MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ipnon | 2026-01-01 08:03:42+00:00
I don't feel like I ever learned how to code. The first program I wrote was in Flash, it moved a little triangle spaceship around a small frame and shot lasers. I had no idea what was going on. Later in college I wrote a lot of Python, like Django and simple algorithms. Still had no idea what was going on. After college I wrote lots of JavaScript targeting Web APIs and DOMs and strange frameworks. Still confused. We were serving on the order of 100,000,000 people a day, kind of just made it up as I went along. Now I write Elixir, and still only have a fuzzy idea of what I'm doing, but eventually it starts to work with the features and reliability I want.

I suppose all of this is to say I still feel like I'm learning! If I ever feel like I have finished the learning process it will probably be on my death bed!
by agobineau | 2026-01-01 08:04:21+00:00
this is a very interesting read, thank you for posting

you may consider a simple example for yourself:

Portfolio $100,000.00
$60k into US Tbills, (3, 5, 10y)
$40k into SP500 cash
$40k into Sp500 on margin

$140k exposure
For the portfolio to be wiped out, you would need to have a 50% drawdown in the sp500 which hasn't happened in 90 years, and that assumes in a crash your tbill face value wont soar due to rate cuts
by schoen | 2026-01-01 08:04:32+00:00
Whoa, I sent a postcard to a Danish colleague last year! Does this mean I can't do that again in the future? Would this private company deliver personal correspondence originating from abroad?

Edit: I asked an LLM, which told me that we can still send letters to Denmark from abroad, but that Danes themselves will have to go to the new private contractor to send outgoing mail (instead of using their postal service). The private contractor will apparently still do regular residential and business delivery, including for mail that originates outside of Denmark.
by ksec | 2026-01-01 08:06:07+00:00
Instead of Predictions I guess I will do Wishlist.

JPEG-XL or AV2 with AVIF. I still dont believe AV2 would be a better technology. But regardless we need something better than JPEG. And WebP wont cut it. Arguably JPEG-XL isn't good enough either but we have to take what we have.

LLEVC + EVCv2, VVCv2, AV2, or H.267 early release. We need better video codec. H.264 High Profile is still 70% of all video usage. May be LLEVC could be a decent alternative if the recent testing showing 60% bitrate reduction were accurate.

Apple please open source your AAC-LC Encoder. It has been 10 years since you last update it and the release before that was 5 years so we are nearly 16 years since you last touched on it.

Battle of OLED and RGB LCD. It has been a long time since display technology was this exciting. We have Tandem WOLED and RGB OLED, battling RGB Mini LED and SQD - Mini LED. Both will drive quality and price improvements.

Safari - Please fix your multi Tab ( 10s to 100s of tabs ) issues. There are too many to even list but just copying 80 of what Firefox is doing is more than enough.

Oracle release ZFS, MySQL, Solaris and dTrace into certain foundation. With their licenses changed to BSD.

Bring back old 1.5mm typing distance keyboard on Laptops.

HyperScale Cloud competition. I still dont understand why all Cloud are so expensive. And dedicated server are not promoted enough.
by samschwab26 | 2026-01-01 08:06:39+00:00
Hey HN,
I’m the cofounder of EconTeen. We just shipped a new version today.

The idea is simple: once a day, you swipe if you didn’t spend money on something you normally would have. That logs the amount you didn’t spend and keeps a streak alive. Most days it’s a few dollars. Some days it’s more. The amount isn’t the point, the habit is.

We don’t hold money, invest it, or move funds around. This just tracks what you didn’t spend. Friends are there mostly for accountability. Budgeting runs in the background without asking you to micromanage anything.

This started as a financial education project and turned into a habit problem instead. Curious what people think, especially whether this feels motivating or annoying in practice.
Product Hunt page:
https://www.producthunt.com/products/econteen
Happy to answer questions.
by WoWSaaS | 2026-01-01 08:07:03+00:00
I was debugging why some pages of my SaaS were ranking while others weren’t, and ended up using Google’s site: operator as a full visibility audit.

