MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by newsoftheday | 2026-01-07 15:56:42+00:00
When I have to use Windows for work (which I 100% would prefer over Mac when I can't have Linux Desktop), I've found OneDrive works best if you give it one file. I gzip a tar file on Windows and let OneDrive sync that. As long as it's only one file, it does a good job.

Whatever you do, don't try to sync a git repo folder with OneDrive.
by primemegently | 2026-01-07 15:56:43+00:00
For those that want more details on this fun rabbit hole of math, see the theory of Strong Pseudoprimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_pseudoprime

Miller-Rabin in considered a simplistic/antiquated primality algorithm in computational number theory. For a much better algorithm see the Baillie–PSW primality test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baillie%E2%80%93PSW_primality_... . For an implementation see Math::Prime::Util on CPAN: https://metacpan.org/pod/Math::Prime::Util or one of the many others.

The P in BPSW is for Carl Pomerance mentioned in the academic paper above. According to the wikipedia article "No composite number below 2^64 (approximately 1.845 * 10^19) passes the strong or standard Baillie–PSW test" which means if git-prime used this algorithm and the nonce was below 2^64 (very likely) then it would be provably prime instead of a probabilistic prime and hence have much more "mathematical rigor".

I also agree with other comments here that git-prime would be much cleaner if it put the nonce in git commit header data instead of the message. Something like this was done Long Ago in a "for fun" git patch by Jeff King: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CACBZZX5PqYa0uWiGgs952rk2cy+QRCU...

And he even made a multi-threaded version: https://lore.kernel.org/git/20111024204737.GA25574@sigill.in...
by sxzygz | 2026-01-07 15:56:50+00:00
Phil,

They don’t want you to sell Teensy certainly because they believe they can make more money that way. Who cares? You have a far richer ecosystem yourself. Why spend energy over this? If your customers care, help them transition to your ecosystem and move on. If your ecosystem doesn’t have something your customers need, build it.

If you were a tiny player I think I’d have more sympathy.

Personally, I’d consider adding embedded Rust to your ecosystem as more worthy of your efforts. Bunny and Xobs’ Xous is something you should look into along with their Baochip.

Leave this old shit behind.
by mauricekleine | 2026-01-07 15:56:54+00:00
I built this benchmark to see how LLM performance scales with puzzle complexity on a task that’s hard to solve via pattern matching alone.

It evaluates 34 models on nonograms across increasing grid sizes. One thing that stood out is how differently models approach the same task: some generate code to brute-force solutions, others reason step-by-step like a human.

Community feedback surfaced a few methodological issues (notably around reasoning configuration), which led to a re-run and adding raw prompt/output storage so failures can be inspected.

Everything is open source and rerunnable — happy to answer questions or clarify methodology.
by whstl | 2026-01-07 15:56:55+00:00
HN itself is way better than people give credit to. The toxicity tends to be very isolated, and divisive topics disappear quickly from the front page.

I find that there's still a subset of users that make it worse than it should be, by making too much noise about "tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage", but that is already against the rules/guidelines.
by JoelMcCracken | 2026-01-07 15:57:32+00:00
The only languages I know that can do prolog-like-constructs as-a-library are lisps, or at least langs that have reasonable symbol constructs. Usability is way way worse if you can’t talk about variables as first class objects.

I was talking to Bob Harper about this specific issue (context was why macro systems are important to me) and his answer was “you can just write a separate programming language”. Which I get.

But all of this is just to say that doing relational-programming-as-a-library has a ton of issues unless your language supports certain things.
by dyllonj | 2026-01-07 15:57:46+00:00
We ran 13,825 personality evaluations on 6 LLMs (GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, Llama 70B/8B, Mistral Large 3, Qwen 72B) and found that open-weight models cluster together with nearly identical personality profiles, while closed frontier models have diverged into distinct types.

