MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lbreakjai | 2026-01-09 08:50:19+00:00
Share of the world's GDP is a flawed metric. It tells us we're getting a smaller slice, but it doesn't tell us if the pie grew or shrunk. If the EU grew by 50% while India and China became 200% richer, then on paper the share of the world's GDP would be dramatically lower, while everyone would be better off.

I don't disagree with the sentiment you expressed at all though.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-09 08:50:52+00:00
Imagine you're a billionaire with infinite resources. You'd have gofers for everything. Get a weird idea while golfing? Shoot a text or call someone and it'll get done (or just tell the assistant that's always following you)

These web agents are similar. You pull out your phone while queueing in the shop, change to your "research" repo and tell it "investigate a way to create a privacy-preserving mobile application to store barcode-based loyalty cards", hit execute and put your phone away.

When you get to it, you can check out what it did for you.

Or if your system is set up properly, you can ask the same thing to make changes to any project, like adding a new feature you just thought up. Get back, review PR, maybe merge it.
by resumenext | 2026-01-09 08:50:53+00:00
What is the value of being in front of a car? The value is in opening the door, which is on the side. Sure you could have two jackers, one in front and another on the side but then running over 1 of the 2 (or more) again becomes useless as the side jacker would shoot you.

> Or women in?

You must be rolling in women. Lucky them. Maybe you can take them out to dinner and run over some car jackers on the way home.
by kolektiv | 2026-01-09 08:50:56+00:00
In all seriousness, why is that a problem? Surely for embedded, the size and hardware usage of the resultant binary is what matters, not the size/number of tools used to build it? I get that a lot of people worry about supply chain attacks right now (and that's fine, everyone should be thinking about how to mitigate that problem/reduce it) - but going back to a world where code re-use is significantly less usable isn't likely to magically make everything better, that has trade-offs too - particularly if (as plenty of people clearly do) they want a modern dev experience for embedded hardware.
by lnardi | 2026-01-09 08:51:20+00:00
Midwest Tape (distributor for Hoopla) was hitting performance ceilings on their RDS PostgreSQL production database during peak demand.

By using an ML-driven tuning agent, they were able to identify bottlenecks in server-key parameters that manual inspection missed. In a 4-hour session, they achieved a 10x boost in query performance (75ms to 7ms).

This aligns with the "Autonomous Postgres" trend—moving the burden of tuning from the DBA to agents.
by wtetzner | 2026-01-09 08:51:49+00:00
> My work flow: Planning mode (iterations), execute plan, audit changes & prove to me the code is correct, debug runs + log ingestion to further prove it, human test, human review, commit, deploy. Iterate a couple of times if needed.

I'm genuinely curious if this is actually more productive than a non-AI workflow, or if it just feels more productive because you're not writing the code.
by ZeroConcerns | 2026-01-09 08:52:07+00:00
Note that the complete title is "How Samba was Written", but apparently there is a list of unapproved interrogative adverbs...

Also note that since the MS-EU settlement, the SMB protocol is quite extensively, if a bit passive-aggressive opaquely, described in a series of documents that Microsoft updates to this day, e.g. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...
by chews | 2026-01-09 08:52:30+00:00
I've been in New Zealand for the last few weeks (actually posting this from a beachside campground) and holy smokes is the Delica a cool vehicle (previous model years... there isn't a 2020's mini here) I will say there there are a TON of cool small campers from japanese automakers I've seen on this trip. Protectionist measures like the chickentax really make it obvious that the US is propping up a bunch of terrible auto manufacturers and if it really allowed capitalism (actual competition) the US automotive industry would be fully cooked.
by Ameo | 2026-01-09 08:53:00+00:00
It seems to me that Wasm largely succeeded and meets most/all of the goals for when it was created. The article backs this up by listing the many niches in which its found support, and I personally have deployed dozens of projects (both personal and professional) that use Wasm as a core component.

I''m personally a big fan of Wasm; it has been one of my favorite technologies ever since the first time I called malloc from the JS console when experimenting with an early version of Emscripten. Modern JS engines can be almost miraculously fast, but Wasm still offers the best performance and much higher levels of control over what's actually running on the CPU. I've written about this in the past.