This search shows every page Google has indexed for my domain — including blog posts, system pages, experiments, and long-tail content I didn’t expect to surface.

Here’s the raw search result:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Avect.pro

What surprised me:

Pages I didn’t consider “important” were indexed first

Some pages had impressions without intentional promotion

It revealed how Google is actually interpreting the product, not how I describe it

It turned out to be a simple but effective way to:

Validate indexing health

Spot weak or duplicate pages

Understand early search demand signals

Audit content strategy without any tools

Posting this in case it’s useful for others building or debugging SEO visibility on early-stage products.

Happy to answer questions or hear how others audit indexing without paid tools.

Happy new year
by ipnon | 2026-01-01 08:07:15+00:00
Chinese diplomacy doesn't work very well because they don't have power projection, so they can't attack Netherlands. They don't control global finance, so they can't sanction anyone because there is hardly any Dutch money in China. And they don't have any moral high ground because they're constantly performing industrial espionage and corporate nationalization on friends and foes alike. So all of this just makes me laugh.
by raphman | 2026-01-01 08:08:27+00:00
Indeed.

Small addendum: at least in Germany, early telephone wires (up until the 1950s?) were wrapped in paper, drenched in oil. The bundles were then enclosed in a lead-copper alloy to protect them from moisture.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KabelbaumFMAachen_49...
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-01 08:09:13+00:00
With guys who are in prestigious/powerful corporate positions, I wonder if there is a fundamental issue where everybody tends to brown nose them, but female brown nosing sometimes gets misinterpreted as flirtation and interest.

And because guys in these sorts of positions actually do get an overpowered amount of real interest from women, they may have a harder time detecting inauthentic interest-alias
than say a random janitor guy who a woman is being artificially nice to for some reason.

And then if the guy mistakenly thinks the woman is interested and makes a move, the woman may then in the moment feel unsure about what to do, because an abrupt rejection that contradicts their earlier outward behavior may make them feel not good, they might feel like they caused it, etc (which I think lines up with accounts I’ve read, except they don’t mention the brown nosing part of the theorized pattern).

This doesn’t excuse anything, necessarily, I just wonder if there are some complex dynamics at play. This setup we have where sexual relations are at will, subject only to consent, is not that old, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the system as-is still produces very bad outcomes at times even if the parties involved are all behaving in a non-psychopathic way.
by hippo22 | 2026-01-01 08:10:56+00:00
I don’t think this isn’t true. If you buy VOO, you’re buying shares in a fund that owns shares of S&P 500 companies. The managers of that fund are free to exercise their voting rights however they please. The reason why Vanguard shouldn’t be considered an individual investor is because Vanguard has chosen to delegate its votes to the fund owners. This is just a choice, they could easily choose differently in the future.
by freetime2 | 2026-01-01 08:13:00+00:00
Yeah this article didn't really sit well with me. Not the part where they procrastinated and never wrote the book... life happens. But as you say - the title is a bit misleading.

But the bigger issue to me is that after failing to write a book, they have now started accepting pre-orders and promising to deliver chapters as they are written. Because first, if they were capable of writing the book, they probably should have honored their original contract. And second, if they are not capable of finishing the book, they probably shouldn't be taking peoples' money in pre-orders for a book that they may not ever be able to deliver.

To be fair, it does sound like they were mistreated and/or mismanaged a bit by the publisher, which may well have hindered the writing process and helped prevent the book from getting written. So I'm not going to lose any sleep worrying about the poor publisher - who I am sure deals with this pretty frequently. It's mostly just the concern about not being able to follow through with their obligations to pre-order customers that concerns me.
by ManuelKiessling | 2026-01-01 08:14:32+00:00
I think this is the most-fitting one-liner right now.

The arguments going back and forth in these threads are truly a sight to behold. I don’t want to lean to any one side, but in 2025 I‘ve begun to respond to everyone who still argues that LLMs are only plagiarism machines, or are only better autocompletes, or are only good at remixing the past: Yes, correct!

