MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-12-31 14:18:16+00:00
I mean, yeah, type erasure does give parametricity, but, you can instead design your language so that you monomorphize but insist on parametricity anyway. If you write stable Rust your implementations get monomorphized but you aren't allowed to specialize them - the stable language doesn't provide a way to write two distinct versions of the polymorphic function.

And if you only regard parametricity as valuable rather than essential then you can choose to relax that and say OK, you're allowed to specialize but if you do then you're no longer parametric and the resulting lovely consequences go away, leaving it to the programmers to decide whether parametricity is worth it here.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-31 14:18:37+00:00
Linux can do this as well, the issue is that just duplicates how many versions you need to have installed, and it's not that different in the limit from having a container anyway. The symbol versioning means you can just have the latest version of the library and it remains compatible with software built against old versions. (Especially because when you have multiple versions of a library linked into the same process you can wind up with all kinds of tricky behaviour if they aren't kept strictly separated. There's a lot of footguns in Windows around this, especially with the way DLLs work to allow this kind of seperation in the first place).
by somenameforme | 2025-12-31 14:19:00+00:00
If the government not sticking to a backed currency is one of the biggest concerns, then that's quite high praise of the concept in and of itself! In any case the amount of currency does not determine the size of an economy. Rather the size of the economy determines the value of the currency. As economies grow in a system with relatively finite amounts of currency, the currency simply becomes worth more - people become overall wealthier and things become overall cheaper.

This is how you get things like the elderly generation thinking people are just lazy - when they were young, you could fully fund university and have enough for a down-payment on your first home through a part time job. The dollar just went much further. They don't really understand that's not the way things are anymore, especially as most are largely detached from the broader economy.

Also the 'crisis point' you mention is similarly an issue with fiat currencies. Look we're going to print a billion dollars just this once... then 10 billion... then 100 billion.. then they're printing money by the trillions and insisting that the inflation will just be 'transitory', because it always has been, until the one time it isn't. It's akin to somebody arguing that you can always put a bit more air in the balloon - after all it hasn't popped before, so why would it now?
Ask HN: Are Google Search AI hallucinations common?
by blutoot | 2025-12-31 14:20:28+00:00
Are "hallucination" from Google's "AI Summary" in Search Results very common?

Go to google.com and type in"how do I ignore AGENTS.md in codex?" --> the "AI Overview" section on the top of the search results page confidently says "To ignore AGENTS.md in Codex, you can use the codex --bypass-agents command-line flag to disable its loading, pass alternative instructions via flags, or leverage the optional AGENTS.override.md file for temporary control, but directly "ignoring" it often involves command-line overrides or creating higher-priority files rather than simple exclusion, as Codex is designed to find these instruction files by default." Then it goes on to give two examples:

In reality, it seems like Google's search AI (Gemini I suppose?) picked up the third search result on the front page which happens to be an open GitHub PR - https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/5983 - "Ability to bypass/disable AGENTS.md pipeline (CLI) #5983"

So, is the problem here that whatever is prompting Gemini is not sending the full context of the search results? (like in this case, the PR is actually open)
by Bender | 2025-12-31 14:20:59+00:00
I was unaware California had black slaves. More power to them I suppose. There is no official count as to how many of the 2.2 to 2.8 million black people in California have slave ancestry from other states. Good on California for picking up the tab. California should bill the states their ancestors were slaves in.

AFAIK most of California's slaves were Chinese built many of the railroads and tunnels people commute through daily. How much will the Chinese get?
by frenchman_in_ny | 2025-12-31 14:21:37+00:00
Curious about what you're using as a cycling platform -- just the Peloton, or are you on a bike trainer? There's a huge library of workouts out there (see [0] as just an example), but mostly targeted at % FTP. The flow path is generally create your workout in an app to generate the FIT file, then upload to the bike computer (or use Zwift). But they tend to not support cadence range as yours does. Would love to find something that gives me %FTP and cadence range!

[0] https://whatsonzwift.com/workouts
by gethly | 2025-12-31 14:21:46+00:00
I do not, but John's old videos on the idea of making a language and addressing the modern problems of archaic languages has been cited many times.

Here is a list with his videos where he goes from conception to something tangible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ&list=PLmV5I2fxai...

The first video is from September 17, 2014.

Zig's first commit was Aug 5, 2015.

Odin has first commit in Jul 7, 2016.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-31 14:21:53+00:00
Thanks. I dont want to bother you as I assumed it would be just a case of pulling a feed but sounds like there is more. Plus I dont surf too often! I think they would have a high res weather model https://www.bom.gov.au/weather-and-climate/rain-radar-and-we... but not sure if it is.
by mrngm | 2025-12-31 14:21:54+00:00
I do like how it has some brutalist web design elements. With regards to drop-shadow colours on the /symbols page, it doesn't provide additional structure, so I would choose either none or a grayscale tint. Or, if you prefer colours, choose as many distinct colours as there are categories, such that they provide that additional structure.

