MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by angarg12 | 2026-01-06 16:39:16+00:00
This sounds like surface level wisdom if you are in your earlier career. I see several problems with this advice, but here is the most obvious one: this only works if you want to become a manager.

It used to be the case that the only way for engineers to advance their career. But we've long moved since and now you can have a long career and get very high in a company without management responsibilities. The examples given in the blog post are exactly what I would expect ICs to do, not managers.

Do you want advice to get promoted? if your company has a formal career ladder, look into the process and optimize for it. Despite people grievances, this is still the fastest and easiest method to get a promotion (shocker!).
by sdenton4 | 2026-01-06 16:39:25+00:00
My original home on the internet is metafilter, where I've been a member since 2001. For an extremely long time, it was the internet's best kept community, imo. Unfortunately, it also seems to be falling into pure doomerism, especially as the user base has declined over the last few years. The overall population is definitely on the older side at this: I was one of the younger users 25 years ago, and probably still am.

Which is to say, the feelings of doom are quite widespread. There's a good argument to be made that it underlies the rise of trumpism: people in the sticks feeling abandonment, resentment, and doom, and expressing it at the ballot box.
by 7777777phil | 2026-01-06 16:39:29+00:00
You're right that a simple Python script would be more cost-effective for this kind of archiving. I went with workers because I was already familiar with the stack and wanted real-time processing, but for a research project focused on completeness rather than latency, your approach makes much more sense - please reach out if you want to offer your help. Initially I was planning on building a public realtime dashboard and might as well still do.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-06 16:39:32+00:00
> he’s literally a “democratic socialist” which is far, far left

For an US perspective, yes. From an European perspective... him and Bernie are center-left, if not centrist. The Overton window is positioned much more towards the authoritarian right in the US than it is here - although the huge amounts of American and Russian funding towards far-right parties have been shifting the window here as well for about a decade.
by lukeschlather | 2026-01-06 16:40:16+00:00
The thing historically about GPUs has not been the actual lifespan of the hardware (at least half of the hardware will probably work fine for 10 or more years) the problem is that work/watt is dropping for newer hardware, so there's a point where even if you had an equivalent quantity of 10-year-old GPUs, powering them for some period costs $40k and you can buy a single brand-new GPU that costs $40k but only costs $20K to power for the same period which is less than a few years.

I don't think we're seeing any decrease in supply though, ignoring 2020 I'm pretty sure the number of GPUs manufactured has been steadily increasing. It might be the case that projected manufacturing was higher than what actually happened, which is not the same thing as a decrease in supply, but companies like Amazon will talk about it like it is, and from the standpoint of their pricing it essentially is.
by jmarcher | 2026-01-06 16:40:44+00:00
Yes, I thought the same thing.

My son loves Lego Mario and the app. He'll even go through the building instructions of kits he doesn't have just to see how they are built. The instructions in the app are super clear, animated, and the model can be rotated at any step to check whether the real-life model is correctly built.

Going back to paper instructions after using the app is a pain.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-06 16:40:44+00:00
> Default has a meaning, and it's what happens if you don't explicitly choose to do something else.

It also has the meaning of doing the common thing: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/default

> : a selection made usually automatically or without active consideration

See that "without active consideration" there? The default usage of malloc includes, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, checking the returned value.

C doesn't have anything done automatically, so I am wondering why you would choose to think that by "default" one would mean that something automatically gets done.
Show HN: 9×9 goal grid for multitaskers (No back end, No login, No Cost)
by atharvashah | 2026-01-06 16:40:47+00:00
Most tools let you add tasks forever.
This one doesn’t.

One main goal.
Eight subgoals.
Eight actions each.

Runs entirely in the browser. No accounts. Exportable.

This is a client-only app. No backend. No auth.

The grid is intentionally finite. You get 64 action slots. That constraint is the point. Built it because infinite lists made prioritization worse.

Import/Export works seamlessly.

Looking for feedback from people who feel stuck planning big goals.

