MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Terr_ | 2026-01-19 07:42:32+00:00
The craziness comes from assuming that the mere possibility of a highly individual and particularized conflict immediately voids one side forever.

Look, the Federal government could also grant a letter of Marque and Reprisal to a convicted murderer on death row. It's unlikely, but they could.

Does it follow that states can't operate prisons anymore, only the federal government? Hell no!
by yetihehe | 2026-01-19 07:43:40+00:00
> They have more time that they are willing to waste on propaganda than you

Yes, that's why I need others to help. There are actually less of them (bots) than us. There is one pretty strange "tiktok-like" site, that has the worst kind of people and memes out there showing up regularly, something like 4chan but for images, but somehow most trolls (there are trolls from many different groups operating there) still can't hold on and every such trolling post is pretty fast met with a big wave of downvotes and counter-comments.

> The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them

The owners of that site can't manage such a big firehose of hate and most users say that they are racist degenerates (and they say they don't care if you are black or white racist, if you are racist they like you).

> The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.

They DO care and a lot of users here also care. Every stupid comment that I've seen could be from troll was very quickly downvoted and counter-commented. We didn't see a lot of them, because they are deleted pretty fast and often and trolls just can't get easy foothold here.
by klez | 2026-01-19 07:43:43+00:00
But they're not going after people who use the mod. They're going after someone who's profiting off of their IP. Someone else said upthread that CDPR doesn't go after people who make free mods (or donationware) so it's clear they don't have a problem with mods per se.

I'm not saying I agree with their stance, but we're talking about different matters entirely.
by pmontra | 2026-01-19 07:43:45+00:00
I disagree on that. I think that the main value of this kind of tools is "no installation required".

There are already free PDF editors that can be downloaded and installed once forever. What I used most is Libreoffice Draw: it imports a PDF, edit it as if it were a file in its own format, export as PDF again. It's not the only choice. Firefox has had a vanilla PDF editor since last year: download a PDF or drag one inside the browser window, edit it, save it. It's enough to add a PNG of my signature and fill out forms.
by JohnLeitch | 2026-01-19 07:45:03+00:00
Writing software that works containerized isn't that bad. A lot of the time, ensuring cross platform support for Linux is enough. And docker is pretty easy to use. Images can be spun up easily, and the orchestration of compose is simple but quite powerful. I'd argue that in some cases, it can speed up development by offering a standardized environment that can be brought up with a few commands.

Kubernetes, on the other hand, seems to bog everything down. It's quite capable and works well once it's going, but getting there is an endeavor, and any problem is buried under mountains of templatized YAML.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-19 07:45:43+00:00
Linux distros for Netbooks, Chromebooks, Android and Cloud VMs, prove the point of how OEM driven Linux distro experience would look like.

Just like with CP/M, MS-DOS, UNIX, and any other OEM driven platform, everyone wants to make differentiation part of their story.

Welcome to Asus Linux, Dell Linux, Microsoft Linux, HP Linux,....
by bkolobara | 2026-01-19 07:46:04+00:00
There is a lot of research on how words/language influences what we think, and even what we can observe, like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors.

I have a suspicion that extensive use of LLMs can result in damage to your brain. That's why we are seeing so many mental health issues surfacing up, and we are getting a bunch of blog posts about "an agentic coding psychosis".

It could be that llms go from bicycles for the brain to smoking for the brain, once we figure out the long term effects of it.
by nnevatie | 2026-01-19 07:48:48+00:00
I found this a weird article.

If you wish to see some speedups using AVX512, without limiting yourself to C or C++, you might want to try ISPC (https://ispc.github.io/index.html).

You'll get sane aliasing rules from the perspective of performance, multi-target binaries with dynamic dispatching and a lot more control over the code generated.
by yetihehe | 2026-01-19 07:49:07+00:00
Hard right wingers are a small minority. There are also people that can change their opinion. If you don't engage with hard right wingers, a lot of people won't see ant counter-arguments and will be convinced that hard-right way is the majority view, is the right way, and will flock to that way of thinking. Engaging with right wingers on public forum is necessary, so that their voice is not the only one heard.
by vanviegen | 2026-01-19 07:49:44+00:00
The problem is that it's a zero-sum game for a large part. People are hopefully not going to buy more medecine because of pharmacy ads. So the excessive spend on ads is driving up costs for everybody, and causing insane profits for a handful of companies.

I have no solution to offer though. Just thinking out loud... what effects would a limit on advertisement budgets relative to total expenditures have? That would force companies to spend their money mostly on actually creating value for the customer, instead of just selling the hell out of a mediocre offering.. ?
by krzysztofc | 2026-01-19 07:50:45+00:00
I recently shared this on another reddit and it got 500 upvotes so I thought I’d share it here as well, hoping it helps more people.

