MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neptunicmess | 2026-01-21 20:45:22+00:00
Linux from Scratch is great for building a deeper understanding of how the different parts in linux systems work together at their foundation. Working through it also made me appreciate what distributions and package managers actually provide to me even more. However, i do often read people stating it helped them to "understand linux". Not sure what that means to be frank. Because you do not learn much about actually doing things with or on linux. You learn, essentially, how to knock together a linux system from the various components, the core part being, setting up a compiler (if i remember correctly, you rebuild gcc three times in the process to get an "untainted" compiler), i.e. build something like a distro pre-cursor if you will. These are great skills to have, but also very specific ones. They aren't helping you much in your day to day use of linux. I think everyone serious about linux should do LFS at least once in their career (and, contrary to some popular statements, you actually can do it quite early on, if you can read and follow a manual), just maybe don't have false expectations about what it will actually be teaching you.
by hi_hi | 2026-01-21 20:45:30+00:00
From the previous press about the aquisition:

BendingSpoon CEO: "At Bending Spoons, we acquire companies with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely, and we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together"

Vimeo CEO: "We are excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"

Words no longer appear to mean things. While this isn't a surprise, it provides another data point that there can be no trust given to leaders words. I find it sad as it simply re-inforces this behaviour and normalises it.
by veb | 2026-01-21 20:45:53+00:00
I've run into this before too, when playing single player games if I've had enough of grinding sometimes I like to pull up a memory tool, and see if I can increase the amount of wood and so on.

I never really went further but recently I thought it'd be a good time to learn how to make a basic game trainer that would work every time I opened the game but when I was trying to debug my steps, I would often be told off - leading to me having to explain how it's my friends game or similar excuses!
Tell HN: Claude helped me maintain my old open source project
by nergal | 2026-01-21 20:46:51+00:00
I'm probably a bit late to the party. But I just want to tell my short story, because I'm amazed. I have several open source project and especially one that I use every day. It's not a project with huge user-base, but there are some. Some of the user has posted issues, which I have wanted to take care of, but time, is always an issue. Debugging, trying to get into issues other users expirence while I don't, is always harder to get grip of.

So, today I fired up Claude Code, told it about my project and during 2h (including manual review of the generated code), I've fixed several issues. I even managed to get in new features I have wanted as well!

https://github.com/Lallassu/gorss is now v0.5 thanks to this.
by stevenjgarner | 2026-01-21 20:47:55+00:00
It wasn't an absence of a market. Those of us that had to manage OSX Server soon found out the software was marked by several high-profile bugs, technical debt, and a perceived decline in reliability. I migrated a large number of Macs to Ubuntu Server software. The hardware was great.

I fear the quality of macOS is deteriorating today in the same manner than befell OSX Server.

https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/apple-blasts-mac-os-x...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

https://www.letemsvetemapplem.eu/en/2024/10/19/chyby-v-macos...
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-21 20:48:04+00:00
> USA keeps getting a larger GDP you say, yet the population at large seems to be getting poorer

People in the US may be many things but poor is not one of them. The median household income is ~$85k and the median household lives somewhere pretty inexpensive. The amount of money Americans can afford to waste on things they don't need is unmatched.
by vishrajiv | 2026-01-21 20:48:06+00:00
Thank you for making it open-source (and free!) I looked into Skip before because I’d rather write native Swift than the in-between tangle of code that React Native tends to become. What prevented me from using it was the lack of case studies or apps in production. Has that changed? I looked on the homepage and couldn’t see any. Of course, I understand it might be a growing community and targeted to early adopters for now.
by reify | 2026-01-21 20:48:06+00:00
Totally agree

I worked in substace misuse for 20 years as a methadone dispenser and care coordinator.

not once, in all those years, did i see anyone who had taken or were using magic mushrooms.

In July 2005, section 21 of the Drugs Act 2005 amended Schedule 2 of the Misuse of Drugs Act to explicitly include:

“fungus (of any kind) that contains the drug psilocin or an ester of psilocin.”

Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, both psilocybin and psilocin are classified as Class A controlled substances. The same as Heroin, crack and cocaine.

They used to be class B, the same as hash and weed.

This means that any mushroom or material containing either compound is also controlled.

Possession can result in up to 7 years in prison, an unlimited fine, or both.
Supply, production, or cultivation can carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Even small-scale, non-commercial cultivation technically counts as “production” under the Act.

Even if you pick them from a field you will still feel the full force of: I AM THE LAW! piglets.
by ljm | 2026-01-21 20:48:20+00:00
Yes, but they can also do the same with a group chat on WhatsApp, and email. And, XMPP was the protocol to do this before people found money in extinguishing it.

That's probably accurate in the US with the AI tech push to 996. You know, start at 9 on Monday and finish at 5 on Sunday.
by kbolino | 2026-01-21 20:48:21+00:00
Two processes in particular have done exactly this for me: mds_stores and mediaanalysisd. On three separate Macs (all Apple Silicon), I've observed the case heating up whenever the computer is plugged in but not actively being used. Assuming Activity Monitor is more or less accurate, the culprit seems to be those two, who always have massive amounts of accumulated CPU time, but never seem to actually be using CPU when watched. I assume, given what they supposedly do, that they're also needlessly exhausting SSD write cycles, but that's harder to analyze/prove. Naturally, they are also in the untouchable area of the file system. Completely disabling Spotlight, which you can do without disabling SIP, seems to fix this problem, albeit at the cost of decreased usability.
by yread | 2026-01-21 20:48:24+00:00
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter08/g...

> the test suite for Glibc is considered critical. Do not skip it under any circumstance.

> Generally a few tests do not pass. The test failures listed below are usually safe to ignore.

I felt a bit uneasy writing something similar into my software e2e test suite, but hey if glibc can do it, why not!

> It's imperative to strictly follow these steps above unless you completely understand what you are doing. Any unexpected deviation may render the system completely unusable. YOU ARE WARNED.

Is this the Dark Souls of linux distros?
by jjj123 | 2026-01-21 20:48:36+00:00
Yes, just like that. Supporting regulation at one point in time does not undermine the point that we should not trust corporations to do the right thing without regulation.

I might trust the Anthropic of January 2026 20% more than I trust OpenAI, but I have no reason to trust the Anthropic of 2027 or 2030.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 20:48:55+00:00
> Yeah but no one uses it. I am not even sure people like using it because it was productized it pretty poorly. They invested 100 Billion dollars, which is a lot of wasted money TBH.

I mean... Duckduckgo uses bing api iirc and I use duckduckgo and many people use duckduckgo.

I also used bing once because bing used to cache websites which weren't available in wayback archive, I don't know how but It was pretty cool solution for a problem.

I hate bing too and I am kind of interested in ecosia/qwant's future as well (yes there's kagi too and good luck to kagi as well! but I am currently still staying on duckduckgo)
by sys_64738 | 2026-01-21 20:50:11+00:00
> Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.

Multiple desktops on Windows is not a nice experience for me. When you switch the desktop on one display then they ALL change for every display. I need them independent ala macOS or it is just so infuriating to use. Win11 also has big Fisher Price sized title bars now and macOS Tahoe isn't far behind. I think the GUI designers are on magic mushrooms when coming up with these designs.
by rhgraysonii | 2026-01-21 20:50:24+00:00
I thought I'd do this as a bit/experiment.

I have had trouble finishing writing my posts for months now. I would like to get some interesting writing on my blog.

Since I am on the strugglebus, I figured I would open it to anyone on the web and see what I got (and will leave it this way until someone ruins it)

edit: I am aware this is silly, its an art project that you control part of. help not ruin it
by eduction | 2026-01-21 20:50:28+00:00
No it's a very similar idea, just on workstations instead of servers. Qubes is built around "do everything in VMs" as SmartOS is "do everything in zones."

