MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-05 10:26:41+00:00
You can absolutely write C# that reads close to natural language. I do so on a daily basis.

Legalese is a bit of a non-sequitur. Despite English legalese ostenisbly being written in English, it is specifically obfuscated, using terminology that is not encountered in everyday English so as to be more difficult for laymen to understand. In fact it is common for legalese to use English that is not English, that is, words that look like English words but have completely different definitions that are not in accord with how those words are used in regular communication.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-05 10:26:51+00:00
Do scholars even read it?

I guess:

- (a) propaganda/psyop/marketing/engagement farming may not be as old as the hills, but it's close: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39994449
(Cyrus cylinder ca. 540 BC has it fully formed; no doubt there was a preceding oral tradition but we're never going to know what the ontogeny may have been)

- (b) everyone uses the same tricks, because they learn them from their enemies (in an adjacent field the KGB's precursor learned all their dirty tricks from the Okhrana, probably in a nearly unbroken line going back to the first chimps who put together a coalition to overthrow the alpha chimp before the alpha sniffed it out. 100W is pretty expensive for a neural net; how else are you going to justify that calorie expenditure without scheming and plotting?)

- (c) telling truths that might hurt is more effective than lying (judging by XXI standards, maybe that's why he's been dropped from the curriculum?)
by IanCal | 2026-01-05 10:27:40+00:00
Ideally IMO this would be accept headers. You're asking for the same semantic content but a different format. I'm not sure if there's a nice way of specifying html but in a minimal sense (we do quality with images, perhaps linked), however these could mostly be text/plain or text/markdown (and it'd be nice if that was then formatted properly by the browser).

This often makes a really nice API if you can do other formats too - the main page of cnn could respond to rss accept headers and give me a feed for example.
by oliwarner | 2026-01-05 10:28:19+00:00
This isn't supposed to be a slam on LLMs. They're genuinely useful for automating a lot of menial things... It's just there's a point where we end up automating ourselves out of the equation, where we lose opportunity to learn, and earn personal fulfilment.

Web dev is a soft target. It is very complex in parts, and what feels like a lot of menial boilerplate worth abstracting, but not understanding messy topics like CSS fundamentals, browser differences, form handling and accessibility means you don't know to ask your LLM for them.

You have to know what you don't know before you can consciously tell an LLM to do it for you.

LLMs will get better, but does that improve things or just relegated the human experience further and further away from accomplishment?
by Flameancer | 2026-01-05 10:30:35+00:00
I keep coming back to see if Linux is usable for daily driving. I still dual boot but for the past 5 years if I don’t update my Linux partition for a few weeks due to going on holiday or visiting in-laws then I always run into boot issues. Mostly it’s been the OS booting to a black screen. At least windows doesn’t give me login issues and just works with any peice of hardware I want. It saying it’s perfect but even as a daily driver of windows canary, my windows system is much more stable than my Ubuntu/Arch System.
by TekMol | 2026-01-05 10:30:50+00:00
Why have multiple connections in the first place?

If your writes are fast, doing them serially does not cause anyone to wait.

How often does the typical user write to the DB? Often it is like once per day or so (for example on hacker news). Say the write takes 1/1000s. Then you can serve

1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 86 million users

And nobody has to wait longer than a second when they hit the "reply" button, as I do now ...
by wink | 2026-01-05 10:30:52+00:00
Without trying to make it sound judgemental I know literal dozens of people who stopped smoking and it hardly comes up in conversation anymore - I think I have like 2 friends left who smoke, out of... more than 50%? And several of them smoked for 10 years or more.

Maybe it's because most people don't just randomly are offered cigarettes or because it went from a "50% of the population" to "10% of the population in this age group".

I'm not saying that sober alcoholics are making a big deal out of it, it just feels different - maybe because it is seen as a lot more problematic than being a smoker? Or harder to quit. Or because it's rarer.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-05 10:31:30+00:00
This will not be unusual for any kind of software engineering work to be honest. A big chunk of work in B2C companies has to do with customer support, for example; building websites, apps, writing content, chatbots, etc with the objective being that people do not call customer support, because people on phones don't scale very well. And the other part is that when they do call, that the CS agent can address the issue quickly and has minimal administrative overhead.