Every time I launch a new product, I go through the same annoying routine: Googling “SaaS directories,” digging up 5-year-old blog posts, and piecing together a messy spreadsheet of where to submit. It’s frustrating and time-consuming.

For those who don’t know launch directories are websites where new products and startups get listed and showcased to an audience actively looking for new tools and solutions. They’re like curated marketplaces or hubs for discovery, not just random link dumps.

It’s annoying to find a good list, so I finally sat down and built a proper list of launch directories: sites like Product Hunt, BetaList, StartupBase, etc. Ended up with 82 legit ones.

I also added a way to sort them by DR (Domain Rating) basically a metric (from tools like Ahrefs) that estimates how strong a website’s backlink profile is. Higher DR usually means the site has more authority and might pass more SEO value or get more organic traffic.

I turned it into a simple site: launchdirectories.com

No fluff, no paywall, no signups just the list I wish I had every time I launch something.

Thought it might help others here too.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-19 07:51:08+00:00
> let the compilers know that the float* are aligned

Reminded me of way back before OpenGL 2.0, and I was trying to get Vertex Buffer Objects working in my Delphi program using my NVIDIA graphics card. However it kept crashing occasionally, and I just couldn't figure out why.

I've forgotten a lot of the details, but either the exception message didn't make sense or I didn't understand it.

Anyway, after bashing my head for a while I had an epiphany of sorts. NVIDIA liked speed, vertices had to be manipulated before uploading to the GPU, maybe the driver used aligned SIMD instructions and relied on the default alignment of the C memory allocator?

In Delphi the default memory allocator at the time only did 4 byte aligned allocations, and so I searched and found that Microsoft's malloc indeed was default aligned to 16 bytes. However the OpenGL standard and VBO extension didn't say anything about alignment...

Manually aligned the buffers and voila, the crashes stopped. Good times.
by pwatsonwailes | 2026-01-19 07:51:57+00:00
Blindsight by Peter Watts

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

Startide Rising by David Brin

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

Semiosis by Sue Burke

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Translation State by Ann Leckie

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

This is what sprang to mind as answering that sort of brief off the top of my head.
by uecker | 2026-01-19 07:52:55+00:00
The truth is that you need to set the decline of CO2 emissions to the progress of the transition. If you do this, you will see that emissions decrease accordingly to the rollout of renewables. If Germany had decided to build out nuclear, it would also not have low emissions the next day, but only decades later depending on how much coal is replaced by new nuclear. This not difficult to understand. In fact, it is very obvious.
by viraptor | 2026-01-19 07:54:44+00:00
I like the write-up of this idea. It's well presented. But I'd change one aspect: "We could leave author: 'dril' in the JSON but this is unnecessary too." - kind of. What the post lacks is the record of the identity at the time. What the user's username and the avatar was at the time can change the meaning of the post entirely. To really preserve the message, you need to reference what the displayed identity was used to post it - not just the account id.

There's a number of famous accounts that do it continuously. For example popehat today is "Fucking Bitch Hat" but will change to something else soon that may be related to the current events.
by asacrowflies | 2026-01-19 07:54:58+00:00
If you think that was bad you have no clue what is coming. If this type of lawless behavior is normalized so be it. Enemies of the Constitution are not protected by it.

And you have no idea who me and the ones like me are. We are not "left wing" or "liberal" as the two things you brought up would imply . You will be purged like the communists. Losing the right to vote and hold firearms permanently.and even your family and associates monitored for generations to make sure this treason is fully stamped out.
Show HN: Document Copy Planner – plan safe offline copies of your documents
by fenrirx22 | 2026-01-19 07:55:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small browser tool called Document Copy Planner to help people figure out how many copies of their important documents to keep, in what format, and where, all fully offline.

Key features:

Supports passports, IDs, contracts, receipts, tickets, and more

Generates a primary, backup, and emergency copy plan

Downloadable PDF or printable checklist

Runs entirely in the browser — no accounts, no uploads, no tracking

The motivation: most people store sensitive documents in cloud apps or email, which increases exposure risk. This tool gives a simple, actionable plan to keep copies safe without relying on servers or third parties.

You can try it here: proofpocket.com/doc-copy-planner

I’m curious to hear feedback from the HN community:

Does this approach make sense for offline document planning?

Anything I could improve in the workflow or UX?

Any edge cases I’m missing for security or usability?

