MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MaulingMonkey | 2026-01-22 04:32:38+00:00
I bucket Eclipse under "heavyweight IDE". I used to use it, plus the CDT plugin, for my C++ nonsense.

Then Visual Studio's Express and later Community SKUs made Visual Studio free for ≈home/hobby use in the same bucket. And they're better at that bucket for my needs. Less mucking with makefiles, the mixed ability to debug mixed C# and C++ callstacks, the fact that it's the same base as my work tools (game consoles have stuff integrating with Visual Studio, GPU vendors have stuff integrating with Visual Studio, the cool 3rd party intellisense game studios like integrates with Visual Studio...)

Eclipse, at least for me, quickly became relegated to increasingly rare moments of Linux development.

But I don't always want a heavyweight IDE and it's plugins and load times and project files. For a long time I just used notepad for quick edits to text files. But that's not great if you're, say, editing a many-file script repository. You still don't want all the dead weight of a heavy weight IDE, but there's a plethora of text editors that give you tabs, and maybe some basic syntax highlighting, and that's all you were going to get anyways. Notepad++, Sublime Text, Kate, ...and Visual Studio Code.

Well, VSC grew some tricks - an extension API for debuggers, spearheading the language server protocol... heck, I eventually even stopped hating the integrated VCS tab! It grew a "lightweight IDE" bucket, and it serves that niche for me well, and that's a useful niche for me.

In doing so, it's admittedly grown away from the "simple text editor" bucket. If you're routinely doing the careful work of auditing possibly malicious repositories before touching a single build task, VSC feels like the wrong tool to me, despite measures such as introducing the concept of untrusted repositories. I've somewhat attempted to shove a round peg into a square hole by using VSC's profiles feature - I now have a "Default" profile for my coding adventures and a "Notes" profile with all the extensions gone for editing my large piles of markdown, and for inspecting code I trust enough to allow on disk, but not enough to autorun anything... but switching editors entirely might be a better use of my time for this niche.
by citizenpaul | 2026-01-22 04:33:34+00:00
Cunningham's Law?

Ok. Aside from the obvious things like , calculators can't be co-opted for undermining and exploiting their users? Calculators can't be primed with false information for manipulating its users? Calculators just offload some longform math, and lets be real a huge percent of people barely touched a calculator after school. AI is basically glued to 70% of the populations hand.

Even at its current level AI is diminishing the value of being someone knowledgeable.

At the core computers are a power consolidation machine. AI streamlines boring/slow aspects of consolidating that power to those that control the AI.
by spijdar | 2026-01-22 04:33:35+00:00
> Certainly, macOS is a "weird" Unix if you compare it to Solaris and look at the administrative bits. But, then again, IBM's AIX is very weird, too. And that's one of the few commercial Unix implementations still kicking.

That's why I said that "Unix" has always been kind of confusing as a name, because a lot of "Unix"es are very different. I've never used AIX personally, but I know it's pretty funky. And there have been weirder "unix"es, Domain/OS was another weird one. At least a few others had split BSD/SysV "personalities", I've read.

> If I can download some GNU source, run ./configure; make; make install ... it's Unix.

On the one hand, I agree with this.

But then, by that standard, you could call basically every OS in use today "Unix", including Windows via Cygwin, or WSL, or etc...

To me, "Unix" is epitomized by Sun's fix for SunOS 4 for disabling Yellow Pages and using only DNS for hostname lookups.

Their official advice? To unpack the libc shlib, delete the object code for the Yellow Page functions, then repackage it into a new libc version.

That feels like Unix to me, in a way that macOS just never will be. Which is also perfectly okay with me.
by morcus | 2026-01-22 04:33:59+00:00
> Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE.

More like Eclipse struggled on the kind of hardware that people could afford as a student.