Happy to answer technical or design questions.
by metanonsense | 2026-01-06 16:40:47+00:00
In my experience, this depends a lot on the subreddits you are subscribed to. Even in that set, the general mood sometimes changes significantly over time, e.g. because moderators change, a flood of new people is coming in because of some trends (AI), or some reddit meta events (eg a post being bestoffed). Generally speaking, a few vocal asshles can spoil your subreddit and drag the overall sentiment down.
by onetoo | 2026-01-06 16:40:53+00:00
The equivalent in python-metaphor-land would be that python files clearly designate whether they are py2 or py3, and a single python interpreter can run both py2 and py3 scripts, as well as cross-include files of each version without issue.

Rust editions only (and rarely!) break your code when you decide to upgrade your project's edition. Your public API stays the same as well (IIRC), so upgrading edition doesn't break your dependents either -unless they don't have a new enough version of the compiler to support said newer edition.
by culi | 2026-01-06 16:42:22+00:00
I agree, but I've definitely used better tools than others and been stuck with crap that shows up at the top of google results. And there's great tools like this[0] that I've found through HN but never show up on google

I think an aggregator for pre-vetted tools like these can go a long way. Just a repository of various tools with tags and the ability to search through them

[0] https://cobalt.tools/
by epistasis | 2026-01-06 16:42:41+00:00
Jellyfin was super easy to get running on Arch a few months ago. With a Tailscale network, I have all my media devices connected to my very small but growing collection of DVD and Blu-ray media.

I'm old, I ripped all my CDs in the 1990s and early 2000s, but abandoned all of it when Apple Music replaced iTunes in a disaster of product launch. After a decade of streaming, I'm trying to head back to curated media files, at least for video. Music is far harder to obtain in ways that compensate the musicians, at least for the stuff I'm looking for.
by cheschire | 2026-01-06 16:42:47+00:00
I have to thank Plex for changing their cost model. It motivated me to setup Jellyfin, something that took slightly more effort than Plex. And by getting that inertia going, I then followed up with Navidrome, a local OSM service with routing, and finally my own mediawiki copy that has a starting point from the pre-AI days as well as an annual content refresh so my "compare" history is short and simple on all articles.

That inspired me to build a homelab finally, which then became a NAS, which then became an OCIS server to replace my commercial cloud storage.

I finally got proxmox setup, OPNsense, with Caddy for reverse proxying the externally facing services and tailscale for access to those services I want to keep only for me and not others in my family.

So yeah, all of this big massive avalanche of work started with the little tiny snowball of Plex deciding they wanted to charge me to use my own media while away from my house.

Thanks Plex!

And thanks Jellyfin for being a fantastic alternative for video.
by HDThoreaun | 2026-01-06 16:42:50+00:00
This sounds simple but in reality creates a huge regulatory burden so that people can have an extra 10 cents a year. In chicago we passed a law that says landlords have to pay interest on security deposits. Guess what happened? Every single landlord moved to move in fees instead. Now instead of getting your deposit back renters just have to pay thousands of dollars to move. This law without a doubt made life worse for basically every renter in the city
Show HN: Ctrl – execution control plane for AI agents
by mmmehulll | 2026-01-06 16:43:16+00:00
Agents are starting to take real actions (publish content, trigger workflows, touch prod systems).
Ctrl is an execution control plane that sits between agent intent and real-world actions.
It intercepts MCP tool calls, scores risk, enforces allow/deny/approve policies, and executes only what’s authorized with a full SQLite audit ledger.
It Ships as a drop-in CtrlMCP wrapper for LangChain.
Looking for feedback and early pilots running agents in production.
Ask HN: Any Microsoft employees/devs here? What's happening to Microsoft?
by thehamkercat | 2026-01-06 16:43:21+00:00
Why are they behaving like this since last year (trying very hard to burn themselves to the ground)

Latest example:

Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496465)

Not only the rename is absurd, but the page (office.com) looks heavily vibe-coded
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-06 16:43:55+00:00
The goal is to kill those payment schemes which mostly exist for exactly the reason I laid out.

