewhat better lately.
But I agree that it does not make that much sense because you end up with a product that has many flaws and is a bit annoying to use.

The main factor is being able to sell the iMac for that relatively high price. I can't figure out why they are still so expensive because most of the early 5K models are kind of useless nowadays (on low end version, the compute just cannot cope with modern media/files at such a resolution). But maybe it's people converting them to display driving the market...
by tombert | 2026-01-11 19:18:54+00:00
Well, no, I think that the claim is that having nuclear power plants is better than not having them. If they're not sucking energy off the grid (like what is happening right now), that at least will help avoid regular people like us having to pay the increased prices and indirectly subsidizing them.

And nuclear energy is clean (from a climate change perspective at least), and so if they're going to keep spending huge amounts of energy AI training anyway, it's probably better to do that in a way that isn't going to keep boiling the planet.

Also, if there is any kind of excess energy then it can be fed back into the grid, meaning that grid power can be fed from something relatively clean compared to something dirty (like coal).

I'm not entirely sure how this relates to the party thing. I'm saying that sometimes something selfish in a capitalistic system can occasionally still be a net good. I didn't think that was controversial. I'm not saying we give Zuckerberg a trophy or anything.
by jumski | 2026-01-11 19:19:10+00:00
I'm building a Postgres-native workflow engine using pgmq for queues and TypeScript worker. Workflows compile to definitions (SQL rows), letting Postgres orchestrate the DAG as state machines. The TypeScript DSL is type-safe with inferred inputs/outputs across dependencies with full autocomplete.

Declarative and functional in nature. Just a manifest wiring functions into a DAG and a Postgres SQL functions that manage the graph of state machines. Simple in principle and very opinionated.

Replaces 240 lines of manual pg_cron -> pgmq -> Supabase Edge Function boilerplate with 20 lines of explicit DAG definitions. Currently Supabase-only (leverages their primitives) but planning to make it agnostic for vanilla Postgres setups.

Live demo / explanation here: https://demo.pgflow.dev
by mrstackdump | 2026-01-11 19:19:10+00:00
I don't think tinkering is the dominant culture behind tech anymore, but it's definitely operating at a higher scale than ever before. There's more OSS projects than ever, and there are tons of niche areas with entire communities. Examples could include: LoRa radios (or LoRA adaptors!), 3d printing, FPGA hacking, new games for retro hardware...
by ribice | 2026-01-11 19:19:13+00:00
Multiple things, but among many:

- A sports club management platform, and a way for end-users to sign up for sports events, lessons etc.: https://mojtim.ba/en/

- Given the raise of AI, I'm a hiking guide and would like to have that as an alternative, an outdoor activity agency - https://boa.ba (still very WIP)
by nlkl | 2026-01-11 19:19:20+00:00
I see this argument again and again, but I would imagine most people reading this have separate work and home computers?

For the average home user I can see gaming - while hugely improved in recent years - could still be a showstopper.

But surely for the average user Libreoffice or online versions of MS Office will suffice? Surely there cannot be _that_ many average PC users that need the full power of Photoshop?

Of course I expect the average HN user to be quite different from the average user in general, but I really do think that many casual users get no advantages from Windows apart from familiarity.
by arbayi | 2026-01-11 19:19:24+00:00
Working on WordPecker, trying to create something like a personalized Duolingo but for vocabulary you actually encounter.

Started when I was struggling to read books in English. Pushed an open source version back then (https://github.com/baturyilmaz/wordpecker-app), later added more features, and now working on a mobile app.

Recently started testing alpha version, fixing bugs and introducing new features right now (https://alpha.wordpeckerapp.com/).

My end goal is to build: an AI language learning companion that knows what you read, listen, and watch, knows you as a friend (real life, who you are), then helps you improve using that context. If you're B1 at language, it creates a personalized path to get you to B2, then C1, and so forth using your context.

https://wordpeckerapp.com/
by aftbit | 2026-01-11 19:19:30+00:00
I'd say the opposite - any fibre in a wall should probably be single-mode fibre (SMF), simply for future proofing. Single mode optics aren't much more expensive and single mode fibre hasn't changed nearly as many times as multi-mode. You can run 25G over the same SMF that once ran 1G - not so with MMF.
by AuthAuth | 2026-01-11 19:19:54+00:00
There are certain domains where we can accept a high degree of mistakes and health is not one of them. People are reacting they way they are because its obvious that LLMs are currently not reliable enough to be trusted to distrubute health advice. To me it doesnt matter that ChatGPT health sometimes gives good advice or some people _feel_ like it helped them. I'm not sure I even trust people when they say that given how much the LLM just affirms whatever they tell it.
by jefftk | 2026-01-11 19:20:18+00:00
Why do you think there's was an implicit agreement that documentation was only intended for humans? I've written a lot of documentation, much of it open source, and I'm generally very excited that it has proved additionally useful via LLMs. If you had asked me in 2010 whether that was something I intended in writing docs I'm pretty sure I would have said something like "that's science fiction, but sure".
by mhpro15 | 2026-01-11 19:21:24+00:00
Location: Toronto, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Angular, React, Next.js, TypeScript/JS, Tailwind, Node.js, Python, Java, PostgreSQL, Supabase, Mongodb, Stripe, LangChain, LangGraph