My main memories of Eclipse (15 years ago at this point) are waiting forever for it to start up, though it was pretty adequate after that.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-22 04:34:28+00:00
In reality sledgehammer guy is never the threat, it's somebody fabricating votes. This can be done in a completely illegal fashion as in complete identity fraud, legally grey areas like ballot harvesting, or more socially palatable forms of identity fraud like somebody voting on behalf of family members who would not otherwise be voting.

And the biggest problem of this all is that it's basically impossible to prove because there's no meaningful identifier at any given point in the process. The only real evidence you'd have is a bad signature, yet in 2020 some states ceased comparing signatures and signature comparison was, in general, bizarrely under attack by certain interest groups.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 04:34:43+00:00
There's letter and spirit of the word. You're arguing against the spirit of the word because the letter of the word is technically impossible to prove as a lie right now.

We call this lawful evil logic for a reason. It's how you empower stuff like Jim Crow laws (or the current US administration in general. "Well he isn't going to actually invade a NATO ally, he's just saying he wants Greenland. I want a Ferrari!")
by com2kid | 2026-01-22 04:34:53+00:00
Back when MSDN subscriptions where a thing and people still used Visual Studio, the tools were a lot better. Debuggers worked and did impressive things (time travel debugging! Rewind your entire program state! Step through from your website code all the way to your database queries within the same debugging session! Easily debug remote servers!). Developer documentation was professionally written and edited.

Now everything is free and we get what we pay for.
by vbezhenar | 2026-01-22 04:35:53+00:00
For me vscode is super-lightweight and at the same time has enough functionality. I didn't use Eclipse for many years, but from my memory it was super-heavyweight. And it didn't really support anything except Java.

Interestingly Java is the only language that I've found vscode support poor, so I keep buying Idea license exclusively for Java projects. For rest of languages that I use (JS/TS, Go, Python, Shell, YAML, XML) I'm using vscode and happy about it.

In recent years vscode starting to get bloated, mostly with AI stuff. But so far I can disable everything AI with a single setting and it works good afterwards. I'd prefer for all AI features to be contained in a separate plugin that I can just not install, but I guess managers these days want to shove AI in everyone's throat.

Another good thing about vscode is that its written with JavaScript and can be launched in browser, so in the future I want to put my development environment in the browser, but so far I didn't do that.
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2026-01-22 04:36:22+00:00
The vast majority of countries have barriers preventing our highly efficient production from selling in their countries. Think Argentina and meats, Switzerland and all things cattle, EU and pretty much everything.

Tariffs were one way to pry open those markets, but of course, the few agricultural products that were already selling , were affected in the retailiation . It will take some time for things to sort out.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 04:36:41+00:00
I don't like layoffs, but if the statement in September said "we are going to lay off most of our talent in January for blah blah blah corporate mumbo jumbo", it'd suck but I'd see nothing wrong with it. The employees get a 3 month warning to plan around, and the company can do whatever it wants from there.

But that's not the society we live in.
by rustystump | 2026-01-22 04:37:30+00:00
I did something similar for syncing 10m particles in a sim for a multiplayer test. The gist is that at a certain scale it is cheaper to send a frame buffer but the scale needs to be massive.

For this, compression/quantize numbers and then pass that directly to the gpu after it comes off the network. Have a compute shader on the gpu decompress before writing to a frame buffer. This is what high performance lidar streaming renderers do as lidar data is packed efficiently for transport.
by mindslight | 2026-01-22 04:37:39+00:00
We're talking about people who were cosplaying militias for years or decades before they got their "authorization" to pretend to be federal "law enforcement". Were they getting paid that whole time? I suppose it's not out of the question that foreign intelligence services have been funding these groups through one or two "benevolent" members, but overall they seem like quite the crowd of true believers.
by endgame | 2026-01-22 04:37:45+00:00
There are some really clever systems that let you prove that you voted without leaking how you voted.

Unfortunately, explaining them to Joe Q. Public in such a way that he's going to trust your election is a very tough sell, whereas counting paper is a much easier process to explain.

