MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by heavenlyhash | 2025-12-31 14:52:49+00:00
Language explorers looking for lower level languages like this may also want to take a peek at the V language. https://vlang.io/

I won't say with confidence either is better than the other; but I think both are worth a look.

Odin (iiuc) always makes you manage memory; Vlang permits you to, but does also have linking to the Boehm GC that it will generate for you in most cases.

Vlang and Odin in terms of syntax and legibility goals... well. I suggest if you're interested, just quick look will say more than I can. :)
by sbondaryev | 2025-12-31 14:53:12+00:00
Tried running this with `uvx ny2026@latest` on macOS and hit an issue - the package needs `realpath` which isn't available by default on macOS, causing the path resolution to fail.

Workaround that worked for me:

git clone https://github.com/willmcgugan/ny2026
cd ny2026
uv run ny2026

Alternatively, `brew install coreutils` fixes the missing realpath if you want to use uvx directly. Nice effect once it's running!
by pizzafeelsright | 2025-12-31 14:53:39+00:00
I learned that dentists make their money by doing procedures that have little overhead and high returns.

I read about patients who would go one dentist that said they found X cavities and then go to another dentist that would say 'zero' were found.

I tested it myself when I was told I required extensive cleaning beneath the gums and the next dentist, who has a 3 month waiting list, said it was not required and my teeth were fine.

I no longer believe any dentist and considering most are now private equity operated it makes sense.
by estearum | 2025-12-31 14:54:00+00:00
I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument. It's fairly impressive in its density!

1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful.

2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solutions" is not an excuse not to pursue better solutions!

3. There are many dimensions of this that people care about beyond the "global concern" level regarding "pollution and fuel consumption."

4. There are many problems that are significant and worth thinking about even if they are not the largest singular problems that could be included by some arbitrarily defined criteria
by antonvs | 2025-12-31 14:54:30+00:00
Town names in England are full of historical quirks that don’t sound like modern English - try browsing a map, it’s fun. Some of its place names are thousands of years old.

Even names that seem very English now, like “York”, only seem that way because of their long historical presence. The town of that name started out around 70 CE as the Roman fortress Eboracum, which was a Latinized version of a Celtic name.

Later, around 600 CE, the Anglo-Saxons reinterpreted the name as Eoforwic, because “eofor” meant “boar” in Old English, although the earlier name had nothing to do with boars, other than sounding similar.

Then the Vikings came along the 860s and called it Jórvík, an Old Norse adaptation of Eoforwic.

Around 1000 CE, after the Norman conquest, the name was shortened to York. That has no meaning in English other than the place name and its derivatives. Fundamentally, it’s no more or less English than Matravers.
by jchw | 2025-12-31 14:54:32+00:00
I wonder if some day we'll look back differently on the "billion-dollar mistake" thing. The key problem with null references is that it forces you to either check any given reference to see if it's null if you don't already know, or you would have to have a contract that it can't be null. Not having null references really does solve that problem, but still in every day programs you often wind up with situations where you actually can know from the outside that some function will return a non-empty value, but the function itself is unable to make that guarantee in a way that the compiler can enforce it; in those cases, you have no choice but to face the same dilemma. In Rust this situation plays out with `unwrap()`, which in practice most reasonably-sized codebases will end up with some. You could always forbid it, but this is only somewhat of an improvement because in a lot of cases there also isn't anything logical to do once that invariant hasn't held. (Though for critical production workloads, it is probably a good idea to try to find something else to do other than let the program entirely crash in this event, even if it's still potentially an emergency.)

In other words: after all this time, I feel that Tony Hoare framing null references as the billion-dollar mistake may be overselling it at least a little. Making references not nullable by default is an improvement, but the same problem still plays out so as long as you ever have a situation where the type system is insufficient to be able to guarantee the presence of a value you "know" must be there. (And even with formal specifications/proofs, I am not sure we'll ever get to the point where is always feasible to prove.) The only real question is how much of the problem is solved by not having null references, and I think it's less than people acknowledge.
by cestith | 2025-12-31 14:55:38+00:00
That’s a more meaningful study than the first one for T2D in general, because it’s full diabetes diagnosis and between 1 and 11 years with it. That’s much different from prediabetes and fresh diagnoses.

The mean BMI in the study is around 24, which is overweight rather than obese. Their blood pressure was close to normal. Their A1C was in the diabetic range before intervention, but well below 8 so it was somewhat controlled.

After 12 months, 44% of people in the intervention group were off all their blood glucose meds. That’s far, far better than the control group for sure. It’s still not everyone in the intervention group.

