MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by notahacker | 2026-01-04 19:29:15+00:00
She has no support amongst the military government which currently runs Venezuela, and having pulled off the "we are very strong" manoeuvre the US is unlikely to have any further interest in Venezuela beyond getting paid off by them.

I suspect key actors in the Venezuelan administration and military also don't have much support for Maduro (the US must have had some reason to believe they could pull this operation off with extremely low risk of downed helicopters and surrounded special forces), but acting like they do avoids all sorts of awkward schisms whilst keeping oil flowing to the right people.
by bitwize | 2026-01-04 19:29:40+00:00
Wait till the VC tap gets shut off.

You: Hey ChatGPT, help me center a div.

ChatGPT: Certainly, I'd be glad to help! But first you must drink a verification can to proceed.

Or:

ChatGPT: I'm sorry, you appear to be asking a development-related question, which your current plan does not support. Would you like me to enable "Dev Mode" for an additional $200/month? Drink a verification can to accept charges.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-04 19:29:42+00:00
To offer some additional causes for the degradation of UX:

1. An increasing part of industry profits started coming from entertainment (or worse, psychological exploitation) instead of selling the customer a useful tool. For example, good budgeting-software has to help the user understand and model and achieve a goal, while a "good" slot-machine may benefit from confusion and distraction and a giant pull-handle.

2. "Must work on a touchscreen that fits in a pocket" support drags certain things to a lowest common denominator.

3. UX as a switching-cost for customers has started happening more on a per-product rather than a per-OS basis. Instead of learning the Windows or Mac "way" of screens and shortcuts, individual programs--especially those dang Electron apps--make their own reinventions of the wheel.
by mands | 2026-01-04 19:30:06+00:00
Yep, have seen this myself as previously a manager and now with a young family.

I can make incredible progress on side-projects that I never would have started with only 2-4 hours carved out over the course of a week.

There is a hopefully a Jevon's paradox here that we will have a bloom of side-projects, "what-if" / "if only I had the time" type projects come to fruition.
by teaearlgraycold | 2026-01-04 19:30:08+00:00
I have this suspicion that the people who say they have 10x productivity gains from AI might largely see improvements from a workflow change which fixes their executive dysfunction. Back in the day I never had any issue just sitting down and coding something out for 4 hours straight. So I don’t think LLMs feel quite as big for me. But I can see the feeling of offloading effort to a computer when you have trouble getting started on a sub-task being a good trick to keep your brain engaged.

I’ve personally seen LLMs be huge time savers on specific bugs, for writing tests, and writing boilerplate code. They’re huge for working in new frameworks that roughly map to one you already know. But for the nitty gritty that ends up being most of the work on a mature product where all of the easy stuff is already done they don’t provide as big of a multiplier.
by motohagiography | 2026-01-04 19:30:18+00:00
ive spent much of my life sitting alone in cafes, some places i became something of a fixture. what made me welcome was i never used a laptop, always left the copy of whatever newspaper or magazine i was reading behind in their pile, tipped well, and kept to myself.

i used to leave my copy of the weekend FT or the economist at one and there were people who would wait for me to be finished with it. others would have been reading it for months without knowing i was the one who supplied it.

friends knew where to find me and could show up and sit at my table for a bit on their way places. covid policies killed most of those cafes in my city, and nothing can replace a multi decade family run restaurant that anchored a neighbourhood. its part of why i don't forgive what happened. it was my culture they dismantled in their hysteria. i am glad nature is healing and younger people are learning how to be welcome and open to the serendipity of participating in the city. i was worried i was the last of the boulevardiers. get a book, turn off your phone, dont look at the prices and just sit somewhere for a while, eat and drink as much as you enjoy, and just be a quiet pleasant presence. the world rewards it.
by cromka | 2026-01-04 19:30:42+00:00
As I explained in response to other commenters, it wouldn't have to be vcpkg. Maybe I didn't articulate it best, but the inherent issue is not just Anti Microsoft stance, but more of not-invented-here paradigm. They go against the grain too much and it tangibly makes things worse for devs and users. They could have gone with other package manager instead on insisting on Craft. They hardly ever have any good arguments for it, feels like sunken cost fallacy all over.
by vaylian | 2026-01-04 19:30:50+00:00
I've been thinking about Rust errors as well. We see all these nice tutorials that explain how you can match on an Err and then handle it. But I haven't seen this being done in practise. Most errors are reported directly to the user. There don't seem to be any attempts to automatically handle them.