Surprisingly, Llama 8B and 70B score within 0.7 points of each other across all 10 dimensions, suggesting personality is shaped more by training methodology than model scale.
by everlier | 2026-01-07 15:57:56+00:00
I'm trying to find good-enough algorithm for ranking GitHub repo "relevance", based on minimum amount of data.

I have settled on a combination of log(stars) and half-life penalty for days since last commit. It works surprisingly OK, highlighting large active repos and demoting ones that aren't actively maintained.

I'm sure there are many other approaches to the same thing, curious to learn how you solved it.
by xboxnolifes | 2026-01-07 15:58:02+00:00
Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, GTA5 online (and likely gta6 online).

Personally, only TFT is a blocker for me, and you can get an inferior version working on linux, but it only takes you playing one of those games for it to be a blocker.
by bluGill | 2026-01-07 15:58:26+00:00
While you don't need performance guarantees for most things, you still need performance. You can safely let "a small number" of requests "take too long", but if you let "too many" your users will start to complain and go elsewhere. Of course everything in quotes is fuzzy (though sometimes we have very accurate measures for specific things), but you need to meet those requirements even if they are not formal.
by bpt3 | 2026-01-07 15:59:05+00:00
Eh, layoffs also declined, consumer spending is up YoY, and we all know about the investments being made in AI that very well might be propping up the economy.

AI, when effective, is deflationary because it allows for similar productivity at a lower cost. That's what you're describing above, not a shadow recession that is being papered over by claims of AI use.

To my point: You could have replaced "AI" with "computing" for most of the last 50 years and been left with the same argument.
by newsoftheday | 2026-01-07 15:59:43+00:00
I see the article is still on the front page, I'd ignored it yesterday so I took a quick read. I find, being older, trying to read the tiny fonts on a phone to be difficult after a few minutes, otherwise cool idea.

Or, I thought it was cool until this passage reminded me, "coded a prototype in my downtime" that down time is supposed to be down time.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-07 15:59:54+00:00
For decades, the unofficial Microshit motto has been:
Intel inside, Idiot outside.

So basically tons of Windows related websites tell this infallible little trick if a user gets a Windows BSOD (Blue Screen of Death):
Reboot!

Invariably, the reboot causes the OS to start working again, till the recurrence of whatever circumstances (typically, hardware and/or software conflicts) caused the BSOD in the first place. It is left to the user to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent the issue from recurring again, as the BSOD messages are typically cryptic for the average user to decipher (maybe not so difficult in the modern era of AI assistants invocable from a handheld smartphone).

In fact, I would say the whole IT industry grew tremendously over the last few decades, because Microsoft's products were powerful, user friendly (till they worked), but very complex to maintain and troubleshoot in case of issues. That's because every company using M$ products needed dedicated IT Support teams solely for such maintenance, help and fixes for M$ products. Even other vendors like Oracle grew as competition to Microsoft's corporate dominance.

The wonderful (and sometimes terrifying) world of antimalware software may not even have existed were it not for Microsoft products.
by candiddevmike | 2026-01-07 16:00:00+00:00
My hotter take: we're in an economic death spiral. There isn't enough juice that can be squeezed short of mass wealth redistribution to reinvigorate the economy, and what is out there is locked up in stocks that don't translate to revenue. Slashing rates will just skyrocket prices and over inflate our monetary supply, and further tax cuts will only whittle away what's left of government services and social safety nets. Companies are going to start collapsing in a domino effect as liquidity dries up and contracts get cut.
by smithkl42 | 2026-01-07 16:00:02+00:00
I can only speak for myself, but I very much resonate with this.

I was an active contributor on SO in the early days - it was fun to help folks out, and it was often the only way to get help when I needed it myself.

For me, it stopped being a place I wanted to visit when they made the decision to close any question that they didn't deem a perfect fit for their vision of SO. There was certainly some value to that around the edges, but the policy ended up being enforced so strictly that many interesting topics their audience would have found valuable were declared out-of-bounds. Questions I wanted answers to - and that were getting good answers! - would get closed, and so would interesting questions that I wanted to try to answer.