But it's a weird one, because it costs millions to build features like that.
by bigfatkitten | 2026-01-05 10:31:42+00:00
> If you had tried, you would know that there is no fuse dedicated to "network connectivity".

Depends on the car. On modern Fords, it’s the TCU fuse.

> What I have seen done is to tear into the right roof pillar and cut the wires going to the antenna on the roof

Nonsense. Only a fool would do this, rather than simply disconnecting the antennas from the back of the module.

Manufacturers almost universally use FAKRA connectors for quick and error-free assembly on the production line.
by zipy124 | 2026-01-05 10:32:34+00:00
Depending on your confidence in yourself and your ability to execute sometimes also: Total Project Cost > Weekly rates > Day rates > Hourly rates.

Charging someone £10k for a solution can be better if you know you can do it quickly and changes the math for the buisness. They are more likely to pay a higher amount for a solution rather than an hourly rate.
by ch_123 | 2026-01-05 10:33:18+00:00
> TIMI is just a bytecode virtual machine and was designed as such from the beginning.

It's a bit more complicated than that. For one, it's an ahead-of-time translation model. The object references are implemented as tagged pointers to a single large address space. The tagged pointers rely on dedicated support in the Power architecture. The Unix compatibility layer (PASE) simulates per-process address spaces by allocating dedicated address space objects for each Unix process (these are called Terraspace objects).

When I read Frank Soltis' book a few years ago, the description of how the single level store was implemented involved segmentation, although I got the impression that the segments are implemented using pages in the Power architecture. The original CISC architecture (IMPI) may have implemented segmentation directly, although there is very little documentation on that architecture.

This document describes the S/38 architecture, and many of the high level details (if not the specific implementation) also apply to the AS/400 and IBM i: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/Chapter8.pdf
by Yizahi | 2026-01-05 10:33:25+00:00
Satya publishes his thoughts on some custom platform? What happened to the Big Beautiful Linkedin? I thought it was, ahem - "From cybersecurity insiders, to agriculture experts, to thought leaders on diversity and leadership, and beyond, the world’s experts are talking on LinkedIn.". Aren't Microsoft CEO the perfect leader to be an example and post there? Lead the way, so to say? Or did he realize that only corporate psychos and bots post there? :)
by qcnguy | 2026-01-05 10:34:11+00:00
Yes we do have proof of such negotiations. Political parties often use elections internally to select their leaders, those campaigns are public, and then they may spend months negotiating between themselves based on their publicly stated stances in order to form a government, or in more direct non PR systems, just take power directly if they win a majority. The resulting coalitions or governments are explainable. The EU Commission isn't and it's deliberately so.

>The current Commission is the von der Leyen Commission II, which took office in December 2024, following the European Parliament elections in June of the same year.

And those Europarl elections had no influence on who became leader of the Commission, did they, so why are you bringing them up - this seems like the kind of obfuscation the EU regularly relies on. Make noises that sound like what happens in real democracies and hope nobody notices that key links in the chain have been severed.

> Yes, every country is unique. And the EU moreso due to its history.

The EU is not a country. Its "history" is short and artificial. It could work however the people who constructed it wanted it to work, and they chose a dictatorship. What does that tell you about their intentions?

> It is just the chamber that accepts the proposed commmission, and has the decision to unilaterally force a no-confidence vote if the commission does not propose the laws the chamber wants.