The cause for an error can be upstream or downstream. If a function fails, because the network is down, then this is a downstream error. The user has not done anything wrong (unless they also are responsible for the network infrastructure). In that case a retry after a few moments might be the right approach. However, if the user provides bad function arguments, then the user needs to be informed, that it's them who need to make corrections. However, it is not always clear if that is the case. If a user requests a non-existing file, then there might be different reasons why the file does not exist (yet).
by ndepoel | 2026-01-04 19:31:22+00:00
The real "a-ha" demystifying moment for me was not so much learning about the elementary rotation, translation or even perspective projection operations. It was understanding how all of those operations can be composed together into a single transformation and that all that 3D graphics really is, is transforming coordinates from one relative space to another.

One important revelation in that regard for instance, was that moving a camera within a world is mathematically exactly the same as moving the world in the opposite direction relative to the camera. Once you get a feel for how transformations and coordinate spaces work, you can start playing around with them and a whole new world of possibilities opens up to you.
by rdm_blackhole | 2026-01-04 19:32:17+00:00
Well the genie is out of the bottle now.

Every petty tyrant or so called leader in Africa, Middle east, Asia and who knows where else now know that going to another country, snatching the leader and kidnapping them can be done without much consequences at any time so long as they go in guns blazing.

The EU who usually likes to parade around by giving lessons of democracy to everyone is basically completely silent on the whole affair besides Spain who came out saying that they would not recognize whoever ends up taking Maduro's place as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.

And to top it all off you have numerous people who believe that if you have a problem with what the US did then you must be some sort of closeted commie supporter.

I can't wait to see the mental gymnastics that these people will do if and when the PRC decides to do the same thing to the leaders of Taiwan in the future. Will they be so quick to agree that this isn't such a big deal? I think not.
by tliltocatl | 2026-01-04 19:32:30+00:00
> Show me somebody who calls the IBM S/360 a RISC design, and I will show you somebody who works with the s390 instruction set today.

Ahaha so true.

But to answer the post's main question:

> Why do we even have linear physical and virtual addresses in the first place, when pretty much everything today is object-oriented?

Because backwards compatibility is more valuable than elegant designs. Because array-crunching performance is more important than safety. Because a fix for a V8 vulnerability can be quickly deployed while a hardware vulnerability fix cannot. Because you can express any object model on top of flat memory, but expressing one object model (or flat memory) in terms of another object model usually costs a lot. Because nobody ever agreed of what the object model should be. But most importantly: because "memory safety" is not worth the costs.
by tuxedomakes | 2026-01-04 19:32:43+00:00
Hey folks!

TLDR: I built WLEDger, a self hosted, open source inventory system for hobbyists that helps you find your physical parts by lighting up an LED where the part is located. Give it a try using docker compose and let me know what you think! Open source PCB reference files for custom setups are provided in the repo.

Background:

I have hundreds of electronic components in my lab. I couldn't remember what parts I had or where they were stored, leading to over-buying and under-utilizing. I wanted a system that solved these problems and got me back to doing what I love: making!

Existing tools were expensive, closed source, or unmaintained. WLEDger provides a purpose-built, open source, self hostable tool to help you manage and find your things.