And that's before you begin worrying that the developer of your whizz-bang mathematically-provable voting system is a) going to win the bid to build it for the government, b) implements it correctly, and c) isn't subverted while doing so.
by CephalopodMD | 2026-01-22 04:38:34+00:00
Could you maybe have your harness limit the memory of Claude and then occasionally, when Claude specifically asks for it ("i need to remember something"), you can give Claude the full game history? Most turns, I'll bet it's okay to have a short context and maybe some notes. And then maybe once in a while it's nice to see the full chat history. Wdyt?
by somenameforme | 2026-01-22 04:39:43+00:00
In 2020 a number of states were sending out mail-in ballots to every single registered voter, even if they didn't request it. Those states were CA, CO, DC, HI, NJ, NV, OR, UT, VT, and WA. [1]

[1] - https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...
by shushpanchik | 2026-01-22 04:40:09+00:00
There are lots of reported cases in Russia, when your manager requires you to take photo of your paper ballot and show it to them, otherwise you have problems.

You can try to google-translate [this, for example](https://holod.media/2024/03/08/soprotivlenie-putinu/#h-3-%D0...)
by rmunn | 2026-01-22 04:41:19+00:00
With LazyVim (requires NeoVim) and its load-on-demand architecture, startup time usually stays below 50 milliseconds even with a ton of plugins. Below 50ms is fast enough that it feels instant. Aliasing `nvim` to `n` in my ~/.bash_aliases just makes it even faster. cd to a project directory, run `n .` and I'm looking at the NeoVim file explorer plugin for that project directory. No break in thought flow, no standing up to get coffee while the IDE loads, just keep going.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 04:42:03+00:00
>Most of the owners are not drawing any salary.

If they are founders and they chose to leave, that's their freedom to do so. Just like any employee you don't get a salary for leaving just because you used to work there.

if you're an owner who bought in, you already got your money. You got a steady profit from sitting there and operating a business at best. At worst you made a bad business decision. You're not owed profit.

So yes, they are both paid, or gambled and had a bad opportunity cost. That's life. I don't see it as justification for them to "deserve" their sale, even if it's legally their call.

>But nobody here is actually arguing that the layoffs are fine, they're only mad about the comms.

Many people in this discussion are in fact arguing that the layoffs are fine. to paraphrase a few

> "It's obvious if you know who Bending Spoons is"

> "That's at-will employment, it's fair"

> "they have to run a business"

> "most of the owners are not drawing any salary"

So yes, even if it's against their best interests there are still so many beholden to defend billionaires. And that is why I asset seemingly obvious points. What's your argument here again?
by endgame | 2026-01-22 04:42:39+00:00
Yes. Here's a 2014 BBC article about that:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-26487418

The article quotes one Mr Richard Mawrey QC:

> "Postal voting on demand, however many safeguards you build into it, is wide open to fraud… on a scale that will make election rigging a possibility and indeed in some areas a probability."

> "Now I know that there is a very strong political desire to keep the present system. What I'm saying is that if you keep the present system, then however many safeguards you create, fraud and serious fraud is inevitably going to continue because that is built into the system."
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-22 04:43:42+00:00
>According to the historical linguist, rather than reading: “Listen! We have heard of the might of the kings” the Old English of “Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!” should instead be understood as: “How we have heard of the might of the kings.”

So semantically... no difference.
by bruce511 | 2026-01-22 04:44:04+00:00
I agree. Personally I don't understand the love that agriculture shows to the Republican party, but hey you get what you vote for.

It seems like this whole year has been implementing policy after policy that screws over agriculture.

USAid (big purchaser) gone. 40 billion sent to Argentina. Antagonize Canadians (Canadians !!) so they boycott American produce. Tarif China so they'll reciprocate on soy beans. Deport farm workers. Tarif imports of steel so machine costs go up. Tarif fertilizer so production costs go up. Tarif everything else to reduce consumer spending power.