No democracy has a chamber that works like this because that is useless and undemocratic. The Europarl's power to fire the Commission is theoretical. It requires a 2/3rds majority so it was never successfully used in its entire history - the Santer Commission resigned, it wasn't fired. No MEPs have ever suggested firing a Commission in order to get specific policies passed, so MEPs have no influence over policy at all. They can theoretically veto things and then watch the Commission reintroduce it again in a different form, so nobody who cares about policy ever goes into EU-level politics.
by optionalsquid | 2026-01-05 10:34:32+00:00
Denmark doesn't have submarines, if that's what you mean. We had two, one which even served in connection with the US led invasion of Iraq, but they got retired in the early 2000s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarines_in_the_Royal_Danish...

Not that it matters, regardless of whose subs you are referring to, since the US military already has free access to Greenland thanks to previous agreements with Denmark. See e.g.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/den001.asp
by cess11 | 2026-01-05 10:35:16+00:00
Let's say that was possible, why would it be likely, or even the most likely explanation?

How do you square this against, say, the possibility that the early jews wanted to differentiate themselves from the egyptians? I'm not sure about the specifics of the archaeological record but perhaps it was the case that pork was an upper class thing in Egypt due to it being fat and tasty, and slaves and workers were instead fed beef. Then the rule in Leviticus might reflect this and conserve a part of an older identity. In early judaism at least some of the fat from mutton and so on was burnt as a cultic sacrifice, so maybe the idea was to keep tradition from before the exile to the Sinai.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-01-05 10:36:46+00:00
Those are only tolerable because: They are free, optional, operated by people who have no incentive to be the slightest bit anti-user, and you are never actually limited to them so you can take the convenience because you still get the options and control when you do need it.

Produce the `./configure && make install` for Office and you would have a point.
by samiv | 2026-01-05 10:36:59+00:00
Yet more and more people are struggling to afford even basic necessities and one can only dream of the luxury of the 50's when a single working class person was able to pay and cover for housing, car, family and even have enough for leisure. Where has all the economic surplus gone? Right...to the bourgeois, the capital owning class that exceedingly extract more and more of the wealth generated by the society.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-05 10:37:10+00:00
It's narrow vs wide views. Wide views, automation and the like has improved the economies massively. But narrow views, people have lost their jobs, had to retrain and basically restart their career, and some never found another job.

This isn't just automation btw, but also just business decisions, like merging companies, outsourcing, or moving production elsewhere - e.g. a lot of western European manufacturing has moved eastwards (eastern Europe, Asia, etc). People who have a 30+ years career in that industry found themselves on the proverbial street with another 10+ years until their retirement, and due to trickery (= letting their employer go bankrupt) they didn't even get paid a decent severance fee.
by iamflimflam1 | 2026-01-05 10:37:58+00:00
I would reframe this as unable to rather than refused to.

It’s incredibly difficult in a successful business to change direction or even innovate.

There’s a bunch of guys in the engine room throwing coal into the furnace.

There might be one or two lookouts shouting - but they are drowned out by the noise of the engines.

If you’re lucky there’s a guy in the wheelhouse desperately spinning the wheel - but the connection between the wheel and the rudder is broken.
by 1dom | 2026-01-05 10:38:36+00:00
I'm sorry, I find your post insulting. I wasn't engaging in bad faith discourse intentionally, but your assumption that I am - ironically - doesn't feel like appropriate etiquette here either. Despite that, I'll try answer sincerely.

Your 1 megabyte index file has just added over 2 seconds to your page load time in 30 different countries based on average internet speeds in 2024. Chuck in some pictures, an external comment library and your other SSG hacks, and you've just made your website practically unresponsive to a quarter of the planet and a bunch of other low powered devices.

Value is relative. The benefit of rendering markdown on every request is it makes it easier to make it dynamic, so you don't need to do SSG compromises like rebuild and reupload multiple pages when a single link changes.

You're replying in my thread here, to my original points. My original points were that SSGs don't make sense for sites with interaction, which is why were were discussing the limitations of SSG search approaches.

> SSGs are used for publishing writing the same way PDF is used. Nobody sane thinks that they need a comment section in their PDFs.