Thanks for checking it out!
by moonshotideas | 2026-01-19 07:56:13+00:00
I think you did an amazing job of converting this into something that people can easily understand and use within their codebase - so props on that. It however would be the the right thing to give the proper credit to the source of idea - at least to thank them for their work and effort given this more of less is a direct copy of what they published https://www.intent-systems.com/ (not me and it’s something I use as well, but proper thing to do is give credit where credit is due)
by p_v_doom | 2026-01-19 07:56:35+00:00
> the real cause of nobody being able to afford anything is rent extractors.

Employers/Owners are essentially rent extractors to workers. Its even worse IMO. They buy some of your time to do stuff for them. They also lend you the tools and materials to do your job. And they own whatever you produce.
If you are selling your one hour for 100 bucks to produce ten linen coats worth 100 bucks each, you get a 100, everything else - minus costs of materials and your 100 the employer gets to keep as free rent.
by Torwald | 2026-01-19 07:57:18+00:00
Good work! I do like that the tools are task centric and that means I don"t have to handle all sorts of things, I just quickly learn the three to four tools that I really need (as a person working in the real world). #pareto

Now, privacy, I love it! That "normal people" just store stuff in the cloud "it's on my phone", yeah ok, is one thing. It's another topic…

But since Gmail came out and was all the rage in nerd circles, I am wondering why the people who understand the tech the most, are so eager to hand over their data to Big Tech and some other very questionable entities.

Here's the thing in terms of money.

If your app does put my data into the cloud, I am not going to use it. At all. Ever.

If your app blesses me with a beautifully designed native GUI (or UI), instead of presenting itself in Electron slop to me, then I am already almost sold. Literally. I start to consider forking over some cash to you, dear developer of that beautifully designed, privacy respecting app.

I do use my browser to browse the web. I am not interested in a "secondary OS architecture" where I have to play sys admin for a range of "apps" aka plugins. Neither Chrome plugins (I don't use Chromium based stuff.) nor Wordpress plugins, nor Emacs "modes" are going to replace well done native programs.

You don't care enough about your project to provide a native program? Tells me, I shouldn't care either. Good buy.

For a high school student who survives on an allowance, paying $39 for an app may be a bit much, but not for an adult with an income.

Curation. A good maintained app store does all the "sys admin" stuff for me. No viruses, no weird installation procedures and so on.

This is why that works. Hassle-free. Locally-run, native app, means beauty and privacy.

I would pay for that. Happily. In fact, I have done so many times. The success of a plethora of developers with paid-for apps in the stores proves I am not the only one.

And, btw, this is the distribution/commerce model that RMS always favoured. I quote RMS:

> Since “free” refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between
selling copies and free software. In fact, the freedom to sell copies is crucial: collections of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the community, and selling them is an important way to raise funds for free software development. Therefore, a program that people are not free to include on these collections is not free software.

This is basically the app-store model.

And I would pay, for the above stated reasons and I would be inclined to gulp an even higher price if the package has the "OSS inside" sticker on it. For personal reasons, right?

Then there is one last thing. I don't want to have to create an account somewhere just to test-drive your app. Or to use it fully, later on.

Privacy means, I don't have to be online in order to use the software. The end.
by safety1st | 2026-01-19 07:57:26+00:00
I think you missed my point.

If you "quiet quit" you're still working for someone you hate. They still own you.

Instead, you could ACTUAL QUIT and start a business. Then you work for yourself, who you hopefully don't hate as much, and you have the power to define how things are done. So if you think developers shouldn't be replaced by LLMs or whatever, then you can... not do that. I have zero doubt in my mind that that will be a niche somewhere in the global economy for many years to come.

Also you might make a lot of money. Make enough and you're basically free from all these assholes. It doesn't actually take a ton of money when you own 100%. You pretty quickly get to a point where you can start telling off any wanker you want to, but you don't even feel the need, you are your own boss, so you just walk away from them and deal with whoever you want to deal with instead.

Trust me, speaking from experience, this is 1,000,000% better than "quiet quitting" which is pretty much remaining a corporate serf, just the most useless and pussy one in somebody else's room. Of course it's harder, most people who try it fail, real economics, real laws and real people will call you out pretty fast if you don't do things that people other than you think are valuable!
by mettamage | 2026-01-19 07:57:59+00:00
> We're busy building real software

My response is perhaps a bit raw, but so is the quote above.

Stop with the gate keeping. I've studied CS to understand coding, not to have some sort of pride to build "real software". Knowledge is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.

There are enough developers whose whole job it is to edit one button per week and not much more. And yes, there are also enough developers that actually apply their CS skills.