And CPUs can only move zeros and ones.

This is likewise a very true statement. But look where having 0s and 1s shuffled around has brought us.

The ripple effects of a machine doing something very simple and near-meaningless, but doing it at high speed and again and again without getting tired, cannot be underestimated.

At the same time, here is Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, who famously, and at the time correctly, stated that "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

It took a while, but eventually, his statement became false.
by anthuswilliams | 2026-01-01 08:15:04+00:00
> And premiums would go up.

Yes. As I wrote above, insurers compete on premiums, and they do do so by using rebates to subsidize those premiums by spreading patients' deductibles across the insured population. As far as profits go, I can't speak to regulatory issues since they will vary by state, but in any case the same critique would apply if insurers are pocketing a fixed percentage of a larger amount.

Re your second point, it completely twists my point and is largely irrelevant. Yes, older people paying the same premiums as younger people is a counter-argument in that older people are more likely to need healthcare, but the central point is that people who have to USE their insurance (i.e. sick people) subsidize the premiums of people who don't (healthy people), and this critique applies regardless of age. Now, one could argue that the structural factors that control costs across age cohorts counterbalances this phenomenon. And I'd agree with you! But that doesn't negate the original point that insurance companies benefit from, and advocate for, high sticker prices.
by noodletheworld | 2026-01-01 08:15:07+00:00
> What's the metric?

Language model capability at generating text output.

The model progress this year has been a lot of:

- “We added multimodal”

- “We added a lot of non AI tooling” (ie agents)

- “We put more compute into inference” (ie thinking mode)

So yes, there is still rapid progress, but these ^ make it clear, at least to me, that next gen models are significantly harder to build.

Simultaneously we see a distinct narrowing between players (openai, deepseek, mistral, google, anthropic) in their offerings.

Thats usually a signal that the rate of progress is slowing.

Remind me what was so great about gpt 5? How about gpt4 from from gpt 3?

Do you even remember the releases? Yeah. I dont. I had to look it up.

Just another model with more or less the same capabilities.

“Mixed reception”

That is not what exponential progress looks like, by any measure.

The progress this year has been in the tooling around the models, smaller faster models with similar capabilities. Multimodal add ons that no one asked for, because its easier to add image and audio processing than improve text handling.

That may still be on a path to AGI, but it not an exponential path to it.
by mkleczek | 2026-01-01 08:16:52+00:00
This.

In-RDBMS computation specified in declarative language with generic, protocol/technology specific adapters handling communication with external systems.

Treating RDBMS as a computing platform (and not merely as dumb data storage) makes systems simple and robust.
Model your input as base relations (normalized to 5NF) and output as views.

Incremental computing engines such as https://github.com/feldera/feldera go even further with base relations not being persistent/stored.
by throw1235435 | 2026-01-01 08:17:08+00:00
Not really. I used to think more general with the first generation of LLM's but given all progress since o1 is RL based I'm thinking most disruption will happen in open productive domains and not closed domains. Speaking to people in these professions they don't think SWE's have any self respect and so in your example of law:

* Context is debatable/result isn't always clear: The way to interpret that/argue your case is different (i.e. you are paying for a service, not a product)

* Access to vast training data: Its very unlikely that they will train you and give you data to their practice especially as they are already in a union like structure/accreditation. Its like paying for a binary (a non-decompilable one) without source code (the result) rather than the source and the validation the practitioner used to get there.

* Variability of real world actors: There will be novel interpretations that invalidate the previous one as new context comes along.

* Velocity vs ability to make judgement: As a lawyer I prefer to be paid higher for less velocity since it means less judgement/less liability/less risk overall for myself and the industry. Why would I change that even at an individual level? Less problem of the commons here.

* Tolerance to failure is low: You can't iterate, get feedback and try again until "the tests pass" in a court room unlike "code on a text file". You need to have the right argument the first time. AI/ML generally only works where the end cost of failure is low (i.e can try again and again to iron out error terms/hallucinations). Its also why I'm skeptical AI will do much in the real economy even with robots soon - failure has bigger consequences in the real world ($$$, lives, etc).

