MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by isr | 2026-01-04 00:45:30+00:00
No it isn't.

A "proxy" is someone who primarily serves someone elses interests first. Their own interests are subservient to that (if they come in at all).

Venezuelans who may end up fighting for Venezuelan freedom to rule themselves as a soveriegn free nation, with the right to fully benefit from THEIR own natural resources, are NOT proxies of anyone. Regardless of who helps them.

When you're a closet imperialist who thinks nothing of stealing other peoples land, resources, dignity & even lives, then everyone opposing you starts to look like a terrorist, an insurgent or a proxy.

The issue isn't them. Its you.
by foxglacier | 2026-01-04 00:46:43+00:00
Like who? Biden a puppet with dementia, Obama invading Libya and helping kill Gadaffi (and actually killing his family), as well as drone strikes on individuals in lots of middle eastern countries, Bush and Iraq/Afghanistan, Clinton and .. Iraq? but also war on drugs and Mexico border fence. Previous Bush - Iraq again?? Before that, South America again.
by 0xfaded | 2026-01-04 00:47:15+00:00
I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g...

I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations.

People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time.

It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.)

Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.
by defrost | 2026-01-04 00:47:16+00:00
The deep sea miners have zero interest in exploration, discovery, and understanding of our Oceans at a much higher level.

The moment research they funded to the end goal of mining suggested there might be an eco system under threat Gerard Barron and the The Metals Company reveresed course and took a scorched earth approach to their own researchers.

~ https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/7717/
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-01-04 00:47:27+00:00
Lots of the comments here are attributing the decline to a toxic community or overly-strict moderation, but I don't think that that is the main reason. The TeX site [0] is very friendly and has somewhat looser moderation, yet it shows the exact same decline [1].

[0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/

[1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/1926661#graph
by analogpixel | 2026-01-04 00:47:27+00:00
> 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'm always surprised when people say they use LLMs to do stuff in their Journal/Obsidian/Notion. The whole point of those systems is to make you think better, and then you just offload all of that to a computer.
by sathomasga | 2026-01-04 00:48:17+00:00
Follow up in 2015 with essentially the same conclusions:

"Acetylsalicylic Acid Daily vs Acetylsalicylic Acid Every 3 Days in Healthy Volunteers: Effect on Platelet Aggregation, Gastric Mucosa, and Prostaglandin E2 Synthesis"

https://accp1.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcph.6...
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-04 00:48:19+00:00
reminds me of descartes. I was mentioning him the other day to my schizo mother in law, who hears voices, to offer the comfort of "I think, therefore I am". The idea being that during her worst episodes she might latch onto the thought that she is thinking, so while the voices _are_ scary; she still exists, she's still in control, she is thinking, therefore she is.

Anyway, I casually mentioned he did a lot of his thinking in an oven and her curiousity was really piqued by that idea. Which is funny because every time I mention it to someone, that's the bit that is most interesting to them. I'm not convinced that an AI would necessarily pick up on that detail being of note as much as a human would.
Show HN: Comet MCP – Give Claude Code a browser that can click
by hanzili | 2026-01-04 00:48:38+00:00
Hey HN,

Claude Code is pretty agentic now. It writes scripts, calls APIs, uses CLIs. But when something requires actually clicking through a website, it stops and asks me to do it.

Problem is, I'm often unfamiliar with these platforms myself. "Go to App Store Connect and generate a P8 key" okay but where? I end up spending 10 minutes navigating menus I've never seen before.

I started delegating these tasks to Perplexity's Comet browser. It handles the clicking, returns what I need. But copy-pasting between Claude and Comet got old fast.

So I built this MCP server to connect them directly. Now when Claude needs to interact with a website that has no API, it can just ask Comet to handle it.

Examples:
- Grab my app ID from RevenueCat dashboard
- Generate a P8 key in App Store Connect
- Navigate admin panels behind login walls

I tried Playwright MCP but having Claude do the clicking itself overwhelms the context window. Comet's agentic browsing just works better in my experience.

Comet doesn't have an API, so this uses CDP to communicate with it directly.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-04 00:50:16+00:00
> The path behind easy only leads to the lowest common denominator. The real artists, fighters, makers—they stick with a truth as old as time itself: The suck is why we’re here, and only those who overcome it themselves will reap all the rewards of their hard labor.

The other day, my wife needed to divide something, and rather than get up and walk to the next room to grab her phone, she did it on pen and paper longhand.

At first I was amazed that she bothered instead of grabbing her phone to do it.