This is also a pretty specific method of intermittent fasting, not just self control on a traditional meal schedule. So no, I don’t think this 72-person study shows that just having some self control solves T2D for everyone either. It looks like enough self control to stick to a specific, predesigned eating schedule works for almost half of people, though. That’s really good, but let’s not oversell it as a 100% cure.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-31 14:56:01+00:00
Wait'll you hear about Dungeons & Dragons! As if backwards masking in rock and roll music weren't enough.

You're right, I don't have much empathy for bullshit pop-psych as an instrument of motivated reasoning. If ChatGPT can convince you to kill yourself, you weren't sane to begin with, and something else would have eventually had the same effect on you. Either that, or you were an unsupervised child, victimized not by a chatbot but by your parents. A tragedy either way, but let's place the blame where it's due.
by hecanjog | 2025-12-31 14:56:11+00:00
I appreciate this perspective. I'm actually hoping LLM hype will help to pop the bubble of tech salaries, make the profession roughly as profitable as going into teaching, so maybe the gold diggers will clear out and go play the stock market or something, rest of us can stick around and build things. Maybe software quality will even improve as a result? Would be nice...
by a1371 | 2025-12-31 14:56:30+00:00
The problem is that most of the AI labs are popping up in TX that has a uniquely isolated electrical grid. Recall how the Texas cold snap a few years ago took down the grid for days. Turns out if you make a grid based on short term profit motifs, it's not going to be flexible enough to take new demand.

It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result of it
by symbogra | 2025-12-31 14:56:38+00:00
Really cool in depth report, thanks for sharing. It's very interesting to see what these big datacenter deployments are actually doing. Go look at the oil price charts for the last 25 years and you'll see why it makes a ton of sense economically.

I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.
by miltonlost | 2025-12-31 14:56:52+00:00
And all without the proper permits! Using 35 generators when they were only allowed 15! Yay! So glad we're allowing AI companies to break law after law after law to not be able to reason logically the basic Towers of Hanoi.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
by Alifatisk | 2025-12-31 14:58:06+00:00
The site is indeed instant, those performance tricks does work (inline everything, botli compression, cache, edge network like cdn), BUT the site is also completely empty, it shows nothing except a placeholder.

Things can easily change when you start adding functionalities. One site I like to visit to remind myself of how fast usable websites can be, is Dlangs forum. I just navigate around to get the experience.

https://forum.dlang.org
by JadeNB | 2025-12-31 14:58:15+00:00
I think your parent comment was speaking of a "base-$\alpha$ representation", where $\alpha$ is a single transcendental number—no concerns about countability, though one must be quite careful about the "digits" in this base.

(I'm not sure what "the elements of the base need to be enumerable" means—usually, as above, one speaks of a single base; while mixed-radix systems exist, the usual definition still has only one base per position, and only countably many positions. But the proof of countability of transcendental numbers is easy, since each is a root of a polynomial over $\mathbb Q$, there are only countably many such polynomials, and every polynomial has only finitely many roots.)
by heavenlyhash | 2025-12-31 14:58:34+00:00
I'm an advocate for "both".

- `Option<T>` and `Result<T,E>` at core;

- `?T` and `T!E` as type declaration syntax that desugars to them;

- and `.?` and `.!` operators so chains like `foo()?.bar()!.baz()` can be written and all the relevant possible return branches are inserted.

Having `Option` and `Result` be simply normal types (and not special-casing "nullable") has benefits that are... obvious, I'd say. They're just _normal_. Not being special cases is great. Then, having syntactic sugars to make the very, _very_ common cases be easy to describe is just a huge win that makes correct typing more accessible to many more people.

The type declaration sugar isn't the most important, but it's nice to have, and I think it really does change the way the average programmer is willing to write. The chaining operators, though... I would say I borderline can't live without those, anymore.
by sam-cop-vimes | 2025-12-31 14:58:39+00:00
I'm no fan of Musk, but you've got to admit it was a clever way to achieve the goal. SemiAnalysis don't do fanboy articles - their research is pretty in-depth. So they are stating it as they see it.

The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to come up with such "innovations".
by aesh2Xa1 | 2025-12-31 14:58:58+00:00
I wouldn't apply the usual "but mice" appeal to purity in this case.

For one, the paper specifically studied brain structures that are directly homologous in both mice and humans (retrosplenial cortex). The researchers specifically targeted evolutionarily-conserved circuitry.

