MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MathMonkeyMan | 2026-02-15 09:30:57+00:00
It exemplifies how complicated a "combine software to make your own user space" system is.

I've been running Ubuntu this or that since 2007. Desktops, laptops, work computers, personal computers, servers. There has been some BS to deal with, but frankly with common hardware it's exactly the same as any other system. Desktop runtime with web browser support. Except that you can do whatever you want, if you choose.

The idea of Arch was that it's supposed to be hard mode, if that's even true anymore. Any non-tech person I've showed my computer is like "oo, what is that?" I say "it's a desktop environment, here's the web browser." And that's all there is to it.
by robocat | 2026-02-15 09:31:30+00:00
> Has changing zoning laws historically ever boosted housing construction by more than 10%

Certainly has in New Zealand - particularly in Christchurch and Auckland. The local politics are against densification - but the national politics have been ascendant. Over the last decade, New Zealand’s housing stock has grown by approximately 16%.

Densification has gone up in city centres - with broad political support from our left and right parlimentarians.

We must have more houses because our population is rising through immigration. Like many countries, we have too many retirees and not enough workers: so New Zealand is using immigration to patch that problem (particularly in healthcare and elderly care). Currently about 30% of our population was born in another country (gained residency or passport). It isn't a stable solution since working immigrants eventually get old too. The alternative is population growth which is also unstable in the long term (plus population growth is harder for the government to encourage).

There are many issues, and a lot of the same rhetoric you see in the US, but broadly immigration seems to be helping our economy.
by goku12 | 2026-02-15 09:32:28+00:00
Arch wiki is indeed the most informative and comprehensive of all, so much so that users of any distro should find it useful too. Two other distro wikis with smaller, but useful content are Gentoo's and Debian's. Gentoo's speciality in my opinion, is that it contains some lower level information like the required kernel features, and difference between setups using systemd and other inits. Debian wiki contains some information that's related to standards, development, packaging and quality control. These make them useful, despite the availability of the Arch wiki.

Though not distro wikis, there's also a wealth of information on the Linux documentation site and the kernel newbies site. A lot of useful information is also present on Stack Overflow. I just wish that they hadn't shot themselves in the foot by alienating their contributors like this.

Other documentation sources like BSDs' are a bit more organized than that of Linux's, thanks to their strong emphasis on documentation. I wish Linux documentation was a more integrated single source, instead of being scattered around like this. It would have required more effort and discipline regarding documentation. Nevertheless, I guess that I should be grateful for these sources and the ability to leverage them. While I do rely on LLMs occasionally for solutions, I'm not very found of them because they're often very misguided, ill advised and lack the tiny bits of insight and wisdom that often accompany human generated documentation. It would be a disaster if the latter just faded into oblivion due to the over reliance on LLMs.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-02-15 09:32:42+00:00
I think it all comes down to curiosity, and I dare think that that's one of the main reasons why someone will be using Arch instead of the plethora of other distros.

Now, granted, I don't usually ask an LLM for help whenever I have an issue, so I may be missing something, but to me, the workflow is "I have an issue. What do I do?", and you get an answer: "do this". Maybe if you just want stuff to work well enough out of the box while minimizing time doing research, you'll just pick something other than Arch in the first place and be on your merry way.

For me, typically, I just want to fix an annoyance rather than a showstopping problem. And, for that, the Arch Wiki has a tremendous value. I'll look up the subject, and then go read the related pages. This will more often than not open my eyes to different possibilities I hadn't thought about, sometimes even for unrelated things.

As an example, I was looking something up about my mouse the other day and ended up reading about thermal management on my new-to-me ThinkPad (never had one before).
by mvdtnz | 2026-02-15 09:32:55+00:00
Not sure why you're being down voted but the answer is yes, it is the same Peter Thiel who gives lectures on Greta Thunberg being the literal anti-christ and if the down voters think you might be exaggerating or misleading them I encourage them to search this up.