The only way it really fell short is in the way that a lot of people were predicting that it would become a sort of total replacement for JS+HTML+CSS for building web apps. In this regard, I'd have to agree. It could be the continued lack of DOM bindings that have been considered a key missing piece for several years now, or maybe something else or more fundamental.

I've tried out some of the Wasm-powered web frameworks like Yew and not found them to provide an improvement for me at all. It just feels like an awkwardly bolted-on layer on top of JS and CSS without adding any new patterns or capabilities. Like you still have to keep all of the underlying semantics of the way JS events work, you still have to keep the whole DOM and HTML element system, and you also have to deal with all the new stuff the framework introduces on top of that.

Things may be different with other frameworks like Blazor which I've not tried, but I just find myself wanting to write JS instead. I openly admit that it might just be my deep experience and comfort building web apps using React or Svelte though.

Anyway, I strongly feel that Wasm is a successful technology. It's probably in a lot more places than you think, silently doing its job behind the scenes. That, to me, is a hallmark of success for something like Wasm.
by cjs_ac | 2026-01-09 08:53:47+00:00
The weakest point in any computer system is the bag of meat operating the thing; the second weakest point is the network. Most web apps that are slow are slow because of the endless chit-chat between client and server across the network, and because too much business logic runs on the client machine, which might be a ten-year-old smartphone. For these apps, improving performance is about minimising the number of HTTP request-response pairs and moving logic to the server, not making the frontend code run faster.

> I figure most are under the impression that the advancement of this technology would have had a more visible impact on their work. That they would intentionally reach for and use Wasm tools.

> Many seem to think there is a path to Wasm replacing JavaScript within the browser—that they might not need to include a .js file at all. This is very unlikely.

This is because most of us are not writing fancy browser-based 3D game engines; we're writing boring enterprisey CRUD apps, and the only things we want from out frontend code are HTTP request-response handling and DOM manipulation. Consequently, the irrelevance of WASM evangelism is frankly boorish.
by forrestthewoods | 2026-01-09 08:54:10+00:00
WASM works. Except for all the convoluted edge cases where it doesn’t.

Also, wasm doesn’t solve enough real problems. JavaScript sucks but is plenty good enough for most things. Wasm unlocks a few things. But it makes no sense for, say, Steam games that are tens of gigabytes.

If wasm didn’t exist the internet and world would be… fine? Use JavaScript in a browser or go actual native. The space inbetween for wasm exists but is extremely small. Especially for anything other than cool visualization widgets.
by cal_dent | 2026-01-09 08:54:10+00:00
While I sympathise and agree with the point, it’s easiest to blame political parties but the electorate are also to blame.

They simply want to have their cake and eat it too. Plenty of times post-GFC where parties have tried or proposed much needed reform only for the voters, gerrymandered by the press, to throw their toys out of the pram.

Sadly it feels like it’ll probably be taken out of everyone’s hand, through some sort of economic crash or worse, to get people to be realistic again.
by soco | 2026-01-09 08:54:34+00:00
Now that you're mentioning, I'm surprised that, even though in some corners anti-immigrant parties rose to governing, they are only doing legislation and stricter enforcing immigration and border protection rules - not appreciated by everybody of course but somehow understandable where they're coming from. Might be somebody else knows more, or has seen more, but my one data point is: no nothing like that was ever hinted from what I can tell. And I'm appalled.
by mirzap | 2026-01-09 08:55:15+00:00
The "200 lines" loop is a good demo of the shape of a coding agent, but it’s like "a DB is a B-tree" - technically true, operationally incomplete.

The hard part isn’t the loop - it’s the boring scaffolding that prevents early stopping, keeps state, handles errors, and makes edits/context reliable across messy real projects.
by s-macke | 2026-01-09 08:55:26+00:00
WebAssembly itself is not that inefficient in storage. It is mostly the usual bloat that comes with binaries. For example, Go binaries have to provide a full runtime, including garbage collection.