The core feature of WLEDger is visually locating things. It integrates with WLED controllers and LED strips. When you search for a component (e.g., "ESP32"), WLEDger sends a signal to a WLED controller to physically light up a specific bin on your shelf/drawer/whatever.

Features:

- Visual Locate: Click "Locate" and the LED associated with your part location lights up. Supports Strips, Matrices, and Compound layouts. If you can build it, WLEDger should support it.

- Stack: Built with Go, Templ/HTMX, and SQLite + SQLC. It's fast, type-safe, and resource-efficient.

- Mobile Ready: Responsive design for use on any screen.

- Get Inspired: Includes LLM prompt templates. Copy a prompt (and paste it into your favorite LLM - no API keys needed) based on your inventory to get project inspiration or implementation guides for the parts you actually own.

- Enterprise-ish features: Role-Based Access Control, multi-user support, audit logging, and bulk import/export capabilities. Quickly load your parts, backup/restore your data, or export your inventory and take it elsewhere.

GitHub (Source): https://github.com/tuxedocurly/wledger

Docs: https://tuxedocurly.github.io/wledger/

Build Guide: https://tuxedocurly.github.io/wledger/build-guide.html

I’d love to hear what you think, or if there are any features you'd like to see added.
by snet0 | 2026-01-04 19:32:44+00:00
At some point we have to bound our terms, obviously if someone interprets The Great Gatsby to be making commentary on interplanetary space travel they are incorrect but if someone was to interpret The Great Gatsby as containing some meaningful commentary that can be related to interplanetary space travel, that is within reason.

If your definition of "interpretation" involves making claims about the author or empirical details, it is clear you can be incorrect. Otherwise, I think everything else is permissible.
by ar_turnbull | 2026-01-04 19:33:00+00:00
This is a cool explanation, great visualization.

One note — on mobile the sticky section feels a bit tall making reading experience a bit clunky — maybe just screenshots from the simulation would do the trick, rather than live states?

Either way, looks great — nice work! Curious if the data shows anything about successful strategies, or if this could be simulated as well (ie. join an early stage company, get an MBA, etc).
by RaftPeople | 2026-01-04 19:33:21+00:00
> I don’t see any engagement with the centuries (maybe millennia) of thought on this subject

I used to be that person, but then someone pointed me to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which was a real eye-opener.

Every set of arguments I read I thought "ya, exactly, that makes sense" and then I read the counters in the next few paragraphs "oh man, I hadn't thought of that, that's true also". Good stuff.
by brainlessdev | 2026-01-04 19:33:22+00:00
NixOS rocks, but if there is some software you need to install to comply with company policies (e.g. Vanta) then you may be in for some unexpected tinkering.

I would suggest Home Manager though, which will let you set up your environment just as well and is very portable, while still affording you a mainstream host system of the company's choice.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-04 19:33:37+00:00
Seeing the output I want when I describe it, and making changes to get to the vision in my mind. I don't have aphantasia so maybe it's different for those who do, but I can literally see the UI of the app I want to build and of course I can build it by writing code manually too, but I can make it exist much faster with an LLM than without.
by alwillis | 2026-01-04 19:33:38+00:00
It probably won't require 10,000 hours but vibe coding is a craft.

I found Steve Yegge's book to be very helpful [1].

[1]: "Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond" — https://a.co/3HJvbno
by 13415 | 2026-01-04 19:33:41+00:00
I've tried vibe coding and hate it. I guess it's okay for people who are only interested in the result, but for me it takes all the fun out of programming. It doesn't feel like it has anything to do with programming at all. I will continue to "vibe code" out of necessity - saving time and achieving more than I can on my own. But I cannot possibly understand how someone could consider it fun.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-04 19:33:58+00:00
My father-in-law did a fair amount of editing back in the day (on paper, with red pencil/pen). He said that, when you saw something that had "blood" (red) all over it, that meant it was good. When things are bad enough, it becomes hard even to edit it.