The symbols on that page could be a bit bigger, though, as they are the main subject. (I changed 1.125rem to something like 1.6rem for text-lg; that works, but it could get a bit crowded with the clickable arrow on lower resolution screens).

I'm not a huge fan of things that move; the offset of a block of symbols, as well as scaling of an individual symbol block when hovering seems a bit too much. I would do either, but not both.
by smeeagain2 | 2025-12-31 14:21:57+00:00
Hell, look at Rust. Try bootstrapping that POS with verbose logging enabled, and watch the screenfuls of command line options scrolling by for every source file in the giant multi hour compile. It's got 30 years of cruft packed into a "new" language. Just think of how ridiculously complex it would become after an actual 30 years of real world use. That's the garbage you want me to replace C or C++ with? LOL

C++ sucks, but I'll take it over Rust any day.
by Sharanxxxx | 2025-12-31 14:22:01+00:00
2025 wrap

Got an internship

Rejected a lowpay job offer

Quit the 9 – 5

Built my own SaaS in 15 days as a self-taught dev

Got 250+ users on my app

Made my first sales before even consuming my 1-month stipend savings

Crossed $100+ in December revenue

Learned coding + marketing

Didn’t skip the gym

Deadlift PR: 400 lbs @ 130 lbs BW

Betting on myself in 2026

Happy New Year
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-12-31 14:22:07+00:00
Hello. I have. The first time, I was offered a job working on missile guidance systems. I told them I would not work on weapons, so they offered me a job working on something else instead. Then they asked me to move to another project that would require getting government security clearance. I said I wouldn't do that either because I was not willing to make the required promises to my government, so they gave me other projects that didn't require it. It's really not that hard to have a penny's worth of a moral compass if your skill has any kind of value. I think maybe the problem is people who only have value to companies that only hire people without any morals.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-31 14:22:20+00:00
Ubuntu still suffers the same kind of breakage though. You can't take an moderately complex GUI application that was built on ubuntu 2014 and run it on the latest version. Heck, there's a good chance you can't even build it on the newer version without needing to update it somehow. It's a property of the library ecosystem around linux, not the behaviour of a given distro.

(OK, I have some experience with vendors where their latest month-old release has an distro support release where the most up-to-date option is still 6 months past EOL, and I have managed to hack something together which will get them to work on the newer release, but it's extremely painful and very much not what either the distros or the software vendors want to support)
by devnavigator | 2025-12-31 14:23:09+00:00
Software engineer compensation in the United States continued to grow between 2024 and 2025, but the gains were uneven across levels and roles. While senior and staff engineers saw meaningful increases, early-career growth remained modest and principal-level compensation declined. When viewed alongside adjacent job families, a broader pattern emerges: organizations are increasingly rewarding roles that provide coordination, leverage, and execution at scale. This analysis examines what changed, where compensation is accelerating, and what these shifts signal about how companies value technical and leadership impact, and is largely consistent with AI-based technical roles in the US.
by lumost | 2025-12-31 14:23:22+00:00
The taxes on returning profits to investors via dividends are quite high. You’d be looking at the corporate tax rate (35%) + the dividend tax rates (between 15 and 35%). For any company which may need to raise equity finance later, this is an awful deal - but growing a cash balance doesn’t do the job either.

So MSFT is effectively getting 2x the equity by putting money into OpenAI, it also conveys some financial engineering capability as they can choose to invest more when profits are high to smooth out cash flow growth.
by XCSme | 2025-12-31 14:23:46+00:00
I will spend most of my time on building/growing my main product: https://www.uxwizz.com

I am also planning to "vibe-code" a piano-learning game: https://ultimidi.com (placeholder landing page for now), mostly because I need it for myself. It won't be 100% vibe-coding, because I like optimizing the code, but I want to iterate quickly and make it free for everyone.
by gethly | 2025-12-31 14:24:02+00:00
He said that for some period, the compiler will not be open source, the language will. Whether the compiler will become OS or not, I am not sure. But I think he just wants to get the spec done beforehand. I think he mentioned that the compiler code might be purchased via paid licence? I am not certain but as I am not a AAA studio, I do not care either way.
by alex43578 | 2025-12-31 14:25:32+00:00
The US already spends 38% more than the OECD average on education per student, just lagging Luxembourg, Austria, Norway, etc - if you’re a student in America, you have access to plenty of resources.

You’re right that these are complex systems, and just pouring more tax dollars and more debt into them isn’t working. Portions of our society need to value education, value contributing to society instead of taking, and reject criminality - but those changes require more than blind spending.
by smeeagain2 | 2025-12-31 14:26:06+00:00
The standard library hasn't done a damn thing to hurt C. There are better alternatives available and have been for decades. If some noob hasn't figured out that strcpy() is long outdated, that's his personal problem. If some company wants to put clueless noobs or idiots in charge of writing security critical software, that's theirs and their customers' problem, not mine.
by Ekaros | 2025-12-31 14:29:23+00:00
Surely 2026 will be it!