Resume: https://manhhung.app/resume.pdf

Email: me [at] manhhung [dot] app

Website: https://manhhung.app/

I'am a fullstack web dev with 3 years exp. I do anything from web design, static website, landing page to applications with heavy backend, chat bot, rag etc. I like to build and have multiple side projects with 3-400 users not a big number but I enjoy it. Looking for freelance projects and fulltime position where I can learn and grow.
by buran77 | 2026-01-11 19:21:37+00:00
> They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows.

The two topics are orthogonal. GP talks about "local computing" vs. "black box in the cloud", the difference between running it vs. using it. You're talking about various options to run locally, the difference between running it this way or that way.

Linux or Windows users probably understand basic computing concepts like files and a file system structure, processes, basic networking. Many modern phone "app" users just know what the app and device shows them, and that's not much. Every bit of useful knowledge is hidden and abstracted away from the user. They get nothing beyond what service the provider wants them to consume.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-11 19:22:20+00:00
It dual boots Windows 11 and Fedora, and I’ve played with other distros in the past. They have minor edges over each other in various ways but none offer a major concrete advantage over the others in any category (except harassment/junkware, which any distro has a major upper hand over Windows 11 in, but Windows 10 accomplishes that almost as well).

Either there’s simply a hard limit on how good this hardware can be in terms of thermals and battery life or neither Lenovo’s tuning of Windows nor any Linux distro has gone far enough in properly leveraging power management and the like.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-11 19:22:30+00:00
> But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps

For people who are trying to get their work done now, in the present, this doesn’t change anything. We all know that Linux could technically run the same productivity apps and games if every company put enough investment money toward it. However even some of the apps I use which had a Linux version have announced that they’re sunsetting Linux compatibility due to low demand.

For all of the people whose work lives inside of text editors, web browsers, and terminals switching to Linux is easy. I think these threads become biased toward people who fit that description who don’t understand why everyone can’t just switch over.

> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather:

That feels like a strawman argument. Most people don’t choose their OS on ideological grounds. The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it. All of these calls to make OS choice about ideological wars isn’t convincing or even relevant to people who haven’t already switched to Linux.
by conradev | 2026-01-11 19:23:15+00:00
Meta's nuclear intention is a perfect example of how tech is willing to pay far more for energy than other customers

I believe their plan is to convert that energy into revenue at a rate that exceeds the amortized cost of generating the energy. It's not a social good project even though you interpret the cost outlay as such?

Diablo Canyon in particular is big (https://www.pge.com/en/newsroom/currents/energy-savings/diab...). It might be too big for their balance sheet. I imagine they picked the most economical sites to expand?
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-11 19:23:18+00:00
I also ran into https://github.com/philschmid/mcp-cli this morning, which similarly makes a cli out of MCPs. I had been working a little on my own, but here we are!

I see this as a very viable path to "code mode", to having ai write code instead of directly invoking tools. Having the AI write down is work allows nice refinement over time, iteration, in a way that it just calling all the tools directly doesnt yield up.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399204
by kmeisthax | 2026-01-11 19:23:32+00:00
Apple nearly killed Tumblr over accidental third-party CSAM. Them not doing shit about Twitter[0] is complicity in my book.

As for the political content of this article, I would argue that Trump is a lot less powerful than John Gruber thinks. Certainly, Big Tech knew how to shut him up when he was doing an actual self-coup. What changed between Trump I and II is that the liberal establishment saw this act and realized they'd let Big Tech get away with murder. Antitrust is Big Tech's existential threat, and that's a power Trump absolutely does wield.

Of course, Trump is not the only person wielding this power. The EU, Japan, and other countries are passing laws to strip Apple of their power to control apps. So they need Trump to use US trade policy - the biggest lever we have[1] - to beat the EU into compliance with Apple's rules.

There's an additional wrinkle in this story, though. Musk isn't actually favored by Trump anymore. He was a Trotsky - useful to the Trump regime's ascendance to power but not necessary now that it's in place. I don't think Trump is actually defending Twitter from Apple's actions so much as this has always been the limit of Apple's power.