* Self employment: There is no tension between say Google shareholders and its employees as per your example - especially for professions where you must trade in your own name. Why would I disrupt myself? The cost I charge is my profit.

TL;DR: Gatekeeping, changing context, and arms race behavior between participants/clients. Unfortunately I do think software, art, videos, translation, etc are unique in that there's numerous examples online and has the property "if I don't like it just re-roll" -> to me RLVR isn't that efficient - it needs volumes of data to build its view. Software sadly for us SWE's is the perfect domain for this; and we as practitioners of it made it that way through things like open source, TDD, etc and giving it away free on public platforms in numerous quantities.
by yxhuvud | 2026-01-01 08:17:15+00:00
The why is not that hard to understand - insects provide a lot of proteins compared to how much food they consume over their lifetime.

But yes, the obvious place to start is to use it for feeding chickens and not humans. Why chickens? Because insects are part of their natural diet when they are free. There is just a bunch of infrastructure problems that need to be solved for that to work as insects have pretty different problems to solve compared to other parts of the food production chain.
by surajrmal | 2026-01-01 08:17:49+00:00
I think this is happening by raising the floor for job roles which are largely boilerplate work. If you are on the more skilled side or work in more original/ niche areas, AI doesn't really help too much. I've only been able to use AI effectively for scaling refactors, not really much in feature development. It often just slows me down when I try to use it. I don't see this changing any time soon.
by Itoldmyselfso | 2026-01-01 08:17:55+00:00
1. It's not possible to root GrapheneOS or any Android-based OS and preserve the Android security model. That would run entirely counter to the goal of the GOS. It can be done but shouldn't.

2. They have implemented kill switches for these on the software level. Afaik there's nothing up dispute these working just as well as hardware switches assuming proper verified install of GOS.
by sidkshatriya | 2026-01-01 08:18:01+00:00
> I have found that null pointers are usually very easy to find and fix, especially since most platforms reserve the first page of (virtual) memory to check for these errors.

This is true. However, you have done these fixes after noticing them at runtime. This means that you have solved the null problem for a certain control + data state in code but you don't know where else it might crop up again. In millions of lines of code, this quickly becomes a whack-a-mole.

When you use references in Rust, you statically prove that you cannot have null error in a function for all inputs the function might get if you use Rust style references. This static elimination is helpful. Also you force programmers to distinguish between &T and Option<&T> and Result<&T,E> -- all of which are so common in system's code.

Today it is safe to assume that a byte is 8 bits. Similarly it is safe to assume that the first page in virtual memory is non-readable and non-writable -- why not make use of this fore knowledge ?

> This is related to the drunkard’s search principle (a drunk man looks for his lost keys at night under a lamppost because he can see in that area).

This is a nice example and I do agree in spirit. But then I would offer the following argument: Say, a problem (illegal/bad virtual address) is caused 60% by one culprit (NULL dereference) and 40% by a long tail of culprits (wrong virtual memory address/use after free etc). One can be a purist and say "Hey, using Rust style references" only solves the 60% case, addresses can be bad for so many other reasons ! Or one can pragmatic and try to deal with the 60%.

I cringe every time I see *some_struct in Linux kernel/system code as function argument/return. Does NULL indicate something semantically important ? Do we need to check for NULL in code that consumes this pointer ? All these questions arise every time I see a function signature. Theoretically I need to understand the whole program to truly know whether it is redundant/necessary to check for NULL or not. That is why I like what Rust and Zig do.
by BiteCode_dev | 2026-01-01 08:18:45+00:00
> There needs to be an initial chapter for teaching Python in case the reader doesn't have the background.

I can't stand books that start with a half-baked Python tutorial. It's not only wasting the time of people who know, but worse, it's wasting the time of people who don't.

Because a one-chapter explanation on the topic is always going to be so superficial that the people who actually need it will never have the details they actually require to get up to speed. You will give them the illusion of understanding, only to let them hit a wall the first time they try any.