It may not be just that people don't edit LLM output. It may be that the stylistic blandness is so pervasive, it's just too much work to remove. (Yeah, maybe you could do it. But if you were willing to spend that kind of effort, you probably wouldn't have an LLM write it in the first place.)
by lmorchard | 2026-01-04 19:34:31+00:00
Like, fine, here's a personal example: I wanted to build a system that posts web links I share to a bot account on the fediverse. That seemed like a fun result to me.

I wanted to self-host the links, so I installed Linkding. (I didn't write Linkding.) For the fediverse bot, I installed gotosocial as the service host (I didn't write gotosocial.)

From there, a cronjob running a small program using Linkding and gotosocial APIs could do the trick. Decided to do it in golang, because the standalone binaries are easy to deploy.

Writing that small program didn't seem like fun - I've already played with those APIs and golang. What I wanted, for my enjoyment, was the completed system.

So, I took 10 minutes to write out a quick spec for the program and what I wanted it to do. I loaded that up as context for Claude Code along with some pointers for building CLI apps in golang. I let it rip and, in about 20 minutes, Claude produced a functional tool. It also wrote a decent README based on my original prose.

I reviewed the code, did some testing, made some tweaks, called it done. My bookmarks are now regularly posted to a bot account on the fediverse. This is an enjoyable outcome for me - and I didn't have to type every line of code myself.

For bonus points, I also had Claude Code gin up some GitHub Actions workflows to lint, test, build, and release multi-platform binaries for this tool. I've done these things before, but they're tedious. More enjoyable to have the resulting automations than to build them. And now I have them: I can make tweaks to this tool and get builds just through the GitHub web UI.

I've since repeated this pattern with a handful of other small personal tools. In each case, I wanted the tool and the utility it offered. I didn't care about the process of writing the code. It's working pretty well for me.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-04 19:34:32+00:00
C# 2 added "nullable value types". For example bool? is a type which can be true, or false, or null. Does my cat like dry food? True? False? Actually I do not have a cat so that's null. Historically no value types were nullable. In C# 1.0 the bool could only be true or false.

C# 8 added "nullable reference types". For example string? is a type which can be any string, including the empty string "", or it can be null. What's the name of my oldest report? "Steve" ? "Mary" ? No, I do not have anybody reporting to me, it's null. Historically all reference types were nullable, it wasn't optional. In C# 1.0 any string could be null, whereas in C# 8 you could explicitly say that some strings mustn't be null.

However almost all C# software runs on the CLR, and the CLR doesn't believe in these rules, so where your C# is called by other software, possibly not even written in C# you do need to know that all your function boundaries don't actually enforce null checks. This matters most if you write libraries used by third parties in other programming languages, and least for in-house or personal stuff where it clearly goes in the "Don't do that" pile.

Perhaps think of a C# 8.0+ string parameter as a stern "Do not use null strings" sign rather than a firm language commitment like Rust's &str or a C++ &std::string. That new intern will obey it, that nerd who writes machine code for fun will at least know it's their fault if they don't obey it, but the customer on another continent who has apparently never read any of your documentation can't be relied upon to uphold this constraint.

[Edited: fixed numerous typos, there are doubtless more]
by agentifysh | 2026-01-04 19:34:52+00:00
What a weird comment, anybody can see the pricing on Expo's website, sure there is a free plan but you are almost certainly going to end up paying

it's "optional" like so many open core projects these days that deliver a rough free version with issues (https://github.com/expo/expo/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Ao...) that naturally pulls developers into their paid plan

you keep avoiding my question, what is your relationship with Expo?

https://expo.dev/pricing
by freedomben | 2026-01-04 19:35:05+00:00
Yes, I worry about this quite a bit. Obviously nobody knows yet how it will shake out, but what I've been noticing so far is that brand recognition is becoming more important. This is obviously not a good thing for startup yokels like me, but it does provide an opportunity for quality and brand building.