I tried a couple times to push back gently, and got piled on each time.

It stopped being fun, so I stopped going there. Shrug.
by simianparrot | 2026-01-07 16:00:21+00:00
And they get confident lies back 2/10 times, not enough to make them constantly question the answers, but just enough to _really_ mess with them over time. And not just that, almost no new good questions and answers are created anymore for the next iterations of LLM's to train on, so they'll be consuming more and more AI-centered SEO slop until that ratio becomes so high it becomes useless. But by then most of us who used to answer human questions won't give a s*t anymore. You reap what you sow.

Best of both worlds? I disagree vehemently.
by akpa1 | 2026-01-07 16:00:45+00:00
I really don't like this sentiment:

> "Because I can get an answer from an LLM (which does need to be verified) in less than a minute versus the hours or days I would have to wait to get a toxic and potentially useless reply on stackoverflow. They should really downsize or just kill the company it’s a relic of the past and most developers won’t miss it."

To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered. Sure, new questions might be falling off and it might be decreasing in relevance, but that in no way means that a massively resource-intensive LLM regurgitating paragraphs of semi-duplicated text is better enough to justify canning it. (There's also the matter of all the other StackExchange sites, I have no idea what the state of the world is on those but I imagine they also have value in themselves.)

To this day, I find almost all of my low-level questions are still readily answered by StackOverflow, and it holds lots of discussion on higher-level questions that I find useful.

Does StackOverflow have an attitude problem? Absolutely. It is fair to say that most developers won't miss it? No.
by triceratops | 2026-01-07 16:00:51+00:00
I think StackOverflow could have been saved from turning into a toxic hellhole if they'd had AI and LLMs in the mid 2010s. No seriously, hear me out.

SO is infamous for overzealous mods closing questions left and right, calling you an idiot, and being unhelpful.

I think these mods were/are burned out by dealing with mostly idiotic questions all day. They default to suspicion and hostility.

If they'd had AI weeding out low quality questions before they ever got to a human (and not the rudimentary text classifiers that were the state of the art at the time) I think the mods would be a more helpful bunch.
by Ragnarork | 2026-01-07 16:00:54+00:00
> Then the statement "Stuff can't interoperate with c++" is true

Where is that statement? The statement I reacted to (and with some caveats) was the following: "Libraries written in C++ or Java can generally only be used by applications written in the same language. It is difficult to get an application written in Haskell or Java to invoke a library written in C++."

Which in my opinion is not true for the reason I mentioned.

> Nothing from c++ ever gets exposed

Depends what's your definition for "getting exposed". If you mean "no C++ feature from the language gets exposed" then it's mostly true (you can still wrap certain things like allocators, though painful, but there's certain C++ features that have no real equivalent in some target languages indeed). But you can definitely expose the functionality of C++ code through a C interface.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2026-01-07 16:00:55+00:00
Maybe. I am likely not a typical HNer, but my company actually has use of AI our 2026 goals. I am not guessing. I know majority of people in this company have those goals baked in. Now, can I suspect other like companies do the same? No. But even if they don't, it does not matter. Because the companies that don't allow AI, have people who use it anyway..
by ge96 | 2026-01-07 16:01:00+00:00
I get the point of moderating things, try to reduce duplication, low-effort, etc... but it is funny the gut reaction I feel (angry) when my post is auto-deleted (Reddit for example). For SO I remember having questions get blocked and accounts being blocked from downvoted questions. But I understand too, I could have researched more, it's one of those "I want the immediate reward/answer" vs. searching the old questions.
by mbgerring | 2026-01-07 16:01:34+00:00
It makes sense that you wouldn't hire in such an uncertain environment. We have a President using emergency powers to affect sweeping, unpredictable, consequential changes to the economy that can dramatically alter unit economics overnight and completely tank a previously viable business. Within this calendar year, the President's ability to do this may be upended by pending court cases, an election, or both. Following those potential changes, the breach of trust created by the previous chaos may mean that trade never returns to normal. I don't envy anyone trying to make long-term business decisions, like hiring, in such an environment.
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-01-07 16:01:34+00:00
> there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either

Once it became a product there was constant tension between community and management. A 24 year old PM who had never worked in software would come declare a sweeping change and then accuse the community for being toxic uninclusive trolls.