Before uv, install python package was a topic that required a lot more than a quick intro, explaining virtualenv, branching depending on OSes, even backtracking how to source the Python installer.

Better to just say "mastering this is a requirement prior reading the book" and be done with it.

There are full books on the topic that can actually help.

Replace this useless chapter with more content to which the book is actually dedicated.
by utopiah | 2026-01-01 08:20:36+00:00
> All these improvement in a single year

> hard to argue against the value of current AI

> People are willing to pay $200 per month, and it is getting $1B dollar runway already.

Those are 3 different things. There can be a LOT of fast and significant improvements but still remain extremely far from the actual goal, so far it looks like actually little progress.

People pay for a lot of things, including snake oil, so convincing a lot of people to pay a bit is not in itself a proof of value, especially when some people are basically coerced into this, see how many companies changed their "strategy" to mandating AI usage internally, or integration for a captive audience e.g. Copilot.

Finally yes, $1B is a LOT of money for you and I... but for the largest corporations it's actually not a lot. For reference Google earned that in revenue... per day in 2023. Anyway that's still a big number BUT it still has to be compared with, well how much does OpenAI burn. I don't have any public number on that but I believe the consensus is that it's a lot. So until we know that number we can't talk about an actual runway.
by BenoitP | 2026-01-01 08:22:04+00:00
On the brand new and shiny 486 running dos and windows 3.1 that my father bought, on the qbasic language. With only a paper book as reference. No llm, no stackoverflow, no pageranked search engine, no internet, and not even Ctrl+F. In these days when you had a bug, you could chew on it for days.
by rdm_blackhole | 2026-01-01 08:22:29+00:00
> Furthermore, France is in the EU. They expect to deploy their implementation of the EU Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026.

> The EU has been working on this for several years, and it is currently undergoing large scale field trials.

Considering the recent track record from the EU regarding digital privacy, I would soon rather use a VPN than let the EU digital ID wallet verify my age and pinky promise not store any data about the sites that I browse.
by 578_Observer | 2026-01-01 08:24:53+00:00
Your insight into Japan is impressive. You are spot on—commuting from Gunma to Tokyo daily would be insanity. I work at a local bank in Gunma, not Tokyo. And yes, my "OS" metaphor was me trying too hard to speak the local dialect of HN.

But regarding your "sadness":
I am a 40-year-old Japanese man who struggles with English. Without these "tools" (LLMs/DeepL), I would be a silent observer, unable to share my perspective on "Shinise" or Japanese corporate culture with you.

You call it a "dystopia" where AI pollutes human connection.
I see it as a "bridge."
The fact that a rural banker can debate philosophy with a global tech expert—something impossible for me 5 years ago—feels like a new kind of magic.

The polish is machine-made, but the soul and the logic are mine. I hope you can accept this "augmented" form of communication.
by calmbonsai | 2026-01-01 08:25:33+00:00
At least with respect to aviation, we don't have any non-combustion power-trains that can remotely come close to the power-to-weight ratios of turbine engines.

The earliest cars were replacing the animal muscle power of carriages--a trivially easy feat given that the most primitive steam and combustion engines easily 10x both the raw power, power-to-weight, and power-density of a team of horses.
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-01 08:26:58+00:00
It's not in me to somehow disprove claims of exponential growth when there isn't even evidence provided of it.

My point with the F1 comparison is to say that a short period of rapid improvement doesn't imply exponential growth and it's about as weird to expect that as it is for an f1 car to reach the speed of light. It's possible you know, the regulations are changing for next season - if Leclerc sets a new lap record in Australia by .1 ms we can just assume exponential improvements and surely Ferrari will be lapping the rest of the field by the summer right?
by jaboostin | 2026-01-01 08:28:31+00:00
ZZT! It had its own in-game editor and scripting language ZZT-OOP, which blew my mind as a kid. That was the gateway drug to Flash and ActionScript, HTML, IRC bots, Minecraft mods, and more. Self teaching by building something fun and exciting always worked the best for me. Back when coding was for fun and not money :-)