MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yakattak | 2026-01-04 01:01:15+00:00
> Because I don’t write a daily blog to crank out a post every day. If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. I write a daily blog to make sure I remember how to think.

I feel like this will get missed by the general public. What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

I could generate some weird 70s sci fi art, make an Instagram profile around that, barrage the algorithm with my posts and rack up likes. The likes will give that instant dopamine but it will never fill that need of accomplishing something.

I like LLMs to get me to reword something, since I struggle with that. But just like in programming I focus it on a specific sentence or two. Otherwise why am I doing it?
by appreciatorBus | 2026-01-04 01:01:57+00:00
Because city planners and Nimby homeowners do not want it to be easy to build new building buildings. Every extra dollar you can force a proponent to spend, increases the odds that the project will no longer be economic to build, and simply not be built. For those most active in city politics, this is a win.

It goes way beyond design.

Early housing reformers in the 1920s, explicitly called for punitive fire regulations for multifamily buildings to make them on economical while admitting that they would not ask for any fire regulations for single-family buildings whatsoever.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0194436920897553...
by schmichael | 2026-01-04 01:02:19+00:00
Germany was a split country for 50 years.

Korea is still a split country.

I guess I have to give you Japan, although now you could say "clearly the solution is nukes" if you're just going blindly on data.

Even if you think it's going to go well this time, you have to admit this sort of thing does not have a good track record.
by arcticbull | 2026-01-04 01:02:32+00:00
Well you see it would free up a huge amount of money that employers are currently paying to insurers. If you take that money (by raising the Medicare premium on employees), plus the existing medicaid budget, existing medicare tax and payroll tax contributions America's healthcare system would receive over 40% more money to cover care per capita than the next leading contestant. Almost 2X the OECD average. In PPP dollars no less.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

"But where would the money come from" is one of the wildest questions to ask about a system that already costs double the average. I'd say, give or take, the same place its coming from now, but like, less.
by parpfish | 2026-01-04 01:03:32+00:00
Here’s how SO could still be useful in the LLM era:

User asks a question, llm provides an immediate answer/reply on the forum. But real people can still jump in to the conversation to add additional insights and correct mistakes.

If you’re a user that asks a duplicate question, it’ll just direct you to the good conversation that already happened.

A symbiosis of immediate usually-good-enough llm answers PLUS human generated content that dives deeper and provides reassurances in correctness
by BoorishBears | 2026-01-04 01:04:10+00:00
Funny you say that since Dart is the primary reason most people I know don't want to use Flutter.

There's been a trend of improved DX for languages used in app development:

ObjC -> Swift

Java -> Kotlin

Javascript -> Typescript

...Dart feels like the before with no after, even though it got traction in the era of the Afters.
by simondotau | 2026-01-04 01:04:11+00:00
I’m still on Sequoia; I have high hopes that Tahoe is an aberration that will be fixed with the departure of Alan Dye. But let’s keep things into perspective here. The subtle enshitifications of macOS are mild compared to the train wreck of Windows 8 onwards. I daily drove Windows 7 until 2015; IMHO it’s the greatest version of Windows ever.

My wife works for a large corporation that is 100% Windows. I first used Windows 11 a few weeks ago when I was troubleshooting a connectivity problem on her laptop. To some extent my lack of experience with Windows 11 was a factor, but configuring network settings shouldn’t be so obtuse and fragmented. It didn’t feel serious. It felt like a parody of an operating system.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-04 01:04:34+00:00
It matters what the tongue and voice box are doing in the surrounding sounds. The next letter (t) is voiced, and the prior sound is a vowel, so in practice many English speakers will continue to “voice” the c sound between e and d, the “g” is just a voiced “c”, which makes them homonyms in most speakers.

(This post brought to you by YouTube, who keep putting Dr Geoff Lindsey in my recommendation queue, and now I’ve become a part time linguistics enthusiast. Other interesting facts: “chr” and “tr” are also almost entirely homonyms in most speakers. Try saying “trooper” and “chrooper” and see what I mean. In fact my 4 year old, who is recently learning to write, drew a picture of a truck and wrote “chruck” on the paper.)
by lisdexan | 2026-01-04 01:06:05+00:00
Yes, you're right. It just that the comparison with Ukraine (invaded for no rational reason) + 'wiping out' made me think sejje was making a stronger (?) hypothetical.