Despite all this farmers will continue to vote republican this year, and in future years. I presume they have reasons, but I confess they are hard to understand.
by bbminner | 2026-01-22 04:44:51+00:00
I still consider jax.vmap to be a little miracle: fn2 = vmap(fn, (1,2)), if i remember correctly, traverces the computation graph of fn and correctly broacasts all operations in a way that ensures that fn2 acts like fn applied in a loop across the second dimension of the first argument (but accelerated, has auto-gradients, etc).
by Kerrick | 2026-01-22 04:45:13+00:00
Thank you! I wrote the code snippets and picked the color palette, but the web design came by way of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46587284

And my wife, wonderful as always, helped critique the writing! My RadioMenu class's comments (in the "See More: Inline menu example" expando-section) were far worse before she helped.
by spondyl | 2026-01-22 04:45:21+00:00
This comment reminded me of a Github issue from last week on Claude Code's Github repo.

It alleged that Claude was used to draft a memo from Pam Bondi and in doing so, Claude's constitution was bypassed and/or not present.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/17762

To be clear, I don't believe or endorse most of what that issue claims, just that I was reminded of it.

One of my new pastimes has been morbidly browsing Claude Code issues, as a few issues filed there seem to be from users exhibiting signs of AI psychosis.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 04:46:21+00:00
if corporations only exist to make the rich richer, maybe it's time to eat the rich. Corporations' outward goals used to be to satisfy their customers. That may have never been the internal case, but it isn't even pretended to be so nowadays.

Severely downsizing the company isnt a good vibe to a customer. I'd definitely be migrating off Vimeo if I did any serious business with them.
by W_rey45 | 2026-01-22 04:46:29+00:00
Great question this is exactly the tension we’re trying to be explicit about.

CIRCE separates cryptographic verification from semantic interpretation. The signature covers a minimal, stable signed_block (canonicalized → hashed → signed). Everything else is metadata that can evolve without affecting verification.

Older receipts remain verifiable because the verifier only assumes the signed scope + canonicalization rules. Newer tooling can understand more fields, but must ignore unknown/missing fields (JWT / signed artifact style). We also include a schema identifier/hash for tooling selection, but it’s intentionally not security-critical — verification is purely about integrity.

Also: toran.sh’s angle is super aligned. Capturing actual API request/response outside the agent’s control feels like the “ground truth” complement to CIRCE’s “decision truth.”
Curious: are you anchoring the API transcript via a sidecar/proxy with its own signing key, or are you doing something like a transparency log/Merkle chain for requests?
by somenameforme | 2026-01-22 04:46:46+00:00
In the sort of scenario you're talking about the dictator doesn't care how people vote. 'The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.' If he has such a lack of control that a mere election, which is to be counted fairly, could have him leave power, then it'd be somewhat farcical to declare him a dictator with all the connotations such a term implies.
by goatlover | 2026-01-22 04:46:51+00:00
They are breaking down doors without warrants, dragging citizens out of cars, lying about shootings and car rammings, beating protestors up, dragging them across pavement and putting them in choke holds or kneeling on their necks, detaining citizens, kidnapping kids and sending them to detention centers out of state, ignoring due process and making death threats. This done in blue cities where Democratic officials are threatened with legal action.

Play semantic games if you want, this is full on authoritarian stuff that doesn't belong in America.
by defrost | 2026-01-22 04:47:15+00:00
Sounds like, yes.

Actually is, unlikely - a very shallow comment history dive suggests not ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46684376 ).

It's a common way in native English speaking countries to disparage someone, to compare them as a small failed version of something worse.

It's also confusing to non native english speakers, and even to people from "mismatched" english speaking cultures (an Englishman, a Scotsman, an Australian, and a central North American enter a bar; Oscar Wilde tells them they're separated by a common language).

The HN guidelines suggest people refrain from hyperbole, sarcasm, idiomatic metaphors, and generally having fun with language :( <- sad face

They have a point.
by visarga | 2026-01-22 04:47:28+00:00
> Search engines affect me less, and less every day. I have my own small "index" / "bookmarks" with many domains, github projects, youtube channels

Exactly, why can't we just hoard our bookmarks and a list of curated sources, say 1M or 10M small search stubs, and have a LLM direct the scraping operation?