Also Joel violated all rules and norms and used it to promote his personal political platform.
by bikelang | 2026-01-07 16:01:35+00:00
I’m not sure what distro you used or how long ago this was - but I’ve been using Pop!_os as my general OS + dev env (and more recently switched off Windows to Bazzite for gaming) - and I’ve never once had to battle with audio or weird twiddling with settings to get stuff to work. In my experience - both have had the kind of out-of-the-box experience I’ve come to expect from Windows. If anything - Windows has required a lot more fiddling with settings and hunting down drivers as of late.
by observationist | 2026-01-07 16:01:35+00:00
Do a structured code review, with a few passes by Claude or Codex. Have it provide an annotated justification for each test, and flag tests with redundant, low, or no utility within the context of the rest of the tests. Anything that looks questionable to you, call it out on the next pass, and if it's not justified by the time you fully understand the tests, nuke it.

You could automate this, but you'll end up getting rid of useful tests and keeping weird useless ones until the AI gets better at nuance and large codebases.
by miningape | 2026-01-07 16:01:41+00:00
Because LLMs do not work like that - there's no "understanding" the source and answering questions, it simply "finds" similar results in its training data (matching it with the context) and regurgitates (some part of) it (+ other "noise").

Meaning as technology evolves and does things in novel ways, without explainers annotating it the LLM won't have anything to draw on - reducing the quality of answers. Which brings us full circle, what will companies use as training data without answers in places like SO?
by logicallee | 2026-01-07 16:01:59+00:00
>A python-based browser? What are you using for the GUI toolkit?

Great questions.
1. Yes, for the moment. Like the title of this article suggests - we're using a library! :)

It's great to iterate in Python, which has a large ecosystem of libraries. Believe it or not, there is a chance that in the future it would be able to translate the language into a different one (for example, C++) while using C++ bindings for the same gui libraries. This would speed up its actions by 40x. However, not all of the libraries used have C++ bindings so it could be harder than it looks.

2. Here's the current version of the source code:

https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/171toy-browser.py.t...

you can have a quick read through. Originally it was using tkinter for the GUI toolkit. I believe it is still using tkinter, but the AI might be leaning on some other library. As you read it, is it using anything but tkinter for the GUI toolkit?

These libraries are doing a lot of heavy lifting, but I think it is still ending up drawing in tkinter (not handing off rendering to any other library.)
by tracker1 | 2026-01-07 16:02:14+00:00
I think that humanity hasn't changed as much as maybe you give it credit for as a whole and that most human behaviors are somewhat consistent. I do think that taxes on actions as part of trade is better than taxes on income. I also think that taxes that are somewhat protectionist are better than "free trade" against nations that don't have similar quality of life, laws regarding labor, or free trade themselves.

The portions regarding trade are borne out by the VAT systems in place throughout EU and UK. The fact that tariffs exist in pretty much every nation of the world bears out their utility. The reason that most people are even arguing against it is that its being championed by Trump, who is admittedly a bombastic personality.

My opinions on tariffs long predates Trump. I have similar opinions against property taxes against individual ownership as well. I don't think that you should be at risk of losing personal property for the simple fact that you survived another year.
by Zambyte | 2026-01-07 16:02:44+00:00
Unless you need compatibility with Adobe file formats, Free editing software works fine too. I've been using Darktable for about a decade. People bash on GIMP for not being able to do what Photoshop can, but it's because GIMP is built with the intent of being extended by the user. It can be extended to do what people complain that it cannot do. Kdenlive is good at filling the needs met by Premiere. I think the hardest Adobe application for me to recommend a portable alternative to is After Effects. Maybe Blender can be coaxed into filling some AE uses.
by jjice | 2026-01-07 16:03:11+00:00
This may be a controversial take based on the last few years of SO discourse, but the strictness in SO was part of what made it a good resource.

