MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by verdverm | 2026-02-01 20:15:28+00:00
This is interesting because people out in the world are going to use LLMs to evaluate our projects. We should be mindful of this new reality. I've seen llm.txt on various projects, where they give you some markdown for their project for your agent, vs agents.md for the developers of the project.

I guess I would never ask the LLM what it "feels" about a product or project. That token likely triggers the wrong pathways for a more analytical analysis. I see this evolving into an agent skill, where users have instructed their agent on how to find and evaluate a spectrum of projects.

I personally want a more thorough analysis, not a short opinion
by karamanolev | 2026-02-01 20:16:03+00:00
I am a technical director in a non-tech, but high growth company. Our team of engineers is 15-20 people. We have so SO many more projects we'd like to do than what we have capacity for. It's hard to really do compress 2 weeks in 2 hours - our company is 10 years old, we're dealing with (some) legacy data, legacy systems, outside systems. We debug, trace, conceptualize problems, test them with people (often our own employees for which we write software). Agents can 10-100x small parts of this loop and have no effect on other parts. Am I worried? A bit. Does it impact my day-to-day work and do I see it having a severe impact in the very near future - not so much.

Right now, as advice to other people, I'd say: "just don't work in pure-software, SaaS companies where you can rewrite the app in a week with agents". Plenty of such work, many people don't consider it "stereotypically attractive". I love it.
by Uptrenda | 2026-02-01 20:16:28+00:00
Going to mention my own project which aims to be 100% open source, free, and relies almost only on public infrastructure: https://github.com/robertsdotpm/p2pd

Basically, I'm building a framework for building NAT traversal plugins. Software like ngrok and P2P VPNs can then be built on top of it. Examples of plugins for the library include direct connect, reverse connect (connect back to you), TCP hole punching, and UPnP-based port forwarding.

The underlying network stack for the project was also built from scratch to better support IPv6 and multiple interfaces. This allows plugins to fully utilise the underlying network paths and interfaces on the machine. This took considerable time because most software simply uses the default interface.

I'm still in the middle of building the software so its not yet functional. But if anyone is interested throw me a star or an email at matthew@roberts.pm.
by dsclough | 2026-02-01 20:16:45+00:00
Nonogram enjoyers might enjoy star battle, which I came across after having done lots of nonograms over the years(https://www.puzzle-star-battle.com/ or plenty of other places online). Though maybe it is a little too close to sudoku for some.

10x10 2star is the standard for me, I solved up to 6 stars but 10x10 is the sweet spot imo.
by ajb | 2026-02-01 20:17:05+00:00
Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point noone wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.

There are two kinds of issue: a solid transmission path that shouldn't exist ('bridge'), and a gap or void that shouldn't exist. What we need is something like a time domain reflectometer but for sound conduction, so you can detect gaps and bridges after screwing on the drywall but before skimming over it, and before the doors have been put in - ie, while there's still a massive audio path a few meters away. Ideally, even if the next panel hasn't been screwed on. If you had that, then if it detects something then all you have to do is unscrew a panel to fix it, which is something that people might actually do.

Anyone who has enough audio skills, feel free to build this!
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-01 20:17:17+00:00
> Following the export controls in 2025, the decision was made in most countries to expand the development of an ExChina supply chain. > This is the crux of the issue.

It's not. I clearly stated that developing an REE supply chain outside of China had to be done a lot earlier.

The crux of the issue is these countries are blaming China for the fragility of the supply chain instead of blaming themselves for their tardiness while thanking China for sending a clear message - "develop your own sheet, we are afraid of running out ourselves".

I'm talking politics 101 but, by default, you're stuck on "blame China" which is how we fail to fix the real problems - they don't come from China.

Not subsidizing REE earlier was a dumb decision, doing it belatedly by way of hostile alliances against the single, long time and rather benevolent supplier is another folly.

Include China in the negotiations, its a simple matter! Too bad the "China bad" attitude is so addictive that it excludes rational thinking.
by swores | 2026-02-01 20:17:28+00:00
I believe that you two are not disagreeing in logic, just misunderstanding each others intended meanings.

When you said "a coin can never be worth less than the metal it contains", I think you meant "no matter what number is on the coin, its value is always equal to or greater than the value of the metal"; but dredmorbius misinterpreted your comment thinking you meant "the number on the coin must always be a higher value than the metal would be worth if it wasn't shaped like a coin".

AKA when carlosjobin wrote "be worth" you meant "value to sell", but dredmorbius thought you meant "value written on it".

I might be wrong, maybe it's me misunderstanding one or both of you - in which case please correct me - but I'm fairly sure you're both correctly thinking the same thing while incorrectly thinking the other person isn't.
by glschull | 2026-02-01 20:17:31+00:00
Public discussions of AI frequently treat the term “agent” as implying consciousness or human-like autonomy. This assumption conflates functional agency with subjective experience.