Going back to Tumblr, there's a reason Apple went after them. They were small, and easy to bully. For all Apple's grandstanding about "privacy is a human right", the only thing they did to stop, say, Facebook[0] was take away IDFAs. Facebook has blatantly violated Apple's guidelines time and time again, up to and including shipping ad tracking VPNs using Enterprise signing certs, which is extremely forbidden by Apple policy. If you or me did this, we'd be so blacklisted from writing iOS code we wouldn't even be able to open Swift Playgrounds on an iPad. And all this happened before Trump II figured out how to threaten the economy into compliance.

Twitter has shrunk from what they were pre-Musk, but they're still big enough that they can pay the third world to tell Americans why America should kill people who live in the third world. An iPhone that can't Tweet is materially worse, so Apple is going to let Twitter get away with murder (or, more specifically, trafficking CSAM). If you're big enough, the laws do not apply.

[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.

[1] This is literally the stick we used to copypaste DMCA 1201 into the local law of basically every country, over the objections of everyone including Americans!
by ossa-ma | 2026-01-11 19:23:39+00:00
Long read but worth it.

a16z paved the path for a large chunk of the industry even if engineers don't like to admit it.

Even something like this would have been impossible to realise unless you had an engineering background and were hands-on:

> Ben didn’t think Hadoop was going to be the winning architecture. It was notoriously difficult to program and manage, and Ben thought it was poorly suited for the future: every step in a MapReduce computation wrote intermediate results to disk, which made it painfully slow for iterative workloads like machine learning.
by epistasis | 2026-01-11 19:24:35+00:00
> The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.

That is not at all what I have seen, the costs tend to be from absolutely massive infrastructure needed to last a long time in harsh conditions that are difficult to repair.

Those seem more like fundamental engineering requirements.

Across four different regulatory structures: France, Finland, the UK, and the US, modern nuclear has proven to be excessively expensive and require massive amounts of high skilled labor. In the past century, high skilled labor was cheaper, but these days we need to pay welders and other construction workers higher wages because they have high productivity alternative jobs that pay better than in 1970.

Those high interest payments for 10+ years are also because EPC promises to build the design within 5-7 years then takes 2-3x the time. At Vogtle the fuckups both on design meant that many plans were "unconstructable" and then construction proceeded anyway with whatever they could wing together then they had to go back and make sure that whatever the bell was built still met the design.
by mystifyingpoi | 2026-01-11 19:24:43+00:00
> I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises

Then Linux is not for you at this point. I don't mean to discourage you - for me, Reaper works, Scarlett works, ffmpeg works etc. But there are quirks. Reaper has horrible scaling on 4k screen, which I believe can be resolved by forcing UI scaling, but this requires change every time I switch from laptop to external monitor, so I just live with tiny buttons. Scarlett works, but requires JACK, and I never got it working properly with Pulse/Pipewire (outputs get duplicated sometimes), also control software doesn't exist, aside from one opensource reimplementation, which works but looks horrible.

If you don't have time, just don't.
by n_u | 2026-01-11 19:24:53+00:00
> Our agreement with TerraPower will provide funding that supports the development of two new Natrium® units capable of generating up to 690 MW of firm power with delivery as early as 2032.

> Our partnership with Oklo helps advance the development of entirely new nuclear energy in Pike County, Ohio. This advanced nuclear technology campus — which may come online as early as 2030 — is poised to add up to 1.2 GW of clean baseload power directly into the PJM market and support our operations in the region.

It seems like they are definitely building a new plant in Ohio. I'm not sure exactly what is happening with TerraPower but it seems like an expansion rather than "purchasing power from existing nuke plants".

Perhaps I'm misreading it though.
by shimman | 2026-01-11 19:25:08+00:00
I'm glad that individuals with no democratic control are allowed to declare large swaths of society to suffering because, maybe, in the future things might get better.

FWIW, it took nearly 150 years for commoners to benefit from the industrial revolution. The idea that I must suffer and my children must suffer and their children must suffer so some future plutocrat can get a fatter nut is pathetic.
by jesse__ | 2026-01-11 19:25:12+00:00
> The core idea is that if a model’s weights or training artifacts could enable catastrophic harm, you should treat them like top-tier secrets and secure them accordingly.

My read here is that you're implying that if an attacker has access to, for example, weight data, they can invariably find a way to exploit it.

If that's a correct assumption, I think you're playing an unwinnable game, since attackers always have indirect access through inference of the model. It feels like locking down weights/training data/etc is the ai version of security through obfuscation.

Just my 2c, for what it's worth
by jtwaleson | 2026-01-11 19:25:21+00:00
I've created a programming language and game for (my) kids called Stacky Bird. You learn Stack Based programming with Flappy Bird. Inspired by my old HP calculators, the game 2048 and Flappy Bird. In levels you earn a new instruction and at the end you have a complete instruction set, and can solve complicated puzzles. With new instructions you can even go back and solve previous levels more elegantly.