Sell a product for $7 but only allow "recharge" in $5 increments. It pretty much guarantees that you will have tons of accounts with random dollar amounts laying around in them, never to be used. Even for regular gift cards, the counter party would be beholden to honoring them at their full value, as they should.

Besides, nothing it stopping you from rolling monthly treasuries and using those as a bank. Something people with enough money to exploit this proposed "gift card bank" would almost surely already be aware of.
by paxys | 2026-01-06 16:43:57+00:00
It's about more than just costs. Plex started out as a home media server (a direct port of XBMC/Kodi in fact), but over time due to its success the creators decided they wanted to turn it into Netflix instead. So using Plex to stream your own media to your own local or remote devices is being made harder with every update.
Show HN: Finite Craft, The Rubiks finite group via an Infinite Craft interface
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-06 16:44:37+00:00
I always have loved the idea that Rubiks cubes can be solved via abstract algebra, but the group action is not ergonomic on a physical cube. This toy solves that by allowing one to apply one cube state to another. In fact, that's all it allows.
by serbuvlad | 2026-01-06 16:45:07+00:00
Somewhat unrelated but as a Pixel Watch user (since I'm in that ecosystem), I envy the Apple Watch just for the square display. It is just the fundamentally correct design for text imo (which is a large part of what is going to appear).

One of my main uses for my Pixel Watch is reading notifications, and even for a 2-3 line text message I have to scroll to read it because it gets cut out by the roundness.
by Ajedi32 | 2026-01-06 16:45:08+00:00
There's certainly a way to do this, poorly. But it's not realistic to expect an AI to be able to diagnose users with mental illnesses on the fly and not screw that up repeatedly (both with false positives, false negatives, and lots of other more bizarre failure modes that don't neatly fit into either of those categories).

I just think it's not a good idea to try to legally mandate that companies implement features that we literally don't have the technology to implement in a good way.
by f1shy | 2026-01-06 16:45:53+00:00
In my circles, there is one part of OOP seen as positive: encapsulation. Everything else, specially inheritance and partly polymorphism are seen extremely negatively. The hype is over. BUT: I still hear more often as I would like, some manager stating “of course we will use C++, because is THE OOP language, and everybody knows OOP and UML are the only right way of doing software” this is an actual verbatim statement I had to listen 4 years ago.
by codebyaditya | 2026-01-06 16:45:57+00:00
This is excellent feedback. You are absolutely right that a multivariate regression controlling for location, experience, and job family is the rigorous way to isolate the staffing firm coefficient from the raw data. We stuck to descriptive statistics (medians/distributions) for this initial post to keep it accessible to a general audience, but the 'Cap Exempt' comparison you suggested is a brilliant idea for a validity test. I’ll definitely look into and will try to add a 'Cap Exempt' binary variable to our roadmap for Part 2. Thanks for the 2 cents, it’s worth a lot more than that!
by TheCraiggers | 2026-01-06 16:45:58+00:00
It seems like human nature that if you attach a number or score to something, people are going to try and get the most they can.

Which is kinda the point. Nobody wants to lose score, so they don't post horrible comments (usually) and they try to find the most interesting articles to post. That's good for everyone. But it does have the side-effect of people complaining that their karma was "stolen".
by dspillett | 2026-01-06 16:46:04+00:00
> but 2/3rds of 330 million people is not 75 million votes

It was a remembered stat, and there were more than 75,000,000 who “either directly voted for it or sat on their elbows and let it happen”.

A quick check of official stats:

The turnout of 64.1% and 49.1%/49.3%/1.9% “of the vote” figures means:
~32% rep
~31% dem
~ 1% other
~36% did not vote

So 68% voted for it or sat on their elbows. Pretty close to my half-remembered two thirds.

> it's not like Europe hasn't had it's fair share of bullshit and far right parties.