I think we're have strayed too far from the point of ´might makes right' is bad, actually. GP very clearly chose Italy as an example because it's less polemic than the obvious option with a enormous manufacturing base and nukes.
by nicce | 2026-01-04 01:06:19+00:00
I wonder what is the role of moderating duplicate questions. More time passes - more existing data there is and less need for new questions. If you moderate duplicate questions, will they disappear from these charts? Is this decline actually logical?

2020 there was new CEO and moderator council was formed:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/21/scripting-the-future-o...
by lurk2 | 2026-01-04 01:06:43+00:00
> Venezuelans for the past 5+ years have been the most or almost the most numerous asylum seekers in the US.

That by itself does not demonstrate that the majority have been exiled, even if we want to expand the definition of "exile" to be inclusive of those who were not actually forced to leave, but felt it was necessary to leave due to political persecution.

The majority of Venezuelans will never have a legal option to reside in the United States. This incentivizes Venezuelans to make asylum claims in order to gain entry. Similar abuses of the asylum process are seen at far smaller scales in Canada and the European Union.

What sort of persecution are these people claiming to have experienced, and more specifically, what rights are they alleging to have been deprived of by the Maduro regime?
by apparent | 2026-01-04 01:06:45+00:00
> You do realize the current government won the elections and the president won the popular vote right

Technically he won a plurality of the popular vote, but he didn't win the popular vote. This is typically not a distinction that matters, but in this case it's what happened. The majority of people voted for someone else, but he got votes from more people than any other candidate did.

Of course, what really matters is the electoral college, but the popular vote is often seen as lending even more legitimacy to a victory.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-04 01:07:25+00:00
Thanks! I thought this felt familiar. 2023 is a long time to still be in this "Initial signs are promising" mode. There are no code commits since March 2025.

I've had projects which stalled for a few months or even a year, but generally if I said I'll get to it "soon" and two years later I haven't, that's not getting done. There are two boxes of books I planned to unbox "soon" after discovering that the bookshelves for my new flat were full & so I had nowhere to put them. That was when Obama was still President of the United States of America. Don't expect me to ever get around to unboxing those books, I clearly haven't even missed them.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2026-01-04 01:07:52+00:00
To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.

I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.

An analogy I like is imagine you're organising a hike up a mountain. There's a gondola that takes you to the top on the other side, but you arrange hikes for people that like hiking. You get a group of tourists and they're all ready to hike. Then before you set off you ask the question "so, what brings you hiking today" and someone from the group says "I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the sights, I hate hiking but it is what it is". And then you say "if you take a 15 minute drive through the mountain there's a gondola on the other side". And the person thanks you and goes on their way because they didn't know there was a gondola. They just assumed hiking was the only way up. You would have been happy hiking them up the mountain but by asking the question you realised that they didn't know there was an easier way up.

It just goes back to first principles.

The truth is sometimes people decide what the solution looks like and then ask for help implementing that solution. But the solution they chose was often the wrong solution to begin with.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-04 01:08:15+00:00
Fair points-- I have to reflect.

I'm just as terrified of going around in circles as you are -- I'm guessing that's where some of the anger comes from-- but I've no relevant expertise/experience to stay grounded.

>I am involved in humanity

This may or may not help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sum,_humani_nihil_a_me_al...

(It's taken very seriously now, was Marx's personal maxim, but it started off as a joke)
by lovich | 2026-01-04 01:09:13+00:00
It wasn’t above board.

It was fraud.

The bank was unaware he had changed the valuation.

Also wasn’t it just for the fraud, it was because this fraud was connected to his attempts to manipulate the election.

If we are going to go further in this conversation I need to know if you can point to an action he has taken that you think is bad, other than appointing someone he turned on later.
by xp84 | 2026-01-04 01:09:52+00:00
The dumbest part of SO is how the accepted answer would often be bad, and sometimes someone had posted a better answer after the fact, and if the all-powerful moderators had the power to update it, they sure never did. Likewise, there were often better insights in comments. Apparently if you have the right mod powers, you can just edit an answer (such as the accepted one) to make it correct, but that always struck me as a bizarre feature, to put words in other people’s mouths.

I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting.

I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP.
by jeremyjh | 2026-01-04 01:10:28+00:00
I would guess the two languages have little overlap in who they appeal to, and this is a bit closer to C semantics which is their north star. In C for functions that don’t return a value you often return a null for success or a return code that is a defined error code, which is exactly how Optional works in C3 (but you don’t write the word Optional in the function head). If you need to return a value in C you often pass an out param pointer and then still return either null or a defined error value. The improvement is you just write ‘type?’ for the return type to enable this and you don’t need an out param, but you still need the define (faultdef).
by Nebasuke | 2026-01-04 01:10:50+00:00
A similar but not as strong decline. Taking the one but last datapoint for both (stackoverflow/tex respectively): 4436 and 394. If you compare this to how it looked like between 2015-2020 you get (my guess from scanning): 160,000 and 1700. So Stackoverflow as a whole went from 160K -> ~4.4K. That's like a 35x drop, compared to tex, where it's a 1700 -> 394, 4x drop.
by skybrian | 2026-01-04 01:11:41+00:00
> “Having AI summarize a book or a paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know. It would not have made the connections I would have made.”