> but 99% of software engineers aren't working on toys in the first place

Go outside of your bubble. It's way more nuanced than that.
Ask HN: Does Hacker News pull posts about Greenland from the front page?
by subjektivation | 2026-01-19 07:58:26+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46669025

This post was on the front-page for about 1-2 hours before disappearing from it. It had gained about 300 points in that time which is way more than most posts on hacker news that stay on the front-page for 1-2 days. Even if you go to page 2 or 3, 4 or 5, this post cannot be found!

This seems strange. Does YCombinator have any interest in this?
by Bigpet | 2026-01-19 07:59:03+00:00
I don't even care about that. My suggestion to him was earnest.
I don't have a problem with LLMs. Just with how people use them. I just don't like "slop". I see the same user-interaction problems every time.

I just don't want people to litter their heavily polished immaculately styled products that have so clearly bad user-interaction design. E2e testing and closing the loop on LLMs does seem to help here.

Though I really would prefer people click around their own product for at least 5 minutes.
by antisol | 2026-01-19 07:59:32+00:00
> I'll also create a feature request for resizing/stacking of rows.

That's the spirit! Please do file feature requests with the docks that you think might be close to what you want. A lot of foss projects are pretty receptive to feature requests.

Keep in mind that in the foss world you're not a customer - the people doing the work will be donating their free time to build a feature you're asking for, so please be nice and polite to them - the worst thing you can do on a feature request is have an entitled tone, or insinuate that their software is crap because it doesn't quite do what you want :)

Someone else suggested that adding 2 xfce panels might accomplish something pretty close to what you're after. I had a bit of a play around and agree with that. I didn't replicate your request exactly (because my panel is very different and I didn't want to break my setup too much) but depending on where your priorities lie I think you could probably get something pretty close.

Options that are similar:

a) If you really want the 'start menu' button to span both rows, use a single panel and set "row size" to e.g 48px and "number of rows" to 2. The con of this method is that the task list (list of programs) will span both rows, which is not what you have.

b) If you want to replicate your preferred setup more closely, you might not be able to have the 'start menu' button span both rows. To accomplish this I would add 2 panels of e.g 24px and put them both at the bottom of the screen. In one you'll have the task list and in another you'll have icons.

The media player controls might be an issue in xfce. I'm not sure if anything like that exists. However you definitely can have a systray icon for your media player which pops up media controls when you click on it.

There are other docks with more customisable widgets that will give you media controls like those, but I can't really make a solid recommendation for you unfortunately. The one I used to use was called cairo-dock, but I think that might be dead. Before that I used one called avant-window-navigator. There's also a couple of others that I'm aware of, e.g tint2 and wbar.

I'd be a little bit surprised if there are zero docks out there that can do what you want. The thing is you might have to try screwing around with the config for 20 different ones if you insist on replicating that layout exactly :/

HTH!
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-19 07:59:56+00:00
A lot of computer terms come from trains, I’m going to cheat and use AI:

Many modern computer terms have their roots in 19th-century railway operations, largely because early data processing and networking systems evolved alongside or out of the infrastructure created for railroads.

Terminal: Originally defined as the end point of a railway line (circa 1888), this term was adopted in 1954 to describe a device used for communicating with a computer or the point where a conductor ends in an electrical circuit.

Network: This term was first used in 1839 to describe complex, interlocking transportation systems like rivers, canals, and railways. It was later adapted for broadcasting in 1914 and for interconnected computer systems in the mid-20th century.
Punched Cards: Herman Hollerith, who developed the tabulating machine (a precursor to modern computers), was inspired by railroad tickets. Conductors used "punch photographs" to mark a passenger's physical description (hair color, nose size) on their ticket to prevent fraud. Hollerith adapted this physical encoding method for data entry.

Interlocking: In railroading, an interlocking is an arrangement of signals and appliances that prevents conflicting train movements (e.g., preventing two trains from entering the same track). This concept of hardware or software logic preventing "unsafe" states is fundamental to modern computing and circuit design.

Bus: While often associated with vehicles, the computer "bus" (a communication system that transfers data between components) shares its etymology with the "omnibus" and the conceptual "bus" lines used in telegraphy and power distribution, which were often built alongside railway right-of-ways.

Buffer: Originally a mechanical device on a railcar designed to absorb the shock of a collision, the term was adopted in computing to describe a region of memory that temporarily stores data while it is being moved from one place to another to account for differences in speed.

Semaphore: Long before they were a programming construct used to control access to shared resources, semaphores were physical mechanical signals used by railways to communicate track status to locomotive engineers.
Track & Sector: On a hard drive, "tracks" and "sectors" mirror the way physical rail tracks are laid out and divided into "blocks" or segments for traffic control.