True, and they are worryingly gaining ground in a number of places (here in the UK for one), but the whole EU (or Europe, or the EEA, depending on the exact set of countries we want to include in the pot for this discussion) has never been close to far-right in that time.

> That then the US and Europe can be more equal partners than before this monster of an individual

Eventually, hopefully. We'll see what happens in a couple of years. But the trust won't come back overnight even from where it is now, and there is plenty of time for the situation to get worse. I expect it will take a couple of terms at the very least for things to even out close to where they were before, if they ever do.

And for all the claims of “defending democracy and the free world”, the unilateral arseholery in general and active threats to other democracies (the EU overall, its individual states, and non-EU states), gives other regimes a loverly big mess to point at while asking “Do you really want democracy?”, so it might not even be possible for things to revert over that timescale because of the changes in balance elsewhere as less direct consequence.
by proee | 2026-01-06 16:46:17+00:00
Engineers are employed to fix problems, so they have an inherent disposition to break things down into pieces to identify what's working and what's not working. I've had the opportunity to demo our engineering tools to professionals at industry-type events, and they all came to our booth with arms crossed, even before they understood our value proposition. We demoed the exact same tools to the maker space and everyone who came to the booth was flowing with positive energy. Basically a glass half-empty vs half-full type of experience.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-06 16:46:26+00:00
You disparage the negativity as "reflexive", but isn't whether the negativity is warranted more important than the pace at which it is delivered, or some oblique critique of its motivation? This looks like an attempt to smear the negativity. Your critique as HNers as not being qualified also looks like an ad hominem argument.

Pace could be driven by the rapidity with which posts fall off the front page or with which comments expand so new comments are far down the list.

I'd turn that around and say the observation that negative comments are upvoted shows that HN readers value them.

I'll admit we could use more steelmanning when critiquing.
by munksbeer | 2026-01-06 16:46:29+00:00
> the burden of proof is not on the people denying LLM intelligence, it's on the boosters

It's an impossible burden to prove. We can't even prove that any other human has sentience or is reasoning, we just evaluate the outcomes.

One day the argument you're putting forward will be irrelevant, or good for theoretical discussion only. In practice I'm certain that machines will achieve human level output at some point.
Show HN: I built a dev tool site to avoid context switching
by DerekDragon | 2026-01-06 16:46:33+00:00
Hi HN,

This started as a JSON editor.
Then I added “just one more thing”.
And then another.
At some point it became a small collection of developer tools.

JSONEditors is now a set of browser-based utilities I use when dealing with
JSON, HTML, XML, encoded strings, and random bits of text that show up
while debugging APIs, configs, or data exports.

Nothing here is revolutionary.
Most of these tools already exist somewhere.
The problem I kept hitting was friction:
switching between different sites,
different UIs,
different assumptions about what I want to do.

So I ended up putting the tools I actually use in one place,
with consistent behavior and predictable output.

The goal is very boring, on purpose:
paste input, see result, copy output, move on.

Some examples of what’s there:
- editing and formatting JSON, HTML, and XML
- encoding / decoding helpers
- tree and text-based views depending on the task
- simple transforms that don’t try to be clever

It’s meant for the “in-between” moments of development,
not as a replacement for IDEs or CLI tools,
but for the quick tasks that don’t justify opening a full environment.

I’m curious how others here handle this:
- Do you prefer all-in-one dev tool sites, or format-specific ones?
- What small tasks do you keep repeating in the browser instead of your IDE?
- At what point do you abandon browser tools and switch to CLI or editor plugins?

Happy to answer questions, or hear why this approach doesn’t make sense for you.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-06 16:46:49+00:00
> the problem is that work/watt is dropping for newer hardware, so there's a point where even if you had an equivalent quantity of 10-year-old GPUs, powering them for some period costs $40k

Sell the old-gen GPU's to on-prem users (including home consumers) who are going to run them a small % of the time (so power use is more or less negligible to them compared to acquisition cost), problem solved.
by takluyver | 2026-01-06 16:47:02+00:00
Also, power users are the ones who will find and change the setting - that's pretty much what being a power user means. Picking defaults that work for novices makes sense, even if that's slightly more inconvenient for me.