If size is your top priority, you can produce very small binaries, for example with C. Project [0] emulates an x86 architecture, including hardware, BIOS, and DOS compatibility, and ends up with a WebAssembly size of 78 kB uncompressed and a 24 kB transfer size.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/FSHistory
by roenxi | 2026-01-09 08:55:33+00:00
Progress in India is due to policy in India. The idea that India can handwave it's successes and failures on external forces might have been well justified in 1955, but in this century they get to choose. Best hope for the anti-Modi-policy crowd is maybe it isn't Modi's policies specifically.

In fact, in the vast majority of cases (including North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, India & South-East Asia) progress is entirely about countries choosing how quickly they are comfortable with improvement happening. Africa and the Middle East it is a combination of policy choices and cultural problems. Arguably foreign interference - although even then policy and strategy tends to be the bigger thing over time.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-09 08:55:44+00:00
I start to think that's why there is still no DOM for the WASM and we have to pingping over JS

> Also the dirty secret of WebAssembly is that it's not really faster than JS.

That is near purely due to amount of work it took to make that shitty language run fast. Naive webassembly implementation will beat interpreted JS many times over but modern JIT implementations are wonder.
by dannersy | 2026-01-09 08:56:00+00:00
The point I am making is that this is supposed to be some revolutionary tool that threatens our very society in terms of labor and economics yet the fringe enthusiasts (yes, that is what HN and its users are, an extreme minority of users), and the very people plugged into the weekly changes and additions of model adjustments and tools to leverage them still struggle to show me the value of generative AI day to day. They make big claims, but I don't see them. In fact, I see negatives overwhelming the gains which goes without talking of the product and its usability.

In practice I have seen: flowery emails no one bothers to read, emoji filled summaries and documentation that no one bothers to read or check correctness on, prototypes that create more work for devs in the long run, a stark decline in code quality because it turns out reviewing code is a team's ultimate test of due diligence, ridiculous video generation... I could go on and on. It is blockchain all over again, not in terms of actual usefulness, but in terms of our burning desire to monetize it in irresponsible, anti-consumer, anti-human ways.

I DO have a use for LLMs. I use it to tag data that has no tagging. I think the tech behind generative AI is extremely useful. Otherwise, what I see is a collection of ideal states that people fail to demonstrate to me in practice when in reality, it wont be replacing anyone until "the normies" can use it without 1000 lines of instructions markdown. Instead it will just fool people in its casual authoritative and convincing language since that it was it was designed to do.
by munksbeer | 2026-01-09 08:56:04+00:00
> The burden of proof is 100% on anyone claiming the productivity gains

IMHO, I think this is just going to go away. I was up until recently using copilot in my IDE or the chat interface in my browser and I was severely underwhelmed. Gemini kept generating incorrect code which when pasted didn't compile, and the process was just painful and a brake on productivity.

Recently I started using Claude Code cli on their latest opus model. The difference is astounding. I can give you more details on how I am working with this if you like, but for the moment, my main point is that Claude Code cli with access to run the tests, run the apps, edit files, etc has made me pretty excited.

An my opinion has now changed because "this is the worst it will be" and I'm already finding it useful.

I think within 5 years, we won't even be having this discussion. The use of coding agents will be so prolific and obviously beneficial that the debate will just go away.

(all in my humble opinion)
by runarberg | 2026-01-09 08:56:28+00:00
I see a lot of people declaring that, but I immediately disregard it. In my circles this is a fringe believe. Wasm’s most obvious use case is running x86 binaries in your browser. It is pretty good at that, and that is what most people are using it for. Personally I don‘t see why Wasm needs a different future then the one it is already on.
by lompad | 2026-01-09 08:56:34+00:00
There is no reason such a state would have to set things up this way.

As an example: you probably know that germany has socialized healthcare. It is, however, not implemented as a single-payer model. Instead there are tons of different insurances competing with each other, while having a highly regulated floor of what they MUST offer.

Is the model perfect? Hell no, it has tons of issues - though overall it's pretty solid. My point is just that social policies and "no internal competition ever" does absolutely not have to go hand in hand. There is a massive middle ground.