Second, there is already human research on the topic, too, and this paper is reporting on a likely mechanism to understand "why" rather than "if." Here's one from a Yale researcher:

https://news.yale.edu/2025/09/23/psilocybin-breakthrough-men...
by jmyeet | 2025-12-31 14:59:19+00:00
Two thoughts:

1. More people need to be aware of the imperial boomerang [1]. To summarize, any technique or technology designed to subjugate colonial interests will ultimately be used the citizenry in the imperial core. As an example, a significant number of US police departments are trained by Israel [2] in, for example, controlling and quashing protests such as the BLM protests; and

2. Had the Internet and HN existed in the 1940s, I'm convinced there would be tech pieces on the V2 rocket and manufacture and uses of Zyklon-B.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

[2]: https://progressive.org/latest/us-police-trained-by-israel-c...
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-12-31 14:59:44+00:00
That's what all the serious European economists are pushing for especially Draghi and his report but the EPP and the countries which massively benefit from the status quo, starting with Germany and the Netherlands, are blocking any move in the direction of propping up the internal market.

Merz is actually doing a masterclass in beggar thy neighbors policies right now. It's pretty surreal to see them somehow stuck in pushing sell side policies when they have no one to actually sell to.
by kevin061 | 2025-12-31 14:59:47+00:00
The biggest, loudest, most powerful proponents of free speech don't actually believe in it. Musk bans and fires anyone who disagrees with him. Donald Trump rails against news articles and media companies who publish information he personally doesn't like, all while both of them blame the EU for violating a supposed free speech standard that they themselves hate, and also one the EU never really adhered to.
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-12-31 15:00:18+00:00
But the real issue here is his party. It's gone from 'economically conservative with preference for free markets, austerity, and military solutions' all the way over to 'Populist with slavish devotion to a fascist leader and a reactionary cause'. Romney now looks like a liberal compared to his party. We haven't had a party this bad since the know-nothings, federalists and the whigs, all of which self-destructed, and we haven't had a leader this bad since Andrew Johnson. It would be fun to think about what would have happened differently if we weren't on the brink of losing our democracy and/or being regressed back to 1890.
by yodon | 2025-12-31 15:00:38+00:00
Physics rules everything, once you start trying to run at scale.

The density of carbon per unit volume in solid materials of interest doesn't vary that much, whether you sink it in trees or in exotic materials like diamonds. That means you can calculate the volume of material required so sink a desired amount of atmospheric carbon.

If you want to have a measurable impact on the atmosphere, say dialing it back to 1980 CO2 levels, you're talking not about making a pile of stuff but about making a mountain range that's a mile high and hundreds of miles long.

Now figure out how many trucks you're going to need to move that much material from where your sequestering machine is to where your pile of stuff is.

Or if you want to dump that material in the ocean (which someone else will certainly object to), extend your calculation to figure out how many container trucks worth of material you need to dump into the ocean to accomplish your atmospheric cleanup in whatever amount of time you choose (a decade? If it takes a century, that's not fast enough).

And finally think about surface to volume ratios. You're trying to sink it into a volume, but you can only get the gas into the volume through its surface, so the speed of your process is limited by surface area.

If you want to do it with trees,
my spitball estimates are that you probably need to plant somewhere between the entire state of Connecticut and the entire state of Colorado to have the kind of impact one would want.

Which brings us back to economics. If you have a well-managed forest of that size and scale, someone is eventually going to come along, maybe in 100 years, maybe in 500 years, and say "hey if we cut this down, we could burn the wood to heat our homes" and all that carbon goes back into the atmosphere, so you actually need to sink it into something that is energetically unfavorable for recovery, which means you also need to expand a huge amount of energy to sink the carbon into that energetically unfavorable state.
Show HN: Running Analytics on 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite
by 7777777phil | 2025-12-31 15:00:45+00:00
First of all please go check out the amazing project this analysis is based on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308

For my paper [1] I analyzed HN attention dynamics using 72k temporal snapshots from December 2025 to model decay curves, preferential attachment, and engagement survival. Today I’ve cross-referenced these findings with the recent 22GB HackerBook SQLite export to validate my early-engagement prediction models on this 22GB historical subset.