Thank you! We're in agreement, it doesn't make sense to use SSGs for sites that require interaction. When you do, it forces the rest of your site to do the compromising search stuff like we're discussing here.
by aydin212 | 2026-01-05 10:38:57+00:00
#3 hit hard. You can edit a bad page, but you can't edit a blank one.
I've wasted weeks overthinking architecture for things I'd never built. Shipping something ugly and learning from real feedback taught me more than any amount of planning.
Also #6 is underrated. Early on I thought good work speaks for itself. It doesn't. Took me years to realize decisions happen in rooms I'm not in. If no one can explain your impact when you're gone, it doesn't exist.

Thanks for sharing this.
by gilli | 2026-01-05 10:39:32+00:00
Location: Reykjavik Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Design, Vue.js, Django, Phoenix framework, Quasar, Product Design, Front-end Development Résumé/CV: https://gilli.is Email: gilli@hn.gilli.is
About: Available for freelance projects. I love solving complex problems and have 14 years of experience in Fin-Tech, Journalism, TV and Media, Health, Science, and more. I've taken countless projects from 0 to 1. I pick up new tech easily and like working on complex products. I take my work very seriously and put a lot of work into excellent communication, proper planning, and properly understanding your product.

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by PostOnce | 2026-01-05 10:40:04+00:00
Not everything is absolutely black and white, but here is my best effort to convey my take:

Two wrongs don't make a right, nor does the second wrongdoer make me more sympathetic to the first.

Frankly, none of the oil wealth in Venezuela has been doing anything to improve the life of the average Venezuelan, and that is a terrible state of affairs. It has only served to drown the corrupt rich in their own champagne. Would Maduro be where he is if he were not a dictator robbing the poor of his own country of the benefit of their own natural resources?

I have great sympathy for the nation of Venezuela and its people, but also for the rule of law -- both internationally, as this was surely an illegal action, but also the rule of law internally in Venezuela for the past long while. The ICC didn't start investigating Venezuela for nothing. The people of Venezuela deserve better.

I have very little sympathy for the oligarchs, Maduro, any number of corrupt related subordinate officials and facilitators that led to the exodus of millions of Venezuelans and the precipitous decline inside Venezuela, in terms of everything from national finances to civil rights to economic opportunity for the average man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court_i...

I am not at all sympathetic to anything the Trump administration is doing. I don't believe any of it makes much sense, not even from the perspective of greed or stupidity, but I don't need to go into all of that right now. That has no bearing on my lack of sympathy for the ex-Government of Venezuela.
by samiv | 2026-01-05 10:40:07+00:00
This is putting the apple cart before the horse.

Economy should be a tool for the society and to benefit everyone. Instead it's becoming more and more a playground for the rich to extract wealth and the proletariats have only purpose to serve the bourgeois lest they be discarded to the outskirts of the economy and often to the literal slums of the society while their peers shout "you're just not working hard enough".
by prmoustache | 2026-01-05 10:40:51+00:00
I think diversifying the physical activities is a good thing.

Also avoiding using your domotics, motorized vehicles, elevators and escalators, kitchen/cleaning robots/electric devices when there are manual replacement as well as not using domotic, does a super job on its own.

People have become lazy, pretend they don't have time to do stuff, then have to actually dedicate additionnal time so that their body doesn't suffer from their lazyiness. This is bonkers.

One day my brother saw me shirtless and asked me if I was going to the gym. I said no, I just have 2 young kids, carry my groceries including cat litter by foot, use a shovel to clear snow, use a manual coffee grinder and kitchen whisk and only use my car when it would take me more than 1 hours / 30kms by bicycle, etc. And I had an office job. Being active, fit and healthy shouldn't involve having to "exercise".
by David_Osipov | 2026-01-05 10:41:26+00:00
A product manager here. Thanks to AI, I was able to create my own website on Astro. I was so fascinated by web technologies, that I didn't realize when I created not just a website, but a blazing fast website with extensive amount of metadata generation (Json-LD, OG, microformats, Dublin Core, PRISM, RSL 1.0, Highwire Press, FAIR singposting, MODS generation) and so on. Thanks to this pet project, I'm now quite capable as a software architect of websites. And it is really fun!
by aydin212 | 2026-01-05 10:42:48+00:00
This should be required reading for anyone building government or emergency sites.
During any crisis, people have spotty connections, dying phones, and zero patience for loading spinners. A plain HTML page with bullet points would save lives over a fancy React app that needs 5MB to render.
The irony is we have better tools than ever to build fast sites, yet the average webpage keeps getting heavier. Somewhere we forgot that the web worked fine before JavaScript frameworks.