See: social democracy as a concept and in its current implementation.
by HenryBemis | 2026-01-09 08:56:40+00:00
Why oh why do you not have a "pricing" page up front and center?

Why oh why do we have to 'pay $1' to see the different (?) subscriptions?

Why oh why do you force me to type in some random characters on your email box to find out your pricing?

basic $99/mo
full $350/mo
by habinero | 2026-01-09 08:57:16+00:00
> I prefer to change my environment to fit how my brain/body works, not influence my body/brain by swallowing side effects riddled pills

Just try harder to make insulin, bro. You can outthink that t1 diabetes if you try hard enough.

This weird macho resistance to and scorn of anyone using the mental tools we have available is why men kill themselves at a much higher rate. There is no award for who struggled the most in life.

Do they always work? No. Do they work for a lot of people? Sure do. Can they be replaced with diet and exercise and different circumstances? Yeah, sometimes. Is that realistic? Not usually.

They aren't magic. They don't forcibly make you happy or change your personality or make your problems go away. You still have to do the work. But they're a crane to help lift the crushing weight you're under so you can shimmy out from under it.

If you don't want to use them, fine, but not using them doesn't make you a better person.
by DANmode | 2026-01-09 08:57:18+00:00
So then do your thing, while it’s doing scaffolding of your next thing.

Also: are you sure?

There’s as many of them as you’re talented enough to asynchronously instruct,

and you can tell them the boundaries within which to work (or not),

in order to avoid too little or too much being done for you to review and approve effectively.
by Animats | 2026-01-09 08:57:30+00:00
Protectionism is failing to revive manufacturing

Yes.

The rare earths situation is embarrassing. This has been a political football for years now, but the efforts to fix it aren't working very well.

First, you need a mine site and a mine. The US has a big one at Mountain Pass, California, and it's producing. But in the past twenty years, it's gone bankrupt twice and has been through three owners, because there were a few rare earth gluts and the price crashed. Also, they once had a big spill from a retention pond, and that was expensive.

Mountain Pass isn't the only ore deposit in the US. There's what's supposed to be a good one in
Montana. But the company developing it has been doing "studies" since at least 2023.[2]
There are a few other rare earth "mining" companies which don't produce anything yet.
There's one in Tennessee with a "definitive feasibility study" underway.
I'm tempted to say that the real product is the stock. Anyway, it's not like there's a need to go to Ukraine or Greenland for rare earths. It's all available in the US, with a decent climate, good road access, and no wars.

Second, you need a beneficiation plant at the mine. This takes in rock and dirt, pulls out ore with a reasonable fraction of rare earths, and outputs almost as much waste as it takes in ore. This is a somewhat messy process. In China, the settling ponds are visible from space. Mountain Pass has a better process (the Sierra Club approves) and doesn't make such a mess. The waste is dried, the fluids are reused, and the dry waste can be put back where it came from eventually.
This is now a known technology and is being replicated at some Australian mines.

Then you need a separating plant, where the actual rare earths are separated out. The US has very little capability in this area. Not for any good reason. There's a small startup.[1]
They're slowly scaling up. Production in 2027. There's another startup, Medallion (then Gabo, then Gamma) which has been fooling around since 2020 without building much. That's one of those companies where you read five years of press releases and they're all about financing, reorgs, and management changes, with no actual product. Here's another one, RER. They've been at this since 2021, and they have a little demo plant in Wyoming.[3]

Then you need a smelting and magnet making plant. This is a modest size operation, because it processes tons, not millions of tons, of material. One has been built in an industrial park in Texas.
That took funding from DoD and General Motors. Not big enough to replace all imported magnets.

This is US postmodern capitalism. The US financial system just doesn't seem to be able to bring a complicated heavy industrial project to completion in a reasonable period of time.

[1] https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/ucore-secures-18-4m-dod-...