The issue I see is that if someone comes up with actual polished desktop experience, they will eventually ruin it like rest. And SteamOS is not desktop experience. Even if it is extremely nice store client. They make money from store. Others will make it from adds, analytics and so on... So it will end up ruined.
by ndriscoll | 2025-12-31 14:29:44+00:00
My point is more that thinking advertisement is simply "here's a coupon buy this thing" is naive. The more pernicious flavor is "this thing that everyone knows hurts you (but makes us money) isn't that bad. In fact it's good! You should do it!" That flavor is pervasive to such a degree that people don't even register it.

The AI people call this "alignment" or "safety".
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-31 14:29:59+00:00
"It's only popular, it's not really central to F-Droid itself."

I've used F-Droid for years and I've never used the client ("the F-Droid app")

For me the value of F-Droid is as a list of open-source software with (a) pointers to source code and (b) sample binaries

The goal of F-Droid could be to enable Android users to read, edit and compile the software they choose to run on their "phones"

But F-Droid promotes their own app ("the client") so maybe the project's goal is something more like an "app store"
by pdpi | 2025-12-31 14:30:57+00:00
Part of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of the art" — 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W.

So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-31 14:31:10+00:00
I agree with all. We use Tupperware clones instead of jars, and a microwave+gril+convection oven for 75% cooking. Reposting an old comment:

We are very happy with our Samsung Hotblast https://www.samsung.com/in/microwave-ovens/convection/28-lit... (or a similar version). You setup the temperature to 200°C (392°F), the time to 20 or 30 minutes and you can go to another room while it cooks. It takes some time to find the perfect time, and sometime you must use the microwave or grill instead, but it's perfect for cooking in a short time.
by hypertexthero | 2025-12-31 14:31:18+00:00
I watched a performance by Donnie Rankin on a classic Wurlitzer organ at Grand Rapids Public Museum in Michigan this past November.

https://tickets.grpm.org/events/01998223-5b9a-deac-f45e-f0d7...

My favorite pieces he played were the themes for Princess Leia and Star Trek TNG.

It’s an amazing instrument.
by ecshafer | 2025-12-31 14:32:07+00:00
I am using Odin to write a video game.... why would I want tn HTTPS stack, SQL Drivers, Websockets or any of that? Maybe eventually I might need some websockets if I want multiplayer. But I can also just make bindings to a C library so no real issue there.

Odin is explicitly made for video games.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-31 14:32:11+00:00
I remember Lindows, but I think their problem had more to do with their branding and marketing and the fact that it was sold commercially than it did with its UI resembling Windows, and all of those mistakes are trivial to avoid.

That said, even if the UI looking the same is an issue, it’s not that difficult to come up with a look and feel that is legally distinct but spiritually aligned and functionally identical… random amateurs posting msstyle themes for XP/Vista/7 on DeviantArt did that numerous times.
by simonw | 2025-12-31 14:32:30+00:00
I don't think that's true of three years ago - that's taking us back into GPT-3 territory.

And two years ago we were mostly still stuck with GPT-4 which had an 8,000 input context limit, very challenging to get real coding work done with that.

Easy enough to prove though, find some examples of people saying that 2-3 years ago and I shall concede the point!
by whstl | 2025-12-31 14:32:37+00:00
I'm really sorry, but if you think those topics above are "shallow", I don't think we have much to talk about and should probably agree to disagree.

> Can you explain when (if ever) a person should use an OOP approach and when (if ever) he/she should use a functional approach to implement a system?

I can, and have done several times, actually, for different systems.

> I don't think those fundamentals listed above help me

The list I gave was not exhaustive. You asked yourself for "concrete examples" and I gave examples.

The reason I can't answer hard questions in a simple message is exactly because those foundations are not "shallow" at all.
by imglorp | 2025-12-31 14:32:52+00:00
And the air quality around these plants is poor, leading to health problems for the neighbors.

This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.

I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.

https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...
by sidewndr46 | 2025-12-31 14:33:16+00:00
I normally disagree with such broad remarks, but in the case of C++ I agree. I sometimes see a less common feature of Python used and have to remind myself of the syntax and its usage. With C++, I start any project with the idea that I will only use a small subset of the available features. When I review other's code I pretty much need a language reference available at all times until I can settle into their particular flavor of C++
by parineum | 2025-12-31 14:33:58+00:00
I don't really understand this perspective.

What should be taxed?

Amazon, as an example, has servers in country X. Country X taxes the transaction or the income from the server company.