[1] Preprint available on SSRN: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5910263
by metalman | 2025-12-31 15:00:52+00:00
Your welcome!
my comments are fair and balanced, my trust was lost, it's something that we all experience, and trust is a large portion of how we all make our personal technology choices, I shared that and am living rent free in your head, which , well, is the risk
of reading, untrustworthy sources, unless you can find an echo chamber, which this place, most defintly, is not.
the simple fact is that trust in technology is decining across the board, in all demographics.
and the guy was moving the edge, and then lost the plot
now maybe, just maybe, he learns how to read the room and play to the greater audience, something we can all hope to get better at!
by mvaralar | 2025-12-31 15:00:58+00:00
Toro is just a library OS that allows you to build an application and deploy it as a VM without the OS. Toro acts as the OS. Different that other unikernels, Toro is not meant to be POSIX compliant. The idea is to provide an API that suits better the use-case, i.e., an app deployed as a VM. Toro can also run in baremetal although I dropped the support a few commits ago. I can roll back that support in case there is interest.
by jzellis | 2025-12-31 15:01:36+00:00
I sync my history between Fire/Waterfox on my phone and laptops, and since almost anything I wanna copy and paste is in the browser, I just open whatever it is from Other Devices. For files or images, I use LocalSend now for everything.

Which is not to say there's not a big use case for this, but speaking only for myself, it's not a pain point. But it looks cool!
by Fileformat | 2025-12-31 15:01:37+00:00
There wasn't free hosting in 2003 when I first made it. I have thought about converting it to static, but it would be a complete rewrite, and there is always some other new shiny thing to play with instead.

The newer things I'm doing (like UnicodeSearch.org) are static, though I don't like forcing everyone to have JavaScript enabled.
by jcranmer | 2025-12-31 15:01:39+00:00
> Is it really too late for the C committee to not develop a modern string library that ships with base C26 or C27? I get that they really hate adding features, but C strings have been a problem for over 50 years now, and I'm not advocating for the old strings to be removed or even deprecated at this time. Just that a modern replacement be available and to encourage people to use them for new code.

The next version of C (C2y) is expected to be C29, not C26 or C27. And work has been done on a new string library: see, e.g. https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3306.pdf (not the only proposal!). That said, I would be surprised if anything gets merged into the standard in less than a decade, simply because the committee is not organizationally set up for major library overhauls like this.
by tacostakohashi | 2025-12-31 15:01:45+00:00
Basically, you just need a password manager.

I use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeePass

You can store the other details in the notes - e.g. which card / account is used for payments, what are the password reset questions & answers, which address is set for delivery.

Then, when you change credit cards / addresses / emails, etc., it's easy enough to find all the accounts you used the old one for and need to update.
Ask HN: How to transition into AI career with limited opportunities?
by mattfrommars | 2025-12-31 15:02:00+00:00
Hi HN,

As I look back at my career, vs what I want to do vs what I see in the news, I feel there is a massive disconnection. I don't see a clear way for me to jump into work that aligns with my interests. Perhaps it's a limitation in my mind, and there is evidence here of people who have managed to successfully jump into a tangent industry.

My situation, in gist, is that I’m a 35-year-old who started late in tech and has been working CRUD-type work at a financial services company for the past 6.5 years. I've been passively/actively looking for two years and haven't been able to get the kind of job I want.

In my little world, the only realistic thing I can do is prepare for interviews to join companies like Amazon or Meta. But for these companies, I genuinely admit I don't have the talent or LC skills to crack a senior SWE role. Going in at SWE II would mean a step back in my career. I also can't quite join startups since the feedback has mostly been, "we are looking for more early-startup experience or folks who have done more 0-to-1 projects."

The type of work I really want to do is related to MLOps infrastructure, distributed systems, or role in AI space that does not involve building models, because I think those are exclusive folks with PhD. I can only think of doing are courses or certificates. E.g. pursue CKAD, Azure Solution architecture certificate or Google ML Crash couses.

My main issue is that I'm doing all this based on feelings, without any concrete anecdotal experience. For example, speaking with my friend at MSFT, his approach to switching to AI is to literally apply internally to an AI-specific team. Unfortunately, I don't have this luxury.

What can I truly do on my own to pivot and jump into the AI industry to get hands-on experience with things that matter and are in demand? My goal the feedback from here will allow me to understand to what to focus on in year 2026.
by mitjam | 2025-12-31 15:02:07+00:00
> Now imagine you're one of these customers. [...] Then you find out: 90% of the engineering team is leaving for Nvidia, The CEO and President are leaving for Nvidia, All the IP is licensed to Nvidia, Your point of contact is now... a CFO and 10% of the original workforce?

Beginning of 2024, my employer was planning to buy GroqRacks, I knew someone from the CTO board and we had a chat about it. I was sceptical and din't hold back my opinion:

lock-in on niche technology, risk if the specific HW could serve upcoming/larger models, new model architecture implementations require proprietary knowledge and software, and we would need GPU clusters for training, anyway.

I don't know if that influenced the decision, but the project was stopped, in the end. I'm glad we didn't buy GroqHardware.