[2] https://uscriticalmaterials.com

[3] https://www.rareelementresources.com/technology/
by lenkite | 2026-01-09 08:57:31+00:00
He can do a test using `errors.Is(err, syscall.ENOTDIR)`

func rootInfo(root, p string) (has bool, isDir bool, err error) {
p = path.Clean(p)
info, err := os.Stat(root + "/" + p)
if info != nil {
has, isDir = true, info.IsDir()
return
}
if errors.Is(err, os.ErrNotExist) || errors.Is(err, syscall.ENOTDIR) {
err = nil
}
return
}
by viraptor | 2026-01-09 08:59:48+00:00
> Y U gotta “lol”?

Because some opinions are lazy. You can get all the summaries you want by searching "how I use agentic coding / Claude code" on the web or similar queries on YouTube, explaining in lots of details what's good and bad. If someone says "it's just hallucinations", it means they aren't actually interested and just want to complain.
by pas | 2026-01-09 09:00:09+00:00
that might be overdoing it. I don't know where is the current case law, but IMHO storing a random number and identifying the retuning user is not PII (to count how many times that user returned).

now of course if it gets joined with other data it can become PII.

IP address is usually treated as PII, because it can have very high "selectivity" (and with a subpoena can be turned into PII, whereas a site specific cryptorandom cookie id cannot)
by aitchnyu | 2026-01-09 09:00:33+00:00
In my Django+Vue/TS/Inertia side project, I was surprised to see my agent know to build (use ts compiler in this context) after each change and it iterates till it gets it right. The Django code is not as typed, so I have to feed it a few error messages myself. Gotta unbreak my Mypy (python type checker) to keep my sanity.

In 2012, I felt the high of Scala programs working perfectly once it compiles. Now my TS code is almost there, and Django is somewhat behind.
by chrismorgan | 2026-01-09 09:00:54+00:00
This is badly wrong.

• WebAssembly is not huge. Fundamentally it’s generally smaller than JavaScript, but JavaScript comes with more of a standard library and more of a runtime, which unbalances comparisons. If you use something like Rust, it’s not difficult to get the basic overhead down to something like 10 kB, or for a larger project still well under 100 kB, until you touch things that need Unicode or CLDR tables; and it will generally scale similarly to JavaScript, once you take transport compression into account. If you use something like Go or .NET, sure, then there’s a heavier runtime, maybe a megabyte, maybe two, also depends on whether Unicode/CLDR tables are needed, and then JS will probably win handily on bundle size and startup time.

• JavaScript can’t execute while it’s downloading. In theory speculative parsing and even limited speculative execution is possible, but I don’t think any engine has tried that seriously. As for WebAssembly, it can be compiled and instantiated while streaming, generally at a faster rate than you can download it. The end result is that in an apples-to-apples comparison WebAssembly is significantly faster to start than JavaScript.
by souravray | 2026-01-09 09:00:56+00:00
I learned YAGNI early and used it proudly. It saved me from over engineering, and if I am honest, it also gave me a very convenient way to avoid a few uncomfortable design conversations. After a few systems, rewrites, and more than one “we’ll fix it later” moment, my relationship with YAGNI changed. This is a short, reflective take on where YAGNI genuinely helps, where it quietly hurts, and why thinking ahead is not the same as building ahead.
by justinclift | 2026-01-09 09:00:58+00:00
Apple don't give people the tools/keys/etc to load new OS (etc) onto a device once it's no longer supported.

So, at best the device can just be used with the latest version of the software Apple allows until it's a security nightmare and better off no longer used.

Instead, if Apple gave people the ability to load something (prob a Linux) onto those old devices, then those old devices could be used usefully for quite a few more years.
by p0pularopinion | 2026-01-09 09:01:01+00:00
There are a few noticeable differences between housing as an asset and AI datacenters. Beyond the obvious difference that a house has a depreciation in the order of decades, whereas AI GPUs are a few years.

Then there is the fact that housing is a fundamental human need whereas AI, as frequently demonstrated, isn‘t even a want by many people.

I am not saying that AI cannot demonstrate todays value 20 years into the future. But there is zero reason to believe the short to medium term payoffs on AI investment will be proportional to the investment we‘ve seen over the past few years