It's not mobile friendly yet, but maybe that'll be a next weekend project. At least you can view a video of a level on mobile.

My kids are loving it.

https://game.stackybird.com/ and the source https://github.com/jtwaleson/stacky-bird
by jarofgreen | 2026-01-11 19:25:21+00:00
2 projects around virtual tech events:

Open Tech Calendar, listing virtual tech events that include community participation: https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/

A listings site for virtually attending FOSDEM. The live streaming is great but the official site only lists sessions in the local Brussels time zone. You can choose your time zone here: https://virtuallyattend.teacaketech.scot/fosdem/2026/
by Aurornis | 2026-01-11 19:25:37+00:00
> I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering

Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.

Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.

The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.
Show HN: Isolated benchmarks to avoid optimization pollution (Node.js)
by Llorx | 2026-01-11 19:25:50+00:00
I've always used benchmark.js for my benchmark tests, but I noticed that changing the tests order also changed the performance outcome. They were getting polluted between them somehow. V8 optimizations/deoptimizations maybe? I decided to take advantage of forking to do tests in completely separated processes with their own V8 instances, memory and so on, to avoid present and future optimization/deoptimization pollution.

Is my main benchmark library now (obviously), although not because "is mine", but because of the peace of mind. I've suffered the pollution one time and with this I avoid the paranoia in my head each time I do a benchmark: "will this maybe be polluted? let's reorder". And AI's help a lot to do some quick benchmarks without overthinking, like this example prompt:

Add a Buffer vs DataView benchmark using iso-bench. Read the npmjs iso-bench documentation including the Notes section.

If you are paranoid like me, well, here you have this tool.

GitHub: https://github.com/Llorx/iso-bench
by yxhuvud | 2026-01-11 19:25:55+00:00
It is a known and fairly common dual booting people gets hit with in that windows update rewrite the dual booting setup, it is possible that the author misunderstood what had happened and that it could have been fixed by just fixing the boot setup.

That should of course not be necessary, but it could have saved a few hours of setup if that was the case.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-11 19:26:06+00:00
After reading through all press releases I still haven't seen any details on any money changing hands?

The previous ones from Google and Amazon at least specified that it was based on PPAs. Where all they did was bind themselves to buy X amount of power at Y cost if the company could deliver.

Taking a step back I have an incredibly hard time seeing how new built nuclear power will cope with renewables fundamentally reshaping our grids.

We're seeing the unraveling of the grid monopoly infront of our eyes [1] and renewables are set to completely crash all "baseload" markets. [2] Likely forcing them to become stranded assets.

[1]: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...

[2]: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Wha...
by nosianu | 2026-01-11 19:26:22+00:00
> compliance and certification

You can say the same for cars, houses, appliances, medical devices, elevators, stairs, disabled access, etc etc.

So, what exactly is your point? Yes, everything would be "much cheaper" if nobody had to pay as much attention to most details any more. Everything would also be much much more expensive for everybody else and longer term, or not work at all or reliably or safely.
by throw-qqqqq | 2026-01-11 19:26:36+00:00
> Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome?

As a Linux user forced to run Windows at work, I only see issues with Windows ;)

> I want to switch but I just don't feel confident

Live distros make it very easy to dip your toes and try, without committing to anything.

IMO Linux has much better UI options because there are so many choices and freedom.

You can likely find something that looks/works EXACTLY like you’ve always dreamed of - but maybe you have to try a few options to find it.
by vitaly-pavlenko | 2026-01-11 19:26:41+00:00
Working on https://chessnawk.vercel.app/ – a set of auto-grading tasks for middle school students learning programming.

Comes with Robot, Turtle, HTML/CSS (pixel diff tasks) and a gradual introduction into programming concepts. Currently on JS, literally right now GPT-5.2 helps me adding Python.

I've integrated a simplified clone of Replicube. I hope to integrate ideas from Human Resource Machine and Turing Complete later this year.

I bear heritage of Eastern Bloc-typa math/programming olympiads, combined with front-end/product skills. So I kinda owe to ship this thing to community of fellow secondary school CS teachers.

Surprisingly, nothing comes closer in terms of depth and usability in the classroom for ordinary 12yo kids.

I test this thing 5 times a week in my classroom and I constantly polish it at night. 100% vibe-coding.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-01-11 19:26:47+00:00
You're just saying "negative stereotyping of others based on their nationality (or ethnicity, or race)" with more words.

And yes, it is factually incorrect to say "the commenters on this platform live in a country that views suffering in pain from incurable disease as a “god intended way", because:

1. A country is not a creature and thus cannot have views, and

2. The views of people in the USA are diverse, not unanimous, and include both the view you cited, and the exact opposite view, just like the views of people in every other country.