The initial creation and generation is indeed much easier now, but testing, identifying, and fixing bugs is still very much a process that takes some investment and effort, even when AI assisted. There is also considerable room for differentiation among user flows and the way people interact with the app. AI is not good at this yet, so the prompter needs to be able to identify and direct these efforts.

I've also noticed in some of my projects, even ones shipped into production in a professional environment, there are lots of hard to fix and mostly annoying bugs that just aren't worth it, or that take so much research and debugging effort that we eventually gave up and accepted the downsides. If you give the AI enough guidance to know what to hunt for, it is getting pretty good at finding these things. Often the suggested fix is a terrible idea, but The AI will usually tell you enough about what is wrong that you can use your existing software engineering skills and experience to figure out a good path forward. At that point you can either fix it yourself, or prompt the AI to do it. My success rate doing this is still only at about 50%, but that's half the bugs that we used to live with that we no longer do, which in my opinion has been a huge positive development.
by kmoser | 2026-01-04 19:35:08+00:00
A year or so ago I was seriously thinking of making a series of videos showing how coding agents were just plain bad at producing code. This was based on my experience trying to get them to do very simple things (e.g. a five-pointed star, or text flowing around the edge of circle, in HTML/CSS). They still tend to fail at things like this, but I've come to realize that there are whole classes of adjacent problems they're good at, and I'm starting to leverage their strengths rather than get hung up on their weaknesses.

Perhaps you're not playing to their strengths, or just haven't cracked the code for how to prompt them effectively? Prompt engineering is an art, and slight changes to prompts can make a big difference in the resulting code.
by plq | 2026-01-04 19:35:28+00:00
My impression is that tools that grew complex only because they want to serve every use case under the son got obsoleted by AI, and static site generators like Hugo are a good example.

Today, if I were setting up a blog to host just some text and images, a vibe-coded SvelteKit project using the static adapter[1] would easily solve every single problem that I have. And I would still be able to use the full power of the web platform if I need anything further customized.

[1]: https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/adapter-static
by Defletter | 2026-01-04 19:35:42+00:00
I yearn for the mindset where I actively choose to accomplish comparatively little in the brief spells I have to myself, and remain motivated. Part of what makes programming fun for me is actually achieving something. Which is not to say you have to use AI to be productive, or that you aren't achieving anything, but this is not the antithesis of what makes programming fun, only what makes it fun for you.
by freedomben | 2026-01-04 19:36:47+00:00
As someone who is very much in this boat, though with guitar and bass rather than piano, I have really been wanting to get into this. I'm even willing to spend some money on tokens or subscription, but I have no idea how to really get started with it.

Are you willing to go into some more detail about what you do with Suno and how you use it?
by hansmayer | 2026-01-04 19:37:24+00:00
You are onto something there, if you mean, the design roles being taken over by the people who are not techies - like the POs. But if you just refer to UX being designed for mobile devices - that is not an excuse for an even worse UX on the mobile. If anything I would have expected more effort put in there, given how many more issues the limited screen estate can cause...
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-04 19:37:36+00:00
It’s really frustrating how the Trump family is abusing the presidency to get rich on every front. Qatari jets, golf course deals, building permits, government contracts to companies they’re involved in, and whatever this turns out to be (presumably their key donors will get the contracts to extract and refine Venezuelan oil and minerals).

What’s the solution though? The entire Republican Congress is silent or openly supporting everything Trump does. There is no check and balance to contain Trump. And at the end of four years, he and his family get to keep the billions they gained corruptly with no way to get it back.
by buzer | 2026-01-04 19:37:37+00:00
What is the source for that? Some of the oldest references to sbin I can find are 4.3BSD Net/2 man pages (https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&sek...) and Filesystem Standard v1.0 (https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/fsstnd/old/fsstnd-1.0...). Former doesn't mention anything about static binaries, latter only mentions that static ln (and even mentions sln being static version of ln) and sync can be useful.