That bulleted newsletter list being the most useful thing says everything.
by nosianu | 2026-01-05 10:43:23+00:00
Read a bit further, the very next sentence???

> “All you could smell was sulfur hydrogen, and you cannot breathe,” Dr. Vrenozi said, recalling that most of the researchers were wearing masks. But as they descended deeper into the cave, she said that “you get used to the smell of spoiled eggs.”

Also, you use "" but you are not quoting, the text inside your quotes does not exist in the article. The actual quote would be

> The cave is hard to reach and is filled with foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, in concentrations too great for most animals to live there.
by maz- | 2026-01-05 10:44:12+00:00
Cool! Earlier in 2025 I decided I wanted to design a CAN-FD connected motor controller for RRF / Klipper / custom firmware without any experience.

I'm a software eng now working outside of the tech sphere so not exactly an electronics expert. I know enough to be dangerous but thats about it.

I found Gemini to be pretty great at validating an exported KiCAD netlist against the relevant datasheets with a few caveats.

The RP2350 datasheet in particular was an issue due to its sheer size - bigger than the maximum token limit.

I got around this by extracting the relevant parts of the datasheet myself.

It sounds like you might have this well in hand but worth asking anyway. I assume you've had good experiences testing with MCU datasheets and not just passives / power components?

When it got something wrong it was wrong enough to be noticeable by a non expert and with iterations over the schematic and an incredible amount of time spent learning how to lay stuff out properly, I got a reasonably complex board (double sided, 6 layer, roughly 130 components) produced and fully functional first time.

I'm interested in trying this out on my working design and seeing what it comes up with!

If you can keep this cheap enough for hobby use (or pay as you go for example) and also find a way to validate or check for common layout concerns then that would be incredibly powerful.

It's great to see some genuinely useful use cases for LLM tech that isn't just "we replaced our support people with a shitty chat bot" :)
by beders | 2026-01-05 10:44:13+00:00
While the author mentions that he just doesn't have the time to look at all the databases, none of the reviews of the last few years mention immutable and/or bi-temporal databases.

Which looks more like a blind spot to me honestly. This category of databases is just fantastic for industries like fintech.

Two candidates are sticking out.
https://xtdb.com/blog/launching-xtdb-v2 (2025)
https://blog.datomic.com/2023/04/datomic-is-free.html (2023)
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-05 10:44:35+00:00
That's basically a vacation, or what it should be. I feel sorry for US people who, at best, get two weeks of paid time off a year, which they'll often need to use up throughout the year for other reasons. Everyone should be able to take a two week uninterrupted break at least once a year, ideally more often than that (two weeks around the holiday season, two weeks in summer, another week at another point, a long weekend on occasion, etc).
by plqbfbv | 2026-01-05 10:44:38+00:00
Yes, but they set more ambitious goals than the EU and they're succeeding at moving energy generation to renewables and electrifying transportation: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

The chemical sector is the only reason why emissions haven't meaningfully declined yet, and I suspect it is in part due to conversion of supply chain for electrification.

The point is that they're paying a one-off cost (thus producing a peak) and they're already reaping rewards. Once they fully transition power generation to renewables and electrify transportation, what's left can be better regulated and CO2 recapture more easily scaled thanks to also R&D advances on CO2 recapture (e.g. capturing CO2 emissions from a chemical plant's exhaust). Then, even if you need more energy for CO2 recapture, you can keep scaling renewables further.