Edit - I searched to refresh myself, ok he didn't say she was the literal antichrist. He said she's literally a legionnaire for the literal antichrist. I cannot stress enough that he was very clear that he was not using these terms figuratively, I mean "literal" in the literal sense of the term.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-15 09:34:13+00:00
> Put another way, the ability to use AI became an important factor in overall software engineering ability this year, and as the year goes on the gap between the best and worst users or AI will widen faster because the models will outpace the harnesses

Is it, lol? Know any case where those “the best users of AI” get salary bumps or promotions? Outside of switching to the dedicated AI role that is? So far I see clowns doing triple the work for the same salary.
by whackernews | 2026-02-15 09:34:49+00:00
Yeh, to zoom out a bit, this is a pattern with all products. It’s all a scam. The only thing you should ever pay for is build quality (you should buy something once, that you can hand down to your kids) and staff wages (something that is made in your own country so you’re not undermining your own economy, this is more of a moral reason).
by nvader | 2026-02-15 09:35:35+00:00
Hey tom_, usually they say that explaining a joke makes it worse, but I think you crafted the rare exception!

I did in fact intend to share NewPipe as an antidote to the "en-short-ification" of YouTube after reading a couple of threads earlier today from other Hackers complaining exactly about that. And yes, calling it "vertical video" is a sloppy way of expressing that.

I too will try to do better in the future.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-15 09:35:44+00:00
Obviously there is a ton unsaid in this blog post, but I just wanted to answer your question because it's exceedingly common for companies to be sold, sometimes for lots of money, and for common stock (which is what employees hold) to get wiped out. If the startup was sold for $350 million, but it received $350 or more million in funding, the investors get (some of) their money back, and employees get nothing. This happens all the time.

Again, I don't know what happened in the author's specific case, but think it's important to know that lots of startups have exits that can look big on paper but still are a wipeout for common equity.
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-15 09:36:02+00:00
The motivating blog post[1] linked from the front page is probably going to generate a more interesting discussion than the framework itself.

As someone who has to deal with both angular and nextjs for different (but overlapping) stacks at work, I find myself increasingly sympathetic to this viewpoint.

[1]: https://nadh.in/blog/javascript-ecosystem-software-developme...
by HenryZheng99 | 2026-02-15 09:37:00+00:00
I built a ranking board that estimates commercial traction based on Stripe Checkout payment traffic data. While it’s not a direct look into their bank accounts, analyzing the traffic hitting their payment gateways provides a much stronger signal of revenue and conversion than generic web visits.

The Dashboard tracks:

Top 30 AI products by payment volume.

Month-over-Month (MoM) growth trends.

Estimated MRR (where verified public reports are available).

It’s currently updated monthly. I’m still refining the algorithm, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on the data accuracy or metrics you’d find useful.

I’m actively curating the directory section. If you’re building an AI tool, feel free to submit it. It’s free, and you get a dofollow link. The site is only a week old but already hit DR 30, so it might give your SEO a small boost.
by Mordisquitos | 2026-02-15 09:37:16+00:00
I'll bite. How does a wiki targeted at users of a specific GNU/Linux distribution, a distribution which has made the express decision to be orientated towards technical users and not provide user-friendly tools for its configuration, exemplify how "Linux" (i.e. any GNU/Linux distribution) is broken on desktop?

(I use Arch btw)
by buran77 | 2026-02-15 09:37:44+00:00
If you find a man made hole with a perfectly vertical shaft and high aspect ratio (tall and narrow), it was drilled. Individuals can float or be washed ashore on an island, populations can't. If you find entire civilizations on distant islands, they got there by some sort of boat or advanced raft. Rope generally implies twisted or braided fibers, so maybe it's difficult to tell if this was artificially twisted or a natural one like a vine. But if it looked like a rope, and was used like a rope then it was a rope.
by majgr | 2026-02-15 09:37:50+00:00
I never was good at these human power things. Years after happening, I realised I was the object of a manipulation. I never cared about promotions and stuff like that. I change jobs because I am bored by it after couple of years anyway. I do not mind, well, I will welcome, when AI takes jobs of managers. No more politics, power plays, setting coalitions.
by goku12 | 2026-02-15 09:38:11+00:00
> Because installing a man page requires root and a writeable root fs for that matter