I think this whole discussion is based on an assumption that changing the default is part of an agenda to get rid of middle-click-paste entirely. I don't think it is.
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-06 16:47:23+00:00
AI is already easily profitable without further optimization. If at any point investors decided that this is the best the models are going to get, because it's not worth further investment then we will run inference on the existing hardware, forever. What will not happen:

- The models going away. There is no future where people will start doing more coding without AI.
- Everyone running all AI on their existing notebook or phone. We have absolutely no indication that the best models are getting smaller and cheaper to run. In fact GPUs are getting bigger.

This might hurt OpenAI, depending on how good the best available open models are at that point, but this will in no way diminish the continued increased demand for hardware.

> When this happens

I think all of this is highly unlikely, and would put a "If". But we will see!
by pessimizer | 2026-01-06 16:47:26+00:00
I'd like to make two points about this:

-----

1) I do not understand in any way the sentiment that discussion should ideally consist of people agreeing with and encouraging each other.

The reason I speak with people is either to inform or learn. If I'm informing, this is not really a discussion. I'm just telling people something that they may not know. There are two ways to learn: one is to listen and not speak, which is the mirror of the above. The way to learn through speaking is that somebody says something, I dispute or question that thing, and that person shows me why I'm wrong.

So the way to learn while speaking is that someone says something, I say something negative about that thing, and then that person says something negative about the negative thing I've just said.

Friends and family are what you need, not the empty, uninformed, ritualistic, and above all socially-pressured positive comment of strangers.

-----

2) Following up on the first point (which is mainly a personal observation), it's important to say (although completely unsurprising and obvious) that negativity is relative. On HN (or reddit, or any comment site), the first post or OP is assigned positivity.

A great example is this very OP, which is an accusation of negativity on Hacker News, which with no context is quite obviously a post with negative sentiment. The way you would grade reactions to it in a vacuum would say that other posts disputing its conclusions are positive.

Its methodology, however, requires that the posts disputing it be graded as negative: "Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs." What are the OPs that contain these posts? Links to technologies and technology advocates, announcements, recommendations of particular practices, descriptions of APIs.

Accusations of negativity and tone policing are always content-free social control. If I set my point of view as positive and uplifting (while posting about how HN and reddit and social media are evil poison promulgated by evil people who should be physically stopped to save civilization), I can silence dispute through calling the mods rather than through discussion.

The more indefensible my position is, the more I will prefer the sort of "discussion" where I say something, other people dispute it, and I accuse them of being negative people with implications of bad faith and possibly psychological unsoundness.
by nilslindemann | 2026-01-06 16:47:34+00:00
Off topic: This CSS improves the usability of that page:

ul.threadlist li:hover > a {
color: red;
}

ul.threadlist li.origin > a {
display: block;
background: rgb(205, 216, 216);
font-weight: normal;
padding: 1px 6px;
margin: 1px -6px;
}
by netsharc | 2026-01-06 16:47:46+00:00
Seems like it needs higher level stuff, although that's a bit too sci-fi. Captain Picard can just ask "Computer, where is Commander Riker?" and the computer answers him, he doesn't need to say "Computer, launch people finder app" and "Computer, input 'Commander Riker' in the people finder app"...

I use Google Assistant for things like "add a reminder", "set an alarm", which is natural language processing but doesn't seem to need so many neurons as LLM. And faster than this Gemini crap, anyway.

I saw a social media clip of a woman in the passenger car of a Chinese car (her - presumably husband - is driving) asking the car "Has there been a woman in this car other than me?". The car seems to have an LLM app, because it responds saying "I can't see that", and then start giving tips how to find out (check the recent addresses list in th navigation, check the trips log if there has been long trips, see if the car is cleaner than he usually maintains it), and ending with talking about trust and communication in a relationship...

Hah, in our imagination we'd get KITT from Knight Rider. In reality...