For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise.

For a case study into what it would look like if it invited all questions, look at many subreddits.

I'll occasionally go on /r/ObsidianMD to see if there are interesting product updates, but instead I just see questions that get re-asked _constantly_. There's a very bad culture around searching for previous thread for info on many subreddits. People also ask questions unrelated to the sub at all. I've seen so many times people asking questions about some Android specific problem unrelated to the issue. While ideally I'd like to help these people, it pollutes real questions, discussion, and most valuably to future users, the ability to properly search for previous discourse.

SO best acts as library of information. I will say, people on there could benefit from removing the rude tone (this is a trait I see in software engineers frequently, unfortunately). But closing activity when it's inappropriate or duplicate (which despite many testimonials, I have seen is more common than not) is a good habit IMO.
by munificent | 2026-01-07 16:03:18+00:00
One problem is that closures don't actually behave like blocks. Consider that you might want to use this three-legged-if inside a loop. If it's a real statement, then those branches can have `break;` and `continue;` statements which affect the surrounding loop. If those branches are just closures being passed to a function, then they can't.
by i_don_t_know | 2026-01-07 16:03:35+00:00
I remember seeing a Mandelbrot program for the C64 where half the image was computed on the floppy drive because it's basically the same computer as the main C64. I think it had a 6502 instead of a 6510 and different memory.

I believe the Apple II floppy drive was "dumb", that is, controlled by the 6502 of the Apple II, so the machine couldn't do anything/much while loading/saving data. But the C64 + floppy drive was essentially a two-node distributed system.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-07 16:03:44+00:00
>Seems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans.

There are people at the periphery of my life that I suspect are little more than biological LLMs. Their drivel has much in common with AI slop. I'm sure some of you have had similar experiences.

>Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement.

This might be like putting Skynet in charge of traffic court penalties.
by steveklabnik | 2026-01-07 16:03:53+00:00
Ferrocene has qualified Rust 1.68.2, 1.76.0, 1.79.0, 1.81.0, 1.83.0, 1.86.0, 1.87.0, 1.89.0, with 1.91.0 in the upcoming release.

It's not every six weeks, but it's far faster than once every three years.
by fainpul | 2026-01-07 16:04:02+00:00
This example shows nicely how ugly text processing is: you have to use head and tail simply to trim out the first line of ls (the total).

I think it doesn't even work correctly. ls lists files and directories and then picks the first 4 (it should only select files).

And this also uses awk and jq, which are not just simple "one purpose" tools, but pretty much complete programming languages. jq is not even part of most standard installations, it has to be installed first.
by Gud | 2026-01-07 16:04:11+00:00
Yes, I understand it very well.

The main advantage is I can run it in parallel and iterate often.

The speed up is also avoiding looking up reference manuals endlessly just to produce some Qt Widgets.

I’m a fairly recent convert, I only started “vibe coding” a couple of months ago, after hearing how good Opus was. I had been a skeptic until then.

I am a decentralist by nature and prefer open standards and self hosting. I’ve had my own *nix servers since I was twelve (nearing forty) so it really pains me to admit how good it is to use these corporate products.

I am not a programmer by trade.
I use it to write software for my domain of expertise. The value of what I am creating is enormous.

Both ChatGPT and Claude produce good code, in my opinion.
by kitd | 2026-01-07 16:04:15+00:00
I would go so far as to say the rise of Rails and the downfall of J2EE being concurrent was not entirely accidental. I have/had no particular affiliation for Rails, but it demonstrated how to write simple, opinionated backend code, and that inspired a flurry of Java/JVM web frameworks that tried to follow a similar pattern and eventually gave us libraries like DropWizard, Javalin, SparkJava, even Spring Boot to some extent.