That's not true. The user-equivalent of the man pages directory on Linux and BSDs is `~/.local/share/man`. You can have your mandb index it too. You can achieve more complex manpath indexing setups using the `~/.manpath` file.
by nayroclade | 2026-02-15 09:38:22+00:00
Arguments against proactive MRI scanning always seem to have a whiff of status quo bias to them. Yes, right now MRIs are expensive and false positives are common, but if regular scans were widespread, it's likely this result in innovations that would drive down costs, improve accuracy, as well as producing a much larger corpus of data with which to guide diagnosis and reduce false positives.

To use a software analogy, if your downtime detection system kept producing false negatives, would your solution to be just turn it off? You'd get some better night's sleep, but you'd pay for it when the system really went down and you had no idea.
by bhattattreya | 2026-02-15 09:39:46+00:00
I was a dating coach ($200/hr). Clients struggled with texting, so I vibe coded FlirtFix to replace myself.
Unlike generic wrappers, I reverse-engineered coaching frameworks (Push-Pull, Frame Control) into system prompts.
Standard LLMs are too polite. The model analyzes subtext and power dynamics before replying.
I built this to meet my own standards and use it daily.

Free to use (3 daily credits). Feedback on the reasoning quality welcome!
by Towaway69 | 2026-02-15 09:39:57+00:00
Any human in the loop will be a bottleneck in comparison to AI performance.

If we take that to its logical conclusion, I think we can answer that question.

Getting rid of humans, unfortunately, also takes away their earnings and therefore their ability to purchase whatever product you are developing. The ultra rich can only purchase your product so often - hence better make it a subscription model.

So there is pressure on purchasing power versus earnings. Interesting to see what happens and why.
by alibarber | 2026-02-15 09:40:03+00:00
> Well fix that problem then. If someone puts a smoke detector above a toaster you don't just pull the battery and call it a day.

I think what's happening here is that the smoke detector is indicating the possibility of fire, but the toaster is always being immediately doused in water. Which as we know would cause more damage than good unless there truly was a raging inferno.

The suggestion here seems to be moving the smoke detector to somewhere where there's a higher chance of it ringing means a higher chance of a damaging fire. Which seems quite reasonable.
by lostlogin | 2026-02-15 09:43:23+00:00
> MRIs are extremely scarce tools of last resort and treat them like we treat blood tests.

How would this work?

I can do a blood test and send it to the lab to be processed in ~5 minutes from the moment I meet the patient. Consumable costs are about $2.

I can also do an MR scan. It took a fair bit of training and the scanner and scan room cost about US$2 million. Service contracts on the scanner, scan room, chillers and required staffing utterly dwarf the cost of the scanner over its lifetime.

The scan takes 20-75 minutes. Then the images get sent for reporting. Unlike a blood test, reporting isn’t automated. Even if it was, how could availability of MR ever be similar to a blood test?
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-15 09:47:06+00:00
> I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.

Depends of how you see it. At the moment, if you want a good productivity suit of tools, you have Microsoft or Microsoft because Google is hampered by their lackluster chat client.

People would like some competition.
by norman784 | 2026-02-15 09:47:40+00:00
Most of what the section "Why ROX exists" reminds me of Rust and Zig, where both are more explicit (but Zig even more where there aren't hidden allocations, while Rust hides it).

Said that I really miss all the i{8|16|32|64|128|size}, u{8|16|32|64|128|size} and f{32|64} in other languages, I think having num and num32 is a mistake (IMHO) and naming like them like Rust/Zig provides more clarity (and it's also more concise).

For the "repeat" keyword I find it odd, because most other languages uses "for" but I can understand the reason and might be able to get used to it.

Otherwise I find always interesting new programming languages, what new they bring to the table and the lessons learned from other PLs.
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-15 09:49:11+00:00
I would recommend outright copying Rust.

Among other things, it's a systems programming language and hence its naming scheme is largely (if not entirely) compatible with modern C++ types.