Then it occurred to me that, while more people than I expect probably remember how to divide by hand correctly, I don't think I've actually seen someone do it in years, perhaps since my school days.

I do agree with the author that art is a human endeavor and mastery requires practice... But I'm less optimistic that mass adoption of the easy way will let masters stand out. More likely, they'll just be buried under the deluge of slop the public craves.
by omneity | 2026-01-04 00:50:23+00:00
Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches.

Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowledge collected and redistributed at an even larger scale than SO and forum-style platforms allow for.

It does remove the human touch so it's quite a different dynamic and the amount of data to collect is staggering and challenging from a legal point of view, but I suspect a lot of the knowledge used to train LLMs in the next ten years will come from large-scale telemetry and millions of hours in RL self-play where LLMs learn to scale and debug code from fizzbuzz to facebook and twitter-like distributed system.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-04 00:50:37+00:00
> What happened in Europe after WW2? Dick Cheney didn't invent the idea of America liberating a country and being greeted as liberators, it had happened before, specifically in countries that had a history of liberal democracy.

Those countries were actually being liberated from a foreign power that had invaded them just a few years prior.

There are very few examples where a foreign nation overthrowing the indigenous government (no matter how despised that government may be) are greeted as liberators, and in those select few instances the sentiment is almost universally short lived.
by egypturnash | 2026-01-04 00:50:42+00:00
I'm an artist and telling a story is a fun way to give structure to the eternal question of "what do I draw next".

Sometimes the art comes first, sometimes the words come first, ultimately they all end up with a rough draft of both in an Adobe Illustrator file that gets refined into a final page, and then I make another file in the same directory, and another, and another, and another, until there's enough to be worth considering printing a book. Sometimes I realize I just have to sit down and figure out what the next hundred pages are gonna be shaped like before I can go back to worrying about what this chapter's gonna be shaped like, or what the current page needs to do. Really it's the same shape as any creative process: make a quick, messy version, ask yourself what's the easiest/most obvious thing to do to make it better, repeat that step until you're satisfied with it and/or the deadline hits.

An important part of the process is also directing interested people to my crowdfunding (https://comradery.co/egypturnash, https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash) so I can afford to keep drawing pages instead of seeking other work. :)
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-04 00:52:16+00:00
"The Stupidity of GDP per Capita"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiymTzsZfoA

How much of this years GDP growth in the USA went to average citizens? What does GDP growth matter if your citizens have zero access to healthcare, can't improve their conditions, can't innovate, can't try new ideas because they are tied to healthcare via their current job?

How much of American GDP growth goes to Billionaires and isn't a useful health metric?

See: Billionaires added record $2.2tn in wealth in 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/dec/31/billionaires-ad...
by pyuser583 | 2026-01-04 00:52:47+00:00
Yeah that’s the way I take it - “you’re probably not going to convince many people to sleep with you.”

Kind of hurts my pride, but seeing as I'm older than 40, and my wife and I are pretty freaking boring, the vaccine is better spent on someone with more opportunities ahead of them.

I really hate these vaccine specific awareness campaigns. Not only do they hurt my vanity, but I know too many people who are anti-vaxers, or into weird fake medicines.

I just go with what my doctor says. If social media says something different, social media is wrong.

But really, don’t get your vaccine schedule from Hacker News.

The activists on these threads should probably be pushing folks to get their kids vaccinated.
by zellyn | 2026-01-04 00:53:40+00:00
Thank you! I’ve always procrastinated tracking finances, but as a programmer who believes in reproducible builds, this just clicked.

I just downloaded a bunch of qfx and csv files, and got Claude Code to do this. Took an hour to create the whole system from nothing. Then of course I stayed up until 2am getting CC to create Python rules to categorize things better, and trying to figure out what BEENVERI on my bank statement means

(If you do this, make Claude generate fingerprints for each transaction so it’s easy to add individual overrides…)

Getting Claude to write a FastAPI backend to serve up a “Subscriptions” dashboard took about 3 minutes, plus another minute or two to add an svg bar graph and change ordering.

Crazy times.
by schrijver | 2026-01-04 00:54:05+00:00
It’s a method like any other. The process took him two days, after the LLM suggested which track to mix (like he was working for the LLM instead of the other way around?). Two days is more than enough for anyone who likes music to learn how to make a mashup in Ableton without LLM’s.