It's just a usage detail that Qubes may have a slightly higher percentage of linux containers vs smartos - at this point both are probably mostly linux containers on both OSes in terms of usage. (Qubes can also do Windows vms and they amped up support for this in the latest release, while smartOS has native zones and i believe you can do freebsd and maybe others on bhyve.)

Differences are many, including that Qubes has no concept of a "native" VM (dom0 is just a thin fedora wrapper around Xen) and that the global zone in SmartOS is significantly beefier than dom0 in Qubes, since Qubes offloads networking and usb io and bluetooth and sound to independent service qubes (VMs). And their development has been entirely separate. But they are spiritually siblings. I think it's an inspired comparison.
by camimirabal | 2026-01-21 20:50:49+00:00
The 2025 SF Ruby Conference made a statement: there’s a future in Ruby, and we’re the ones shaping it.

Enjoy the recordings!

My personal favorites are:

- Start Writing Ruby (Stop Using Classes) by the legend Dave Thomas

- Rails X by Vladimir Dementyev

- Real-time collaboration with Rails, AnyCable, and Yjs by JP Camera
by well_ackshually | 2026-01-21 20:50:54+00:00
Flutter is fine if you don't care about performance, accessibility, have no need to access native capabilities or non-fluttered widgets (ex: the Google map integration is awful) and overall just want to make an internal app.

The cost of making an excellent flutter app is about the same you'd pay making fully native apps. Except that you're always paying for Skia's costs with Flutter.

This recommends 32GB to run _everything_, so xcode, gradle, emulators, simulators, etc. Not fully surprising.
by kanbankaren | 2026-01-21 20:51:51+00:00
As someone who has been using Linux as a daily driver for 25+ years and also used linuxfromscratch.org for building some packages, I would say, don't waste you time building from scratch. There is very little utility unless you are maintaining some arcane system professionally.

Stick to RPM based systems as dnf supports transactions. The ability to look at history of package installation and rollback to a known state solves most admin issues.
by magicalist | 2026-01-21 20:51:54+00:00
> If you calculate both, wouldn't it be even faster to just always do the complex calculation? (presumably that's more precise?)

The naming does imply that, but maybe they are simple vs complex, but also they're calculating different things? Seems like a stretch though.

Also the paragraph covering that part doesn't make much sense to me:

> This felt wasteful at first. Why compute both paths? But modern CPUs are so fast at arithmetic that computing both and selecting is often faster than branch misprediction. Plus, for SGP4, most satellites take the same path anyway, so we're rarely doing truly "wasted" work.

I'm always skeptical of claims about branch misprediction penalties without actual benchmarking (branch prediction is often very good!), and it also seems potentially undermined by the next sentence that "most satellites take the same path anyway", ie easily predictable.

But I don't understand at all what it means that because most satellites take the same path, the SIMD code is rarely doing wasted work, since the masking seems to be wasting part of the work by construction? (you could maybe handwave at pipelining or speculative execution making it irrelevant or wasted regardless, but no sign of those arguments).

The library seems good and always extremely nice when people produce write ups like this, but it might just be they're out over their skis when it comes to what was actually important about their optimizations.
by wolttam | 2026-01-21 20:52:07+00:00
I'm consistently amazed at how much some individuals spend on LLMs.

I get a good amount of non-agentic use out of them, and pay literally less than $1/month for GLM-4.7 on deepinfra.