I.e.:

+----------------+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Rust | Modern C++ | Notes |
+----------------+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| i8 | std::int8_t | exact 8-bit signed |
| u8 | std::uint8_t | exact 8-bit unsigned |
| i16 | std::int16_t | exact 16-bit signed |
| u16 | std::uint16_t | exact 16-bit unsigned |
| i32 | std::int32_t | exact 32-bit signed |
| u32 | std::uint32_t | exact 32-bit unsigned |
| i64 | std::int64_t | exact 64-bit signed |
| u64 | std::uint64_t | exact 64-bit unsigned |
| i128 | (no standard type) | GCC/Clang: __int128 |
| u128 | (no standard type) | GCC/Clang: unsigned __int128 |
| isize | std::intptr_t | pointer-sized signed |
| usize | std::uintptr_t | pointer-sized unsigned |
| f32 | float | IEEE-754 single precision |
| f64 | double | IEEE-754 double precision |
| bool | bool | same semantics |
| char | char32_t | Unicode scalar value |
+----------------+-------------------------+------------------------------+
by charcircuit | 2026-02-15 09:51:05+00:00
I agree. Every time I visit the arch wiki or forums for that matter its typically due to a failure of the way the software is.

For example instead of the OS noticing that zstd was not supported, it would always use a zstd compressed initramfs image and would require the user to manually configure a supported compression their kernel supported. I don't understand why they thought it was a good idea to break my install for something that should be easy to do automatically. One could say that there is value in the forum having information on how to fix my system, but this isn't something I should have ever seen in the first place.

https://archlinux.org/news/moving-to-zstandard-images-by-def...
by konradb | 2026-02-15 09:51:29+00:00
Maybe you can help me out, I listened to him talk about this and I couldn't make head-nor-tail of what he was trying to say. It feels like he's so tied up in concepts and metaphors and similes and allegories it's impossible to tell specifically what he is asserting to be true. If you could explain to me like I was five I'd be grateful. Not looking for an argument.
by srdjanr | 2026-02-15 09:52:09+00:00
Can one solution be always doing two scans, N months apart, before drawing any conclusions (excluding things that can be reliably detected from a single scan)? Initial scan could affect N (if you find something potentially aggressive, you can schedule the second scan sooner). And then do a follow up every M years.

That should exclude benign or very slowing growing things
by killerstorm | 2026-02-15 09:53:56+00:00
We've been using Zulip for ~5 years, I won't describe it as awesome.

E.g. it takes a minute to open a chat on mobile, but only few seconds on the web. No idea how it's possible if they use same underlying DB.

In fact a full text search over years worth of communication is faster than loading latest DM from a specific person in a mobile app!

And not much improvement over years: few things became nicer. But mobile app was always dogshit.
by walterbell | 2026-02-15 09:54:05+00:00
https://x.com/a16z/status/2018418113952555445

For my whole life in technology, there was this thing called the Mythical Man Month: nine women cannot have a baby in a month. If you're Google, you can't just put a thousand software engineers on a product and wipe out a startup because you can only... build that product with seven or eight people. Once they've figured it out, they've got that lead.

That's not true with AI. If you have data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve almost any problem. It is magic. You can throw money at the problem. We've never had that in tech.
by kgeist | 2026-02-15 09:54:49+00:00
Technically, clients could simply upload images to S3 and render them inline whenever they encounter an image URL in a message - no protocol or server changes required. And if you're using an older IRC client, you can still just click the link.

The main problem with IRC is that messages aren't stored anywhere. The classic IRC protocol simply broadcasts messages to whoever is currently present in the channel. When you rejoin, messages are typically not replayed. In theory, a modified server could handle this, and a supported client could recognize that it's receiving playback and present it as channel history.

I wonder why we don't extend the IRC protocol in these backward-compatible ways instead of inventing new messengers/protocols.
by motbus3 | 2026-02-15 09:55:13+00:00
Coding tools are less stable as the code grows for several reasons.