Seems though that working with those AI tools appeals to the author, that they learned and had fun, so I guess that makes it a good usecase for them specifically?
Ask HN: Why Can't We Make Approved Building Plans Reusable?
by silexia | 2026-01-04 00:54:07+00:00
Why do people have to go through an entire architectural drawing and engineering process for every single building we create? Maybe we would require a soils test to make sure the ground has the same bearing capacity. If a building plan is approved by government officials, that plan should be available on the approved list for anybody to use at any time going forward. It is stupid that people have to spend $20,000 or $30,000 every time they want to build a box that has been approved and built literally hundreds of thousands of times before.

The architectural and engineering special interests have really captured their regulators on this one.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-04 00:54:27+00:00
All of this is disgusting theft, and is plain old imperialist colonialism. Let’s not pretend there is even a shred of legitimacy to the claims about drugs or whatever - Trump recently pardoned a major drug lord. This is entirely about enriching Trump, his family, and friends. The people of Venezuela will still be left poor but will lose their natural resources.
by danielwhite | 2026-01-04 00:54:28+00:00
Location: Indianapolis
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Rust, C#/.NET, TypeScript, some Kotlin/Java, some Go
Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/danielawhite
Email: daniel@whitefamily.in

I have 16 years of experience and have an affinity for dev tools or infrastructure. Primarily backend, but willing to help on frontend.
by xpe | 2026-01-04 00:54:36+00:00
I appreciate the discussion and thoughtful response.

> But my read is that you over index on the notion of laws

To be fair, nothing I said asserted the relative importance of international law in comparison to other influences (i.e. military power, strategic goals, economic interests, a vindictive leader).

> hence your general befuddlement on the current outcome

Where do you get the impression that I'm befuddled? I was disappointed in the lack of nuance of some comments, so I pushed back, but I'm not 'befuddled' by current events.

> Sovereign nations follow international law and order to the extent their goals align and perceived costs of contravening them exceeds some threshold.

This sounds like the 'rational actor' model from international relations. [1] But that model is not the only game in town, nor is it universally the best model to use!

> Might ultimately makes right, has always been the case.

I would happily see this phrase fall out of usage. It is what authoritarians want you to believe. What is right != who has power. Normative != positive. They are not the same. We would do well not to blur 'what is' with 'what should be', not even in an aphorism.

[1]: http://slantchev.ucsd.edu/courses/ps12/03-rational-decision-...
by zephen | 2026-01-04 00:54:41+00:00
I have never found either (1) or (2) to be a problem in hundreds of thousands of lines of Python.

> In particular, C3's "path shortening" ... we'd have to pay by actually writing `std.io.file.open("foo.txt")` or change to a flat module system.

You can easily and explicitly shorten paths in other languages. For example, in Python "from mypackage.mysubpackage import mymodule; mymodule.myfunc()"

Python even gracefully handles name collisions by allowing you to change the name of the local alias, e.g. "from my_other_package.mysubpackage import mymodule as other_module"

I find the "from .. import" to be really handy to understand touchpoints for other modules, and it is not very verbose, because you can have a comma-separated list of things that you are aliasing into the current namespace.

(You can also use "from some_module import *" to bring everything in, which is highly useful for exploratory programming but is an anti-pattern for production software.)
by kllrnohj | 2026-01-04 00:54:58+00:00
They target different things. kmp/swiftdroid let you share business logic, but not really the UI. Although this is SwiftUI-like, it's not actually swiftui and doesn't behave as such. So you'd be doing platform-specific front ends, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's different from the promise of Flutter/React Native which is the same UI everywhere
by djfergus | 2026-01-04 00:55:10+00:00
> I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience

Interesting question - the result is just words so surely a LLM can simulate an ego. Feed it the Linux kernel mailing list?

Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate?

And if they don’t have the experience that is just a question of tokens?
by adabyron | 2026-01-04 00:55:20+00:00
Nadella had it easy when he took over. Stock soared before he did anything. The only improvements seemed to be made by others using the CEO change to try & push a few better agendas.

Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.

I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.
by brandonb | 2026-01-04 00:55:21+00:00
The thing that took the most time was normalizing biomarker names and units across labs. Even for the same lab chain (say, Quest), you'll get the same biomarker with slightly different names (e.g., Lp(a) vs Lipoprotein(a) vs Lipoprotein a) or units (e.g., cells/uL vs 10^9/L).
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-04 00:56:07+00:00
I used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior product execs emailed me to see what turned me off.

What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is allowed.

Unfortunately it happens to every online technical community once they become popular enough. I even see it happening on HN.
by pyuser583 | 2026-01-04 00:56:08+00:00
I am believe me. And I’m always told the same thing by different doctors. So that’s that.