I don't disagree, but on the other hand, searches are not useless. They're limited because you do need to create a query capturing what it is that you're looking for, in advance. But we do that all the time.
by xdennis | 2026-01-04 01:12:43+00:00
Law is defined as "a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior".

International law is defined as "the set of rules, norms, legal customs and standards that states and other actors feel an obligation to, and generally do, obey in their mutual relations".

When people say that international law is not real, what they mean is that "international law" is to "law" as a "guinea pig" is to a "pig".

The primary differentiation is enforcement.

People bastardize the term law, because they like to throw the word "illegal" around and imply "evilness" without being arbitrary. But guess what: Trump can be evil, without his actions being "illegal".

Without international law, actions would be the same (Serbia gets punished, Rwanda gets away), but you would have to argue for morality individually. Instead, people can point to some tome some unelected people wrote and say "this book says you're evil and you can't argue with it". The book says it's illegal and that's that.
by brunoborges | 2026-01-04 01:13:10+00:00
As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario.

Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product.

The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a product" where the first step is to search, the second step is to get the details (get the ID), and the third step is to delete.

The LLM is capable of answering the question "how to delete the product 'product name'".

To some degree, many of the questions on SO were beyond basic, but still possible for a human to answer if only they read documentation. LLMs just happen to be capable of reading A LOT of documentation a LOT faster, and then coming up with an answer A LOT faster.
by xp84 | 2026-01-04 01:14:59+00:00
The idea of one “accepted answer” there always bugged me. The correct/best answer of many things changes radically over time. For instance The only sane way to do a lot of things in “JavaScript” in 2009 was to install jquery and use it. Most of those same things can (and should) be done just as succinctly with native code today, but the accepted answers in practice were rarely updated or changed. I don’t even know if you could retroactively years later re-award it to a newer answer. Since the gamification angle was so prominent, that might rob the decade-old author of their points for their then-correctness, so idk if they even allowed it.
by jibal | 2026-01-04 01:15:14+00:00
The "whataboutism" accusation is absurd--that's not even remotely an example of it. All my comment was about was editorial insertions of biased loaded language into a supposed news report. And I didn't say that the U.S. "system" is "like" Venezuela or Russia--that's a blatantly intellectually dishonest misrepresentation ... a) "authoritarian" is broader than the most extreme examples, and b) the Trump regime is acting outside of the "system". And: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/22/nx-s1-5340753/trump-democracy...

"A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism."

That's from April ... the move to a "Department of War" and the actual waging of unauthorized war pushes things considerably further.
by dave_sid | 2026-01-04 01:15:26+00:00
Using a common language between platforms, whether it’s Swift or Kotlin always sounds great on the surface but I don’t think adds the expected efficiencies when it comes to the crunch. I expect teams would always still end up with two codebases, with enough differences and workarounds to make it that you might as well just enjoy using Kotlin or Swift as you need to. Knowing two languages isn’t all that bad. Most developers learn many languages during their careers and switch between them without a thought. Just my opinion tho, I’m sure this is a good project.
by braiamp | 2026-01-04 01:16:03+00:00
Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these:

- The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard.
- This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells you of the questions that survived at this point in time, this [0] is the actual graph which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation.
- This is actually a Good Thing™. For years most of the questions went unanswered, non-voted, non-commented, just because there was too many questions happening all the time. So the general trend is not something that the SO community needs to do anything about. Almost 20% of every question asked is marked as duplicate. If people searched... better™ they wouldn't ask as many questions, and so everyone else had more bandwidth to deal with the rest.
- There has been a shift in help desk style of request, where people starting to prefer discord and such to get answers. This is actually a bad thing because that means that the knowledge isn't public nor indexed by the world. So, information becomes harder to find, and you need to break it free from silos.
- The site, or more accurately, the library will never die. All the information is published in complete archives that anyone can replicate and restart if the company goes under or goes evil. So, yeah, such concerns, while appreciated, are easily addressed. At worst, you would be losing a month or two of data.