The idea is to have starting points for a scraper, such as blogs, awesome lists, specialized search engines, news sites, docs, etc. On a given query the model only needs a few starting points to find fresh information. Hosting a few GB of compact search stubs could go a long way towards search independence.

This could mean replacing Google. You can even go fully local with local LLM + code sandbox + search stub index + scraper.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-22 04:47:49+00:00
These takes are gonna age like milk.

The new world is one where someone can have an LLM assisted insight, post it on their blog for free, have it indexed by every agentic search engine, and it becomes part of the zeitgeist. That’s the new data that’ll feed the new models: a better information diet over time. And
guess what else: models are getting better at identifying - at scale - the high quality info that’s worth using as training data.

Every time you decry the awful future we are headed towards, every time you take to your blog to bitch about a world you can’t prevent, every time you downvote someone who promises it’s going to be okay: are you no different than old fogies in times gone by, who complained that rock n roll would corrupt their kids? Are you grossed out at “the kids these days”? Are you voluntarily giving your youthful optimism up just to be part of some anti AI tribe? Do you truly want to sit in front of your cherry MX keyboard and proclaim yourself a luddite while the rest of us make cool shit in an hour that used to take a year? Why would you give up your youth like that?

It’s the world we are headed into - whether you like it or not, dear future down-voter. You may as well put your pitchfork away and learn how to build cool shit.
by someguyiguess | 2026-01-22 04:49:08+00:00
This is exactly what I was going to say. I used eclipse in college when learning Java. Back then it was bloated, slow, had really bad UX, and would occasionally crash for no reason I could ascertain (I was just doing basic school projects. Linked lists, binary search trees, etc...)

VS Code, although it is starting to go get a bit bloated, has always been extremely responsive and snappy. Yeah I've had it crash, but I was never surprised that it crashed. (e.g. opening enormous files, running several instances at once with tons of tabs open, long debugging sessions, etc...)

But now I use NeoVim so none of that matters...
by autoexec | 2026-01-22 04:49:31+00:00
Checking each ballot for completeness sounds like a good improvement to the system. Right now people are just expected to mark carefully and double-check their work before feeding their ballot into the machine and request a new ballot if they mess up.

It might slow things down a little bit, but making sure that the machine can detect a vote for each race/question (even if it's just "Abstain") would make sure people didn't forget to fill out something and help prevent the fill-in-the-bubble equivalent of hanging chads.
by spijdar | 2026-01-22 04:50:06+00:00
That probably came off a bit too inflammatory/self-deprecating :)

The point for me was realizing that, even though I do like all these systems and OSes, and I understand the appeal of both "pure UNIX" and (on the opposite spectrum) OSes that violently reject "UNIX", this kind of purity isn't actually... useful.

End of the day, with most of the ways I use a computer for productivity, playing, or being social with other people, there are other things that matter a lot more than the "purity" of the OS. And this includes how much "real UNIX" it is. It's cool that Solaris/Illumos is "true blooded unix". And... it doesn't really matter that much. Whether or not a system is or isn't "unix" just doesn't matter, as long as it runs the software you want.

(And for a lot of modern software, "being unix-like" isn't enough; if you're not Linux, Windows, or macOS, good luck!)

The purity is also usually kind of a lie in the first place. I've got a VAX in my office running "real" 4.3BSD, before all the "POSIX-bloat" was added. But you look closely and realize there's tons of "bloat" added, for the purpose of making a more useful OS. There are mixed abstractions, redundant libc extensions, dubious system additions that look like one person needed something and added it in.

It's just so uninteresting to me now to argue about what is or isn't "unix". I still enjoy all those old OSes, but you kind of stop seeing them as "UNIX". The ways that each isn't UNIX is far more interesting, like how ULTRIX and OSF/1 abandoned "unix style" syslogs in favor of a rich binary format via 'uerf'.