Even when I live in Europe, which I do occasionally, I’m told to follow the vaccine schedule of my home country.

My kids have all received all recommended vaccines, including the one discussed. So I’m not in any way opposed.

It’s just not appropriate to go around vaccines not recommended.
by jvanderbot | 2026-01-04 00:56:25+00:00
You can write a paper, submit the arxiv, and you can also make a blog post.
At any rate, I agree - SO was (is?) a wonderful place for this kind of thing.

I once had a professor mention that they knew me from SO because I posted a few underhanded tricks to prevent an EKF from "going singular" in production. That kind of community is going to be hard to replace, but SO isnt going anywhere, you can still ask a question and answer your own question for permanent, searchable archive.
by appreciatorBus | 2026-01-04 00:56:56+00:00
This is just standard nimby style writing, describing every element of a proposal in a maximally negative and catastrophic light.

That the writer studied architecture tells you all you need to know - they have nothing of value to add and can only critique endlessly out of a misguided belief that the aesthetics of buildings can bring about a collectivist utopia. It’s the original home of social engineering and central planning.
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-04 00:56:56+00:00
No thank you, for the overconfidence misinformation. Of the three large DRAM companies in the world Micron is the only one based in the USA.

Micron uses ASML’s EUV machines in New York.

https://www.syracuse.com/business/2023/09/mind-boggling-mach...
by akoboldfrying | 2026-01-04 00:57:02+00:00
IIUC, you believe that (a) using a tool like Notion is a useful brain-multiplying lever vs. struggling to keep everything in your head, but (b) using a tool like an LLM is a harmful brain-rotting exercise vs. struggling to do everything with your head.

In your opinion, what is the differentiating factor?
by arbopa | 2026-01-04 00:57:42+00:00
arb is a schema-driven code generation tool that turns structured YAML into fully working CLIs and tooling.

The idea is to make the schema and data the source of truth, with validation and deterministic output, instead of hand-written glue code.

I included a concrete Rust example that generates a Clap-based CLI with global flags, leaf commands, and nested subcommands (e.g. remote add/list), all from data.

This is pre-alpha and focused on clarity and correctness rather than features. Feedback welcome.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-04 00:57:57+00:00
Biden became worse in the last year, but he wasn't a 'puppet', certainly not like the current president is. I'm not a fan of Obama's actions but he at least gave justification instead of inventing it and lying like Bush.

Kamala was the obvious choice and the only adult running in the last election, but she lost largely due to sexism, racism and gullibility of the red state population.

Assuming we get to have another election, we'd hopefully have someone like Bernie or Elizabeth Warren.
by vunderba | 2026-01-04 00:58:00+00:00
Bespoke apps that would normally be too time‑consuming to justify building are a perfect use case for LLMs. A few that I've built already.

- Pre-AI Image Search – find images on the web with upload dates prior to 2022

- HN Notifier – a Mac menu bar app that shows toast notifications for Hacker News submissions containing topics of interest to me

- Comic Display – serves CBR/CBZ archives or image folders over LAN so they can be read on mobile devices
by neillyons | 2026-01-04 00:59:24+00:00
My favourite is this disclaimer in the question. lol

> Is there any way to force install a pip python package ignoring all its dependencies that cannot be satisfied?

> (I don't care how "wrong" it is to do so, I just need to do it, any logic and reasoning aside...)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12759761/pip-force-insta...
by 8fingerlouie | 2026-01-04 00:59:35+00:00
I've been using Verbatim all these years, but truth be told, I'm considering stopping.

Blank media is becoming harder and harder to come by, and prices have increased to 2-4x of what they were.

For now at least, I have enough media to fill out the next couple of years, 1 year per 100GB disc, and we'll see where we are by then. My prediction is that it won't be any easier to archive to optical media by then. If you need proof, just check your local DVD/Blu-Ray vendor for latest copies of movies/shows.

I know Sony and others are working on 1TB size discs, but they're all "enterprise archiving", so probably not within price range of consumers.
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-04 01:00:31+00:00
25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat.

Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.

I sometimes wonder how much I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them.
by xucian | 2026-01-04 01:00:44+00:00
SEEKING WORK | San Francisco, CA | REMOTE Location: San Francisco, CA (PT) Remote: Yes (preferred) Willing to relocate: Yes
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hey, I'm Lucian, have 13y of exp as a generalist swe, started as a gamedev then expanded into devops, ai/ml, trading, now working on a pretty diverse range of projects, from games, gamedev courses, ai tools, saas templates etc. more info on my profile
looking for a fractional cto role, ideally, but I'm flexible