[0]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...
by clanky | 2026-01-04 01:16:30+00:00
I feel like they've mostly dispensed with the pretense of needing "consent" from anyone who isn't calling shots on what to print in the newspapers in the first place. This seems more like "we'll do what we want and don't care to even conceal our motives anymore." And other commenters are right to point out that it's very premature when it's not clear there's been a genuine change in power, so it may be calculated to make that seem inevitable as well.
by tptacek | 2026-01-04 01:17:18+00:00
If you mean the OpenSSL CLI, it's hard to think of a more footgun-y cryptographic tool than the one that:

* defaults to unauthenticated encryption

* buries its one authenticated mode

* requires explicit command-line nonces

* defaults to an MD5 KDF

You could probably keep going for another 10 bullets. Never use the OpenSSL CLI for anything other than TLS stuff.
by AxiomPraxis | 2026-01-04 01:17:34+00:00
On the first page, there's the claim:

Encrypted Calls

All calls are encrypted with TLS 1.2+ for signaling and SRTP with AES-128 for audio. Your conversations stay private during transmission.

This can only be true on your (Voklit) end between the client and the server, it stops being encrypted both from signalling and audio perspective the moment it hits the PSTN in any country on any network.

I would consider re-phrasing this so that limitation is more clear, for people who may misinterpret that encryption claim, unless you've found a way to encrypt PSTN signalling and audio which would be a much more impressive feat.
by spudlyo | 2026-01-04 01:18:10+00:00
I agree that Tahoe is considerably less enshitified than Windows, but they are slowly turning the screws on us. With every release, it becomes harder and harder to run unsigned macOS binaries, and I can't shake the feeling that their ultimate goal is turn the Mac into more of a "trusted appliance" and less of a general-purpose computer.

Gatekeeper & notarization, System Integrity Protection, hardware level security enforcement, all of these shifts reek of security paternalism, platform convergence, and ultimately ... control. This frog is starting to feel the water boil, and to mix metaphors, can see the walls of the garden getting higher.
by BurritoAlPastor | 2026-01-04 01:18:16+00:00
> What’s the point in generating writing … if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

Getting promoted, getting a better job, generating sales leads, things of that nature. A depressing number of blogs or LinkedIn posts exist only because the author is under some vague belief that it’s part of what they’re supposed to be doing to get ahead in their career.
by graboy | 2026-01-04 01:18:40+00:00
https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2012.09.017

Across different genetic variants, lower lifetime LDL -> lower risk of death. Check out figure 3.

The causality of LDL -> plaque buildup -> 55-60% [1] of heart disease related deaths is also well understood, so it seems clear to me that preventing plaque buildup in the first place prevents over half of heart disease related deaths.

Would like to know if you disagree, "Minimize LDL at all costs" goes current mainstream medical guidance, so I'd like to disconfirm my beliefs if possible.

[1] Number from deep research.
by JustinXie | 2026-01-04 01:19:08+00:00
This really highlights the misalignment between information density and monetization mechanisms.

Text is random-access, searchable, and respects the reader's time (I can skim a blog post in 2 minutes to find the one command I need). Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment.

It is somewhat tragic that the format which is often technically superior for documentation and reference (text) relies on the format that is optimized for engagement/retention (video) to subsidize it. Kudos to you for maintaining the blog-first workflow despite the incentives pulling the other way.
by vunderba | 2026-01-04 01:19:27+00:00
From the article:

> When you’re stuck and sit there, thinking, trying to come up with what’s next, that’s the valuable part of writing.

Not just what’s next, but the question of what to write in the first place.

I’ve pointed it out before, but this idea of quiet contemplation is exactly where LLMs completely pratfall. The fewer details or instructions you give them, the less novel the output.

I can’t speak for everyone, but when I want to write a new blog post on my site, it’s precisely the opposite. I dim the lights, sit quietly, and let the neurological brownian motion machine do its thing.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-04 01:19:37+00:00
Also--

>racism

Prioritisation is hard. Easier to solve tech-> economics-> racism (in that order, but smh folks mix it up, because racism feels __DEAREST[0]__ -- thanks but no thanks globalsocial media-- and the others not so much?)

[0]So different than opiate in action yet so similar in effect
by jedahan | 2026-01-04 01:20:22+00:00
I was wondering the same thing. My best guess is that is to guard against operator misuse. Like usb-a only plugging in one way. Anything that is secret will never accidentally print to stdout. String interpolation in bash with `—option $empty` might be safer than `8<$empty`. Have to explore more but yeah, this is a new pattern for me as well.