Amazon pays delivery drivers in country X to deliver goods, and the driver is taxed through various means (vehicle, fuel, payroll, etc).

What is Amazon doing in country X that should be taxed?
by saghm | 2025-12-31 14:34:00+00:00
Yeah I guess I'm not the target audience for this because I assumed that "the power problem" was "massive increase in electricity costs for people despite virtually unchanged usage on their part", not "AI companies have to wait too long to be able to start using even more power than they already are":

> Nicole Pastore, who has lived in her large stone home near Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University campus for 18 years, said her utility bills over the past year jumped by 50%. “You look at that and think, ‘Oh my god,’” she said. She has now become the kind of mom who walks around her home turning off lights and unplugging her daughter’s cellphone chargers.

> And because Pastore is a judge who rules on rental disputes in Baltimore City District Court, she regularly sees poor people struggling with their own power bills. “It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...
by drnick1 | 2025-12-31 14:34:07+00:00
Those are valid criticisms of Android, but I see at least two problems that prevent wider adoption of PostmarketOS (even among HN readers). First, it only supports what seems to be ancient hardware. Contrast this with Graphene and latest-gen Pixel support. Second, compatibility with Android is critical. People just want to run their Starbucks app and expect it to work.
by thunderbird120 | 2025-12-31 14:34:12+00:00
Takes much longer to build, requires a much larger up-front investment, and requires a lot more land.

The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short timescales are key.
by smeeagain2 | 2025-12-31 14:35:02+00:00
The whole thing will crash in the next few years. The economy will have its Wile E Coyote moment, all these "valuations" will evaporate overnight, the Shitcoins will instantly go to zero, the music will stop, and the bagholders will look down to find themselves in possession of their shiny new bag of pet rocks. (A few lumps of coal.) All of these mental flipflops people are using to attempt to justify current insane valuations will be revealed as the evidence of intellectual bankruptcy that they are.
by ecshafer | 2025-12-31 14:35:16+00:00
Odin is more similar to Zig or C, very similar to Zig I think, but less boiler plate and more similar to Go syntactically. I have also found Odin to be a bit more friendly than Zig to get compiling and running, less required safety. There is far fewer features so I wouldn't really compare it to C++ or Rust. I am not familiar with Hare.
by roflmaostc | 2025-12-31 14:35:42+00:00
The problem is you cannot plant enough trees around the globe to offset our CO2 emissions.
Also, a forest only absorbs CO2 while alive. Once it dies, it emits CO2 too.
You would need to permanently store the wood somewhere (submerging in water, etc).

Recent article:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/28/africa-f...
by Aurornis | 2025-12-31 14:36:29+00:00
Boom’s pivot to trying to build turbines for data centers wasn’t surprising when data center deployments started using turbines. Either their CEO saw one of the headlines or their investors forwarded it over and it became their new talking point.

What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
by gm678 | 2025-12-31 14:36:40+00:00
Different language, but I find this Kotlin RFC proposing union types has a nice canonical example (https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/projects/KT/issues/KT-68296/U...)

inline fun <T> Sequence<T>.last(predicate: (T) -> Boolean): T {
var last: T? = null
var found = false
for (element in this) {
if (predicate(element)) {
last = element
found = true
}
}
if (!found) throw NoSuchElementException("Sequence contains no element matching the predicate.")
@Suppress("UNCHECKED_CAST")
return last as T
}

A proper option type like Swift's or Rust's cleans up this function nicely.
by xpe | 2025-12-31 14:36:46+00:00
Sci-Hub rules:

1. You do not talk about Sci-Hub.
2. You do NOT talk about Sci-Hub.
3. If a download says "Stop," goes limp,
or taps out, that download is over.
4. Only two tries per mirror.
5. One download at a time.
6. Shirt and shoes optional.
7. Downloads will continue until publicly funded
research is widely distributed.
8. If this is your first time at Sci-Hub, you
have to download something interesting,
actually read at least part of it, learn
something, and then fight ignorance and/or
stupidity with it.
by utopiah | 2025-12-31 14:37:13+00:00
Indeed, that's what I kind of hinted at in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46442195 and coincidentally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46437688 briefly after, namely that OK, one can "generate" a "solution", that's much easier than before... but until we can verify somehow that it actually does what it say it does (and we know of hallucinations and have no reason to believe this changed) then testing itself, especially of well know "problems" is more and more important.

That being said, it doesn't answer the "why" in the first place, an even more important question. At least though it does help somehow to compare with existing alternatives.
by sidkshatriya | 2025-12-31 14:37:30+00:00
> not every new language needs to conform to your ideas of what is or isn’t excusable / acceptable.

That's true. Which is why I wrote "IMHO" i.e. "In My Humble Opinion".

I'm not looking to create any controversy. _I_ don't like Odin's treatment of NULL. If you're cool with it, that's fine too.