Some recent techniques claim to be solving this problem but none reached a release yet.

Working with what we have now, this is a recipe for disaster.
Agents often lies about the outputs. The shorter the context space they have to manage while the bigger the data already in context makes it prone to lie and deceive.

It works ok for small changes on top of human code. That's what we know works now.
The rest is more yet to be reached
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-15 09:55:14+00:00
Wave's core ideas are at the heart of modern collaborative tools. It's just the UX that was poor. If they stuck at it and refined it, they could be the leader of this segment. Something that I can say for a lot of what Google does. They quit too fast and maybe more importantly they don't use the knowledge they got from their failures to improve.

It's the same with Inbox which remains the best email client I ever used but weirdly Gmail never got the core UX ideas which made it works so well. I would like to say Google doesn't get UX but clearly they have great UX designers on board. It's just that they probably never get final say and are not first class citizen.
Show HN: Goutils – 70 type-safe generic functions for async/functional Go
by skatiyar | 2026-02-15 09:56:23+00:00
I built a Go utility library inspired by the JavaScript async library, implemented idiomatically with Go 1.18+ generics. Avoids using reflection and interface{} wherever possible.

It provides ~70 functions across four packages:

Sync and Async -- map, filter, detect, reduce, every, some, reject, groupBy -- for both slices and maps. Every async function runs iteratees in goroutines with panic recovery.
Concurrency limiting -- all async functions have a Limit variant that caps goroutine count via a semaphore.
Worker pool -- a generic work queue with configurable buffer, concurrency, timeouts, and graceful shutdown.
Control flow -- waterfall-style sequential execution with type-safe context passing.

Disclaimer: Parts of the code were generated using Claude Code. One of my goals with this project was to experiment with the latest models and see what they're capable of in a real codebase -- from writing implementations to tests to docs.

go get github.com/skatiyar/goutils@v1.0.0

Would love feedback on the API design and whether the function naming feels natural for Go.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-15 09:58:02+00:00
Correct, the goal is to be foster the adoption of safe systems programming, which given the uptake across all major cloud hyperscalers powering the Internet, and all major OS vendors selling hardware (with exception of one because they have their own alternative), is what I would consider a large success of anyone dreaming to get their language adopted at scale.

All major cloud vendors deploying my Java, .NET and nodejs containers do so, in infrastructure that has various layers of Rust code in it.

To value that as mediocre is quite strange.
by jddj | 2026-02-15 09:59:30+00:00
> Don’t spec the process, spec the outcome.

For this, which summarises vibe coding and hence the rest of the article, the models aren't good enough yet for novel applications.

With current models and assuming your engineers are of a reasonable level of experience, for now it seems to result in either greatly reduced velocity and higher costs, or worse outcomes.

One course correction in terms of planned process, because the model missed an obvious implication or statement, can save days of churning.

The math only really has a chance to work if you reduce your spend on in-house talent to compensate, and your product sits on a well-trodden path.

In terms of capability we're still at "could you easily outsource this particular project, low touch, to your typical software farm?"
by kcexn | 2026-02-15 09:59:51+00:00
There's a softer component to healthcare which is that people can overreact to medical results. If a doctor administers a scan, finds a handful of likely benign things but wants to administer another scan later on down the line, I'm probably much more likely to look for a second opinion that tells me to cut them out (even if it may not be medically necessary) than trust my doctor that "it's probably fine".

It's probably more accurate to use a software analogy about performance metrics. We measure random request spikes now and again that strain the system. It's probably fine, but later on down the line, something could change that results in an outage during one of these spikes. Do we proactively fix the problem even if no change is expected? Or do we wait till there is definitely a problem before taking action?
by antirez | 2026-02-15 10:00:58+00:00
If you use Redis Vector Sets you will easily see 20k - 50k (depending on hardware) queries per second. It is entirely possible to reach this results. With many millions of entries, but the results don't become much worse if you scale more. Of course all that serving data from memory like Vector Sets do. Note: not talking about RedisSearch vector store, but the new "vector set" data type I introduced a few months ago.