MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-07 16:10:16+00:00
China goes up and down on this, I was there when foreigner employment was on the rise, but that fell off even before COVID. A lot of people left during COVID, surely, but that is recovering now as well. While you aren’t wrong, I think it’s totally possible for their AI and automation boom to draw in significant world talent again.

You’ll see first other Asians (mostly Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese) working in China, they are definitely less noticeable. The rest will follow, Chinese are a lot less xenophobic snd more pragmatic than they appear.
by stackskipton | 2026-01-07 16:10:18+00:00
As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though."

When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly in response to someone acting like "I just need to convince them"
by virgil_disgr4ce | 2026-01-07 16:10:20+00:00
> The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude

Are you saying that because you don't like web apps or the frameworks that people use to make them, there shouldn't be a way for people to publicly ask questions about programming?
by shreddit | 2026-01-07 16:10:30+00:00
Did not expect that: I got rid of a small screen i can carry around by putting a lot of small screen all over my house.

I put that in the same bin as all the “Stop doomscrolling” apps. You can’t prevent doomscrolling by adding another app on your phone. Get rid of the phone (and all other screens), one does not need to be able to look up everything in a moments notice. Write it down on a paper and do it later.
by headcanon | 2026-01-07 16:10:33+00:00
Potentially, a lot of that isn't just code generation, it *is* requirements gathering, design iteration, analysis, debugging, etc.

I've been using CC for non-programming tasks and its been pretty successful so far, at least for personal projects (bordering on the edge of non-trivial). For instance, I'll get a 'designer' agent coming up with spec, and a 'design-critic' to challenge the design and make the original agent defend their choices. They can ask open questions after each round and I'll provide human feedback. After a few rounds of this, we whittle it down to a decent spec and try it out after handing it off to a coding agent.

Another example from work: I fired off some code analysis to an agent with the goal of creating integration tests, and then ran a set of spec reviewers in parallel to check its work before creating the actual tickets.

My point is there are a lot of steps involved in the whole product development process and isn't just "ship production code". And we can reduce the ambiguity/hallucinations/sycophancy by creating validation/checkpoints (either tests, 'critic' agents to challenge designs/spec, or human QA/validation when appropriate)

The end game of this approach is you have dozens or hundreds of agents running via some kind of orchestrator churning through a backlog that is combination human + AI generated, and the system posts questions to the human user(s) to gather feedback. The human spends most of the time doing high-level design/validation and answering open questions.

You definitely incur some cognitive debt and risk it doing something you don't want, but thats part of the fun for me (assuming it doesn't kill my AI bill).
by pkreg01 | 2026-01-07 16:10:34+00:00
> A lot of tech companies will find the institutional knowledge they thought would shore up their moat is worth a lot less than they thought.

I totally agree. I think going forward the primary value of SAS will be the embedded domain expertise in a pre-built product. The comparison of Asana versus Notion comes to mind for project management. Asana forces abstractions of good project management upon you, whereas Notion lets you build it yourself. I think this principle will scale to all software in the future, where the only real value of software or it becomes exported maintenance obligations and a predetermines domain abstraction.

But as you mentioned, I think companies will rapidly find that their own specific abstraction is worth a lot less than they believed.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-07 16:10:54+00:00
It's too bad tech folks didn't believe in unions, because management can do whatever they want to workers, even if the consequences don't catch back up to them for some time. Ah, well. The beatings will continue until the hype cycle plays out (Klarna and Salesforce are early examples of enterprises putting forth they were using AI replacing workers, and then having to hire workers back, or start hiring again).
by ted_dunning | 2026-01-07 16:10:56+00:00
No. Typst is an open source application.

There is a very prominent web site that offers a hosted version without much clarity about the fact that you can run it yourself. The hosted version offers collaborative editing similar to what Overleaf provides which is incredibly useful.