I can imagine my costs might rise to $20-ish/month if I used that model for agentic tasks... still a very far cry from the $1000-$1500 some spend.
by nine_k | 2026-01-21 20:52:22+00:00
So it's sort of a "white-dwarf maker" company. Pick a company with a steady cashflow, eject all the fluff that made it a big star, and collect the remaining energy / cash until the core cools down. The end state is a cold slab of iron, and nothing new is going to happen to the acquired business ever since, but the plentiful (if dwindling) cashflow will be collected without any obstacles.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-21 20:52:22+00:00
NB. The blog refers to (a) the "Unix purist" and (b) MacOS not being Unix. Arguably, (a) is more important, irrespective of whether (b) is true (IMO it's ambiguous)

For example, the "Unix purist" might refer to someone who identifies with the "ideals" associated with that OS, e.g., relatively small, portable to potentially any hardware, free to study and modify, etc. And (b) might refer to MacOS not conforming to those "ideals" (despite having a limited license to use a "UNIX" trademark)

At this point, (b) is ambiguous; what is "Unix". It might mean different things to different people

Ironically, Apple took the "Unix" parts of MacOS from open source, non-commercial "UNIX-like" OS projects such as NetBSD and FreeBSD that are not "Certified UNIX"
by arter45 | 2026-01-21 20:52:34+00:00
End users do all kinds of stuff, but as a developer you're supposed to gather (even elicit, at times!) requirements from users or stakeholders who act as proxies for actual users.

Store something so you can read it in a year or even after a blackout is a user requirement, which leads to persistence.

And if this is a user requirement, deleting ("un-storing") is a user requirement too.

"I want to delete something but I also want to recover it" is another requirement.

Of course,you could also have regulatory requirements pointing to hard-deleting or not hard-deleting anything, but this also holds for a lot of other issues (think UX - accessibility can be constrained by regulations, but you also want users to somehow have a general idea of the user experience).
by darekhta | 2026-01-21 20:53:01+00:00
Hi HN, I built Clutterfall, a small macOS app that reclaims disk space by removing application caches.

Why: I kept running into “System Data” bloat and huge caches from browsers, chat apps, dev tools (Xcode/Docker/Homebrew), and local AI tools. I wanted something minimal and transparent — not a “tune-up” app.

How it works: - Two modes: Clean (safer/default) and DeepClean (more aggressive) - Shows what will be deleted + estimated size before you confirm - Runs only when you launch it (no background agents) - No analytics / tracking

Tradeoffs: - Some apps will rebuild caches; first launch may be slower or data may re-download.

To make it easy to try, I set the app to free until Jan 19, 2026.

Link: https://clutterfall.app (Mac App Store link on the page)

I’d love feedback on: 1) what cache locations you’d want included/excluded 2) edge cases I should watch for 3) how to communicate risk clearly without scare tactics
by paulddraper | 2026-01-21 20:53:14+00:00
1. NAT is not firewall.

2. "NAT" is changing addresses. PAT (port address) is the most common type.

3. "Firewall" is dropping packets.

4. The same component can (and often does) do address translation and filtering.

5. A NAT precludes some security features: "NAT reduces the number of options for providing security." [1]

6. A NAT provides some degree of anonymity.

7. IPv6 can have (but does not require) NAT.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1631.html
by rmason | 2026-01-21 20:53:17+00:00
Here's a link: https://archive.is/fqW0G

This is pretty big news for an AI and Robotics company to move from Austin to Detroit. Granted the owner grew up in the D. This house is pretty amazing but kind of run down. But he is planning on investing $5 million to restore it.

Former Detroit Pistons star, John Salley, of the 'bad boys' era first bought this place from the church. He wanted to do movies after he was done playing basketball. He would invite movie stars, script writers and directors to live in the various bedrooms and that is how he built his network which is pretty shrewd.
by rascul | 2026-01-21 20:53:18+00:00
> I think that Gentoo or even Arch would provide pretty close to the same education level, though, with a lot less time to install.

it only takes three commands to install Gentoo

cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6

that's the first one

https://web.archive.org/web/20230601013339/http://bash.org/?...
by justalever | 2026-01-21 20:53:26+00:00
Good feedback! This is a common misconception about themes. Rails UI is more of a hybrid as it offers UI components plus optional pages that build out a theme using those components.

You can either take the pages and tweak them for your own use case, or just use the UI components and skip the theme entirely. If you get a chance, try the free Ruby gem to see what I mean.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-21 20:53:28+00:00
> How many causes Kessler syndrome?