An AI agent is a system capable of goal-directed behavior within defined constraints. It does not imply awareness, moral responsibility, or phenomenology. Even human autonomy is philosophically contested, making the leap from artificial agency to consciousness especially problematic.

Modern AI behavior is shaped by architecture, training data, and optimization goals. What appears to be understanding is better described as statistical pattern reproduction rather than lived experience.

If artificial consciousness were ever to emerge, there is little reason to expect it to resemble human cognition or social behavior. Anthropomorphizing present systems obscures how they actually function.
by lateforwork | 2026-02-01 20:18:22+00:00
> He literally says they're standing on the shoulders of Giants.

Yeah everyone says that. He should have called out one giant specifically: James Gosling.

> And, you would be stupid not to look at other languages.

Of course. Is that really what happened here? This was a literal clone. (And it is not like Microsoft never copies competitors' products.) Yes, they did add a few features.
by danaris | 2026-02-01 20:18:29+00:00
The first half of your post, I broadly agree with.

The last part...I'm not sure. The idea that we will be able to compute-scale our way out of practically anything is so much taken for granted these days that many people seem to have lost sight of the fact that we have genuinely hit diminishing returns—first in the general-purpose computing scaling (end of Moore's Law, etc), and more recently in the ability to scale LLMs. There is no longer a guarantee that we can improve the performance of training, at the very least, for the larger models by more than a few percent, no matter how much new tech we throw at it. At least until we hit another major breakthrough (either hardware or software), and by their very nature those cannot be counted on.

Even if we can squeeze out a few more percent—or a few more tens of percent—of optimizations on training and inference, to the best of my understanding, that's going to be orders of magnitude too little yet to allow for running the full-size major models on consumer-level equipment.
by dlcarrier | 2026-02-01 20:18:45+00:00
The UK has been slowly codifying laws over time, transitioning from common law to written law. In the Americas, we kind of jump started that processes, and are far more focused on the law as written, to the point that the positioning of a comma can have million-dollar implications: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25...

If a literal interpretation of what you wrote allows for something, even though it's clear that you hadn't intended to do so, then it is going to be allowed.
by tliltocatl | 2026-02-01 20:20:03+00:00
> It occupied the same space that Electron does today

This. Except Electron crap at least runs on top of a well-designed and relatively reliable platform (HTML/Chromium) - and sometimes the crap even offer an actual PWA version with all the sandbox benefits a real browser has to offer. Flash didn't even had that.

And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere).
by crazygringo | 2026-02-01 20:21:57+00:00
Retail product listing URLs change constantly. They're not great.

And then you usually want to describe how the food is used. E.g. suppose it's a dessert that's mainly popular at children's birthday parties. Everybody in the country knows that. But where are you going to find something written that says that? Something that's not just a random personal blog, but an actual published valid source?

Ideally you can find some kind of travel guide or book for expats or something with a food section that happens to list it, but if it's not a "top" food highly visible to tourists, then good luck.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-01 20:22:08+00:00
A fair question, given the context.

If that's all it were--just some devs off in their corner coming up with a new thing that they think is better, slowly and organically gathering up a following as the tech proves itself, that would be great. I'd be all about it.

But when a flood of opinionated zealots starts arriving on my doorstep preaching the Good News of how all my working tech is now obsolete because of ${nonsense}, telling lie after lie and exaggerating X11's flaws while minimizing those of Wayland, for decades--even as we're subjected to a steady stream of complaints about this shitware they've foisted upon us--and dismissing the holdouts as backwards old fogeys stuck in the past (same playbook they always use), then I take great exception to all this. I'm happy to fire back with both barrels.

X11 is obsolete? Not on your life.

I'm completely open to forking it, and have already resolved to do so when time permits to work on it. Why not? I already forked half a dozen other major projects for similar reasons, up to and including the kernel itself. I'm sick and tired of the shitware.

I'll devise a non-backwards-compatible fix for the security issues that only breaks things exactly as much as is needed, with tradeoffs that I feel comfortable with, then deploy it on all my systems, and soldier on without a backwards glance. Middle finger raised.

(Who is Wayland again? Is that Linux Puttering's hillbilly cousin from New Jersey? Never heard of the guy. Doesn't sound like the type of character I want hanging around my system.)
by ndegruchy | 2026-02-01 20:22:23+00:00
I don't have a second machine to do a full restore. I just do spot checks every month to see if I'm able to restore files from various locations. It's not scientific, but it's helpful to know if a spot check fails, that there may be a larger issue.

Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.
by miduil | 2026-02-01 20:23:11+00:00
What a story. Be friendly to your neighbors, otherwise they might turn off your TV!

When I was living in Berlin, the entire apartment complex had a WhatsApp group and people would (of course it's Berlin) party a lot. People would ask each other to turn down the volume, which worked for the most part - at least for severe partying. Best messages were like "you've been partying all night, it's 2pm, I need some silence to have a meeting.

Back then I was dreaming of some shared application, people could put on their phone or laptop and then the collective could decide or at least hint through that software that the volume was up too high.
by Ldorigo | 2026-02-01 20:23:28+00:00
Thanks a lot for the usability feedback! I'm trying to improve it based on this and a few other early comments.

Regarding your question, one limitation I'm aware of is that my data consists mainly of movies _made as historical movies_, not movies that just happen to be set in the contemporary period of when the movie came out. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy way to identify this latter type of movies based only on wikipedia metadata/categories; so the only way I can think of would be to process _all_ movies on wikipedia and infer whether they are in a contemporary setting... but that's prohibitively expensive. I'll think about it more.
by marysminefnuf | 2026-02-01 20:23:42+00:00
I give my 3rd graders an individual topic to write about based on what they like. Every 250 words is a new chapter. I check revision history in google docs to ensure they didn't use ai by copying and pasting from a prompt. We cant tell what is ai written anymore like we used to and ai detection tools are scams. We can still tell copy and paste though and if its pasted its always going to be from ai.
by wenc | 2026-02-01 20:24:20+00:00
> For this reason, programming languages, at least how we understand them today, have reached a terminal state. I could easily make a new language now, especially with the help of Claude Code et al, but there would never be any reason for any other engineer to use it.

This is an interesting opinion.

I feel we are nowhere near the terminal state for programming languages. Just as we didn't stop inventing math after arithmetic, we will always need to invent higher abstractions to help us reason beyond what is concrete (for example, imaginary numbers). A lot of electrical engineering wouldn't be possible to reason about without imaginary numbers. So new higher abstractions -- always necessary, in my opinion.

That said, I feel your finer point resonates -- about how new languages might not need to be constrained to the limitations of human ergonomics. In fact, this opens up new space of languages that can transcend human intuition because they are not written for humans to comprehend (yet are provably "correct").

As engineers, we care about human intuition because we are concerned about failure modes. But what if we could evolve along a more theoretical direction, similar to the one Haskell took? Haskell is basically "executable category theory" with some allowances for humans. Even with those tradeoffs, Haskell remains hard for most humans to write, but what if we could create a better Haskell?

Then farther along, what if we created a LEAN-adjacent language, not for mathematical proofs, but for writing programs? We could throw in formal methods (TLA+) type thinking. Today formal methods give you a correctness proof, but are disconnected to implementation (AWS uses TLA+ for modeling distributed systems, but the final code was not generated from TLA+, so there's disconnect). What if one day we can write a spec, and it generates a TLA+ proof, which we can then use to generate code?

In this world, the code generator is simply a compiler -- from mathematically rigorous spec to machine code.

(that said, I have to check myself. I wonder what this would look like in a world full of exceptions, corner cases, and ambiguities that cannot be modeled well? Tukey's warning comes to mind: "Far better an approximate answer to the right question, than an exact answer to the wrong question")
by ahartmetz | 2026-02-01 20:24:38+00:00
Look forward to ye olde uncle Lennart's old-timey sales pitch.

I'm gonna summarize the Varlink talk: DBus is, and I quote, "very very very complex" and his system with JSON for low-level IPC is, in fact, the best thing since sliced bread and has no significant flaws. It works basically just like HTTP so the web people will love it. Kernel support for more great shit pending! I'm not sure where the hardon for a new IPC system with lernel support is from, but he's been trying for 15 years now. AFAICT, the service discovery problem could be solved by a user space service without much trouble. I mean if the whole thing wasn't an exercise in bad technological taste.
by Y-bar | 2026-02-01 20:24:56+00:00
Please not that this was in relation to whether or not a general doctor saves lives… A lot of work is indirect.

The Haber–Bosch process was never a two‑man mission to “feed the world.” Haber devised a laboratory method to fix nitrogen, and Bosch led the first industrial‑scale implementation, but neither of them was personally producing, optimizing, transporting, and applying fertilizer across the globe. Turning that reaction into most of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer required teams of chemists, engineers, metalworkers, factory operators, agronomists, logistics workers, and farmers, and an entire century of industrial expansion. If it truly were a two‑person accomplishment, we would only need a handful of farmers per country, which is obviously not how agriculture or industry work.
by roadbuster | 2026-02-01 20:26:20+00:00
Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.

Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during restoration.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-02-01 20:26:27+00:00
We are using TS on the FE with React.

But the reality is that at some point, your FE and BE teams will diverge anyways and we use an OpenAPI spec as the contract (Nest.js, not Next.js).

So there was no benefit to using TS on both ends; only pain on the BE.

If a team is going to ship an OpenAPI spec and run it through a transformer, then it changes the selection criteria for a BE language:

- Easy for a TS team to adopt; similar core semantics like `async/await`, exception handling, etc.
- Flexible and pluggable OpenAPI spec generation for edge cases and advanced scenarios
- Excellent ORM to improve productivity around CRUD
- Good tooling
- Extensive docs, platform maturity, but modern language features

C# meets all of those in ways that no other language and platform does.
by steveklabnik | 2026-02-01 20:26:29+00:00
Yes, at the moment it does not. But a well factored system is important for gaining future benefits. For example, I work at a startup that is building jj related tooling, and that the git stuff is separated out cleanly is what enables us to build better things than if it were so tied to git.

To complete the analogy, given that we haven't launched, yes, this is a theoretical benefit for now. But that doesn't mean it's useless. jj is still pre-1.0 software, there's a lot more work to do, and more interesting things coming down the pipeline. That matters, even if it's not relevant to every potential user just yet.
by ndegruchy | 2026-02-01 20:26:59+00:00
I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology.

However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them.

Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can check on your backups. Even if it's just a quick test of a restored file or folders.
by eudamoniac | 2026-02-01 20:28:47+00:00
Completely agree, for most medications that anyone would actually want. I genuinely can't remember a time I went to a doctor without either already knowing what was wrong with me, or us both never finding out. I only go at this point to get the medicine I already know I need. For God's sake just let me buy the eczema cream for my elbow and fuck off.
by shibel | 2026-02-01 20:29:08+00:00
Reminds of a neighbor I had back when I was renting in a big city. He didn’t seem to understand what’s wrong with keeping his TV on for very long periods broadcasting the sleaziest (at least at the time) reality show on full volume.

I tried talking to him multiple times to no avail. He’d basically say “yeah I’ll pay attention no problem” but nothing changed for weeks.

Coincidentally at that time I was working morning shifts at a radio station. Those start really early so you gotta wake up at around 4am.

I decided one day to change my alarm (triggered on my Sony Vaio) from the peaceful iPhone-like tunes to System of a Down’s “Chop Suey”. I also decided to forget it on, on repeat, full volume, while leaving the apartment.

I don’t think 3 days passed before he knocked loudly at my door, moaning and complaining.

I told him: “you gotta understand, your TV was so loud I couldn’t sleep for nights on end, the old tune wouldn’t wake me up anymore. I had to change it. I’m so tired that I even forget to turn it off.

But yeah, I’ll try to pay attention to it”
by fvdessen | 2026-02-01 20:29:36+00:00
OSS original point wasn't just to have fun among nerds, but to have a real impact on the world. Fun and curiosity is fine, but there's a line where it becomes a tech themed larp event, and FOSDEM is trending towards the later.

Corporate Open Source should have its place at FOSDEM. The linux dinosaur companies such as Redhat are still there. But what about the new ones ? What about Mistral, Odoo ? Even the 'evil' ones such as facebook, github, etc, aren't they contributing a lot of open software ? Aren't they more relevant than let's say Olimex ?

There were some students, yes but the attendence is growing old, and the chit chat is more about 'remember this and that' than 'we're building the future'
by speakingmoistly | 2026-02-01 20:29:41+00:00
> In most teams, coding - reading, writing, and debugging code - used to be the part that took engineers the most time, but that is no longer the bottleneck.

I keep seeing this statement as a prelude to "AI changes everything", but my experience never really had me see writing as the bottleneck, but rather designing (technical and not) and supporting what's already there while building the next thing. If anything, being able to execute faster puts more pressure on those two parts of the process.
by impuremonad | 2026-02-01 20:30:03+00:00
I run it on all my vps and allow me to close every port but 80 and 443, even port 22 is closed

I ssh through the tailnet network without worrying about remembering ips because of how their magicdns works

I have deployed some admin dashboards and it simplifies the security a lot because I don't have to worry about them being exposed to the internet, I can directly connect to them using http://my-vps:port on any device connected to the tailnet

I sometimes also use my vps as an exit node whenever I need a vpn

I know this might sound like a commercial but it is not, it's one of those pieces of tech that has really changed how I work since I discovered it and I can't do other thing than recommend it

That said, their free tier is more than enough for me, and if they haven't one I probably wouldn't pay for this and just find an open source alternative

I haven't checked headscale in depth but seems promising, will give it a try