See https://github.com/typst/typst for the CLI version

There is a page with pre-compiled binaries as well and on Macs, you can install using homebrew.
by gn4d | 2026-01-07 16:11:17+00:00
dw, you're not alone in this. Researchers like this are extremely impressive, but it seems like an absolutely massive misallocation of his brainpower. Sure, people can say the same about art/literature/chess/etc., but I would argue that more people benefit from viewing or experiencing the latter than will benefit from working through all 119 pages of this paper. This guy could be doing medical or other scientific research, but instead is working on some contrived problem. Even here, let's assume there is some remote application for a nanobot for targeted drug delivery transiting a capillary... "rough" computational solutions will be more than adequate, especially when taking into account wall elasticity and other variables. I do wonder why some of the top institutions in the world like KIAS are even funding this.
by leopoldj | 2026-01-07 16:11:49+00:00
I apologize if this is common knowledge. Modern C++ coding agents need to have a deep semantic understanding of the external libraries and header files. A simple RAG on the code base is not enough. For example, GitHub Copilot for VS Code and Visual Studio uses IDE language services like IntelliSense. To that extent, using a proper C++ IDE rather than a plain editor will improve the quality of suggested code. For example, if you're using VS Code, make sure the C/C++ Extension Pack is installed.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-07 16:12:02+00:00
I'm quite confident, based on my interactions with both strangers and non-strangers in the past, that the original commenter got their information from anti-immigrant propagandists. It does me no good to convince them of something if they're just going to read another paper or tune into the next podcast episode and get more false reasons why immigration should be restricted.
by buo | 2026-01-07 16:12:35+00:00
The compiler is open-source and can be run locally. You need an account if you want to use their web editor, which is nice (it shows error messages where they occur along with an explanation and link to docs, and also shows a real-time updated preview).

As for Latex vs Typst, as a language Typst is much better, compiles very quickly, and has sane error messages. However, Typst still has a few rough edges, and can't do everything you can with Latex + packages (yet).

I've been using Typst for most of my documents for a few months and I've been generally happy with it.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-01-07 16:12:40+00:00
> you better take a half dozen executives with you or you'd never get the first meeting no matter how good the product was

I spent ~16 years of my career in life sciences and this is also my experience. There's no way you get into an enterprise account with a pharma as a startup without a lot of deep connections; life sciences space is very high in regulatory requirements and risk and the risk/reward ratio with startups simply isn't worth it.

In my specific space, clinical trials can run for years. A company that might fold if they run out of runway? Non-starter. I was a member of a small company that did make this work and it required that we put our code in escrow with a large multi-national IT company that owned the support contract (customer paid us for licensing, paid multi-national IT company for support, our source code went into escrow).
by pavel_lishin | 2026-01-07 16:12:54+00:00
I have an old, broken crosswalk sign that I keep meaning to set up as a "meeting indicator" - red hand meaning that I'm in a meeting, and the seconds countdown as an indicator of how many minutes are left until I'm out of meetings.

But as it turns out, since my spouse & I both work from home, separated by an entire floor of a house, there ain't that much need for it, so it sits on my shelf.
by tonyarkles | 2026-01-07 16:12:56+00:00
> In the past I have worked in defence, for highly sensitive stuff they wouldn't even allow a common ground between two networks.

I actually agree very much with this. If you're looking for strong assurance that there is no possible back-channel, devices like optocouplers help significantly. It's not hard for me to think of a way to surreptitiously send data backwards through a common ground, or normal silicon diode, or a magnetic coupler like an Ethernet transformer, but optoisolators make it significantly more challenging.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-07 16:13:14+00:00
Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwellers got their way and drove everyone else away.

Instead of a rich interaction forum, it became a gamified version of Appease The Asshole. I stopped playing when I realized I’d rather be doing almost anything else with my free time.

For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run, who is empowered to say “I appreciate your efforts but this isn’t how we want to do things here” and veto the ruiners. Otherwise you inevitably seem to end up with a self-elected bureaucracy that exists to keep itself in place, all else be damned.

(Bringing it back to a local example, I can’t imagine HN without dang and the new mods. Actually, I guess I can: it would look a lot like Reddit, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but I vastly prefer the quality of conversation here, thanks.)
by miningape | 2026-01-07 16:13:32+00:00
It's well known that even current LLMs do not perform well on logic games when you change the names / language used.

i.e. try asking it to swap the meanings of the words red and green and ask it to describe the colors in a painting and analyse it with color theory - notice how quickly the results degrade, often attributing "green" qualities to "red" since it's now calling it "green".

What this shows us is that training data (where the associations are made) plays a significant role in the level of answer an LLM can give, no matter how good your context is (at overriding the associations / training data). This demonstrates that training data is more important (for "novel" work) than context is.
by AlexandrB | 2026-01-07 16:13:35+00:00
To play devil's advocate, I think some people confuse terse, succinct communication with being mean. I find this to be a common cultural difference between contributors from different backgrounds.