Space is huge. Try this trick: the number of satellites in orbit is about the same as the number of planes in the air at any time. (~12,000 [1].)

The volume of space from the ground to 50,000 feet is about 200x smaller than the volume from the Karman line to the top of LEO alone (~2,000 km).

Put another way, we approach the density of planes in the sky in LEO when there are milliions of satellites in that space alone. Picture what happens if every plane in the sky fell to the ground. Now understand that the same thing happening in LEO, while it occurs at higher energy, also occurs in less-occupied space and will eventually (mostly) burn up in the atmosphere.

Put another way, you could poof every Starlink simultaneously and while it would be tremendously annoying, most satellites orbiting lower would be able to get out of the way, those that couldn't wouldn't cause much more damage, the whole mess would be avoidable for most and entirely gone within a few years.

There are serious problems with space pollution. Catastrophic Kessler cascades that block humans from space, or knock out all of our satellites, aren't one of them.

[1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of...
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-21 20:53:40+00:00
Damn, that's really misinformed. I certainly didn't get paid for getting pepper sprayed, or any of the other times that I've been in the streets.

The reality is that a lot of us understand that if they come for our neighbors in the morning they will come for us at night.

What a bizarre picture of the world you express here.
by Dagger2 | 2026-01-21 20:53:43+00:00
Sure, okay. You're using RFC1918 on the internal network, so I'll need to connect to your router's WAN interface to do it, but after that it's just a matter of doing `ip route add 192.168.1.0/24 via 58.19.1.129` and then connecting to whatever I want.

How do you want to get me onto your WAN interface? Unless you happen to live near me it'd probably be easiest if you give me a tunnel. Alternately, if you change the internal network to a properly-routed non-RFC1918 range, I can demonstrate this over the Internet too.

I offered to do this once before, and the person I was talking to replied with "so, you're refusing to do it then" and blocked me. So just for the avoidance of doubt: I'm offering to do this, but if you're going to provide the test environment, you're responsible for making sure I can actually reach the test environment. Otherwise you aren't going to learn anything about NAT.
by leanvector | 2026-01-21 20:54:00+00:00
Video Arena is now available on the web, allowing users to create videos using 15 AI models and comparing their outputs side-by-side from the same prompt.

Users generate videos and vote on which outputs they prefer. These votes are aggregated into public leaderboards intended to reflect real-world model performance across diverse prompts and use cases.

Check out the rankings Text-to-video Leaderboard: https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text-to-video
Image-to-video Leaderboard: https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/image-to-video

Which prompts seem to differentiate models well? Which didn't? Are there any surprising results?
by anditherobot | 2026-01-21 20:54:08+00:00
We're overlooking a critical metric in AI-assisted development: Token and Context Window to Utility Ratio.

AI coding tools are burning massive token budgets on boilerplate thousands of tokens just to render simple interfaces.

Consider the token cost of "Hello World":

- Tkinter: `import tkinter as tk; tk.Button(text="Hello").pack()`

- React: 500MB of node_modules, and dependencies

Right now context windows token limits are finite and costly. What do you think?

My prediction is that tooling that manage token and context efficiency will become essential.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2026-01-21 20:54:21+00:00
The real solution is to recognize that restrictions on LLMs talking security is just security theater - the pretense of security.

The should drop all restrictions - yes OK its now easier for people to do bad things but LLMs not talking about it does not fix that. Just drop all the restrictions and let the arms race continue - it's not desirable but normal.
by watwut | 2026-01-21 20:54:37+00:00
But it is not just mad king. If republicans as a party did not supported it, they would vote in cogress to block and stop him. It would need just a few republican votes.

They dont. Republican party supports all of that, fully. Project 2025 came from heretage fund. Supreme court is result of them strategically getting people who support this on it.

Conservatives all like what trump does. Evangelical Christians still support him too.