Personally I find a lot of "welcoming" language to be excessively saccharine and ultimately insincere. Something between being talked down to like I'm a child and corpo-slop. Ultimately I don't think there's necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution here and it's weird that some people expect that such a thing can or should exist.
by chankstein38 | 2026-01-07 16:13:40+00:00
While I haven't experienced LLMs correcting most (or any) of the problems listed fully and consistently, I do agree that consistent use of LLMs and dealing with their frustrations has worn my patience for conversations with people who exhibit the same issues when talking.

It's kind of depressing. I just want the LLM to be a bot that responds to what I say with a useful response. However, for some reason, both Gemini and ChatGPT tend to argue with me so heavily and inject their own weird stupid ideas on things making it even more grating to interact with them which chews away at my normal interpersonal patience which, as someone on the spectrum, was already limited.
by realityfactchex | 2026-01-07 16:13:44+00:00
Strong disagree

What's achieved is impressive as heck, but it ain't AGI.

It's easy (and good marketing) to convince people that this is AGI. And, for sure, it's fairly easy to become convinced that this is AGI.

But AGI is far, far more magical than this. (Not to discount what this is, which is amazing, too!)
by jacobthesnakob | 2026-01-07 16:13:46+00:00
They’re out there. I find it more productive to search for and financially support such businesses, rather than adopt the doomer pessimistic anticapitalism take.

For example I just bought a Concept2 RowErg rowing machine. They sell literally every piece and part on their website so it’s end user repairable. The metrics integrate with a ton of apps, so you’re not locked into their app/ecosystem and there’s no subscription. It’s the polar opposite of Peloton and Hydrox.

Unfortunately a lot of these honest businesses are one generation away from potentially selling out everything the founders built, but I’ll continue doing my best to keep them around while they exist.
by Permit | 2026-01-07 16:13:53+00:00
> I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original.

This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-07 16:13:57+00:00
The best way to get rid of spiders it to get rid of the files yourself then.

If there is nothing in your house for the spiders to eat, you won't have spiders. If you remove the spiders but not their prey (flies, etc...), you will have more flies, and spiders will keep coming back.

The reason the spider web in the article is so huge is that there is a huge amount of flies to feed the spiders.
by stevenwoo | 2026-01-07 16:14:04+00:00
I am only surprised this came out of UCSF and Robert Lustig's name is not on it, since it's often a topic in his books.

Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co...

Anyways here's a recent study showing fat/sugar intake and nanoplastic correlation.
https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/nanoplastics-have-diet-dependen...
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-07 16:14:15+00:00
That is what the HTML 4 !doctype Tag - https://www.quackit.com/html/html_4/tags/doctype_html_public... - was meant for. Ideally, an old client that cannot parse a newer HTML spec should inform the user to update the client. Developers could then either support old versions of their site (more easily, in such a case) or can simply decide not to deal with outdated browsers. (In fact, isn't that what most BiGTech sites actually do now, through convoluted browser feature detections - "Your browser is no longer supported ...").
by smithkl42 | 2026-01-07 16:14:17+00:00
If you're interested, a perfect example would be this question here ("should I enable application insights profiling on production Azure web apps"):

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77855606/should-we-enabl...

That's an interesting question! It's a question that real programmers might want to have answers to! And I had a very specific answer, based on real-world experience and data. But the question got closed as being off-topic.

Shrug. They get to make the site they want. It doesn't mean it's the site folks want to visit.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-07 16:14:25+00:00
A casual look at where people live the oldest, what they eat, and what's recommended tell you all you need to know about food recommendations then and now.

It's a field where actual long term controlled experiments are impossible, confounding variables are everywhere, and multiple lobbies have vested interests in the outcomes.

I take everything with a grain of salt apart from studies of harm when sources are credible and numerous and even then, I'm not fully confident.

The only current advice I follow is avoiding industrially processed food. That sounds like a sound one as this kind of food is basically terra incognita. It's just applying the precaution principle.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-07 16:14:26+00:00
Think of it this way, some engineers go into people management, they aren’t coding directly anymore…they are managing people that code. Prompting is a similar lateral promotion, just the people you are managing are dumber AIs, you get a lot of them, and instead of meetings you communicate with them via prompts. The fact that they can also do QA is critical because they make a lot of mistakes, but can actually fix those mistakes, so you just devote more AI time to that.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-07 16:14:40+00:00
Even when it's solicited, I think it's weird. I don't tell people what I do for a living when I introduce myself. And when they ask, I tell them I'm an exotic dancer. It's a silly joke (since I'm a fat 50 year old) that tends to break the ice and lighten up the conversation. In general, I think small-talking about what you do for a living is not really interesting to people, and just allows them to silently put you somewhere on their mental totem pole of importance. Better to talk about actual interests.
by Haaargio | 2026-01-07 16:14:42+00:00
communication before the internet was very slow.

Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known.

We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not.

Then you have the wrong people sponsoring this.

Fraud etc.
Show HN: The Data MCP – chat with any database, with memory and rules
by y14 | 2026-01-07 16:15:11+00:00
Built an MCP server for data work with memory and rules.

Use cases:
- Engineers: query your data from Claude/Cursor, debug issues, build with analytics in dev flow (like [1] but with memory and observability built in)
- Data teams: chat with your DB, define rules for how AI should query, share dashboards and analysis

Works with Postgres, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and more. Any LLM. Swap or mix instantly

What's different:
- Memory – stores context, preferences, usage down to table/column level. Learns over time.
- Rules – instructions, terms, guardrails with versioning. Git sync with dbt, markdown, code.
- Observability – traces, plans, evals, feedback. See exactly what happened.

Would love to receive feedback!

[1] https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179856266789204
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-07 16:15:45+00:00
I did consulting work for a place with Sun 2's and 4's, AIX, HP-UX, Xenix, and SCO. There was NFS, Netware, and UUCP all cheerfully coexisting on an IPv4 network that used a public Class C for NATed internal use. (It's now a zombie IP range that doesn't do anything useful.)

Later, I wrote code a university that had even more heterogeneous clusters.

The problem today is the siloification and bias against system diversity that doesn't account for proper software configuration management and support of multiple platforms. Portability is a dying art.
Show HN: Loki Mode hit 99.67% SWE-Bench – MAF built a SaaS overnight
by slogansand | 2026-01-07 16:16:01+00:00
Last month I shared Loki Mode here. Since then, benchmarks came back.

SWE-Bench: 99.67% (299/300 problems)
HumanEval: 98.78% Pass@1 (162/164)

For context, most single-agent systems hit 30-50%. Best proprietary ones hover around 70-80%.

The difference is architecture. 37 specialized agent types across 6 swarms (engineering, ops, business, data, product, growth). Parallel 3-reviewer code review. Feedback loops that actually learn.

To stress test it, I pointed it at a blank folder and said "build a ServiceNow replacement." It ran for 19 hours and built FireLater - complete ticket management, workflows, CMDB, knowledge base, self-service portal. I wrote zero lines of code.

New in this version:
- Kanban board to visualize agent actions in real-time
- Perpetual improvement via self-healing feedback loops
- Smarter swarm coordination

Still open source. MIT license. Still not selling anything.

Loki Mode: https://github.com/asklokesh/claudeskill-loki-mode
FireLater (built by Loki Mode): https://github.com/asklokesh/FireLater

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or benchmarks.
by raffapen | 2026-01-07 16:16:11+00:00
This is a sharp observation, and it goes even further: BeyondCompare easily allows one to hop into an editor at a specific location, while Total Commander, with its side-by-side view of the world, is n excellent trampoline into BeyondCompare.
In this kind of ecosystem (where visual tools strive to achieve some Unix-like collaboration), the super power of editors (and IDEs) is their scripting language, and in this arena it is still hard to beat Emacs (with capabilities that were present maybe 40 years ago).
by catapart | 2026-01-07 16:16:17+00:00
I appreciate the recc, but it misses the mark I think? Time machine is only on a single OS, and is designed as more of a "keep my whole system safe" backup rather than a "back these things up" backup.

I can understand why people might want to backup entire drives, or to backup OS content minimally, but my use-case is to just pick a few folders and only have those backed up. Not to an external drive, but to internal ones and network ones.

That's the tool I'm looking for. While Time Machine can exclude everything but the folders to backup, it doesn't seem to be able to back them up with different cadences or rules about content limits or whatever else. It's all or nothing. I'm just not sure it provides what I'm looking for.
by ACS_Solver | 2026-01-07 16:16:36+00:00
StackOverflow was great because it's not like a support forum or a mailing list. It's more like a repository of knowledge. It's been extremely helpful to me when arriving from Google, and I've gotten a couple useful responses to my own questions either. Awesome resource.

Where SO started failing in my opinion is when the "no duplicate questions" rule started to be interpreted as "it's a duplicate if the same or very similar question has ever been answered on the site". That caused too many questions to have outdated answers as the tech changes, best practices change and so on. C# questions have answers that were current for .NET Core 1.0 and should be modified. I have little webdev experience but I know JS has changed rapidly and significantly, so 2012 answers to JS questions are likely not good now.