MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Xirdus | 2026-01-04 20:16:51+00:00
There is a big difference between being zero-sum and the sum being zero. A zero-sum game cannot end with any other outcome but the sum of zero. Non-zero-sum games can end with the sum of zero but can also end with other sums. This last part is what makes capitalism not zero-sum, even if in practice the sum is zero (which it isn't but that's a separate point).

I focused on zero-resources-needed services because they're the easiest example. They don't make much of the overall economy, but they do exist - tutoring, standup comedy, basic massage to name a few. Because no resources are used, you don't have to quantify the value to prove the sum is positive, you just need to prove the service isn't completely pointless. A proof for services that do use resources is also possible, but far more complicated and requires quantification of value, which is always a very contentious topic in and of itself. Like, you already contended it before I even invoked this concept, that's how contentious it is.

Externalities exist, sure. And are often omitted in pro-capitalism arguments, sure. But to argue that externalities make capitalism zero-sum is to argue externalities always exactly match whatever value was gained by capitalist transactions. Which is even harder to prove than the already dubious argument that externalities are larger than the value of capitalism.

I only brought up GDP to highlight that services are a big part of modern economy, so any model of economy that assigns no value to services is a wrong model, because it will not match the actual flow of money within a real world economy. I strongly believe models ought to be useful.
by j1elo | 2026-01-04 20:17:05+00:00
I'd love to see more reasoning about the decision process to select one static site generator in particular. There are a ton of them, and for sure a bunch of them that we could call "the big ones" so anyone deciding to migrate will probably go through the process of evaluating and choosing bases on pros and cons. Ie. Hugo, Eleventy (11ty), Jekyll, and a couple more are the most known. Seeing Jeff's decision process could be interesting.

Hugo is very well established, but at the same time it's known for not caring too much about introducing breaking changes; I think any given project should provide a strong guarantee of backwards-compatibility with the inputs/outputs that it decides to draw for itself, but I digress... and in fact, Hugo hasn't been great in that regard. Themes and well functioning inputs do break with updates, with in this house is a big drawback.
by efortis | 2026-01-04 20:17:14+00:00
I agree, the problem isn't tech capabilities.

People were more creative, and Flash had great UI/UX.

---

More 2009 flash websites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85UL3HhNq6Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoUnzmaAV08
by nicoburns | 2026-01-04 20:17:33+00:00
> Maybe the canvas operations are particularly slow on Firefox

That seems likely. WebRender (Firefox's GPU accellerated rendering backend) doesn't do vector rasterization. So Firefox rasterizes vectors using the CPU-only version of Skia and then uploads them to the GPU as textures. Apparently the upload process is often the bottleneck.

In contrast, Chrome uses (GPU-accelerated) Skia for everything. And Skia can render vector graphics directly into GPU memory (at least part of the rasterization pipeline is GPU accelerated). I would expect this to be quite a bit faster under load.

It's a known problem, but I hear that almost all of the Gecko graphics team's capacity beyond general maintenance is going towards implementing WebGPU.

---

SpiderMonkey is also now just quite a bit slower than V8 which may contribute.
by exmadscientist | 2026-01-04 20:17:37+00:00
I had the opposite experience last week with a medical question. The thing insisted I was going to get myself killed even though that was fairly obviously not the case. They do seem to be trained differently for medical queries, and it can get annoying sometimes.

Fuzzing the details because that's not the conversation I want to have, I asked if I could dose drug A1, which I'd just been prescribed in a somewhat inconvenient form, like closely related drug A2. It screamed at me that A1 could never have that done and it would be horrible and I had to go to a compounding pharmacy and pay tons of money and blah blah blah. Eventually what turned up, after thoroughly interrogating the AI, is that A2 requires a more complicated dosing than A1, so you have to do it, but A1 doesn't need it so nobody does it. Even though it's fine to do if for some reason it would have worked better for you. Bot the bot thought it would kill me, no matter what I said to it, and not even paying attention to its own statements. (Which it wouldn't have, nothing here is life-critical at all.) A frustrating interaction.
by ccppurcell | 2026-01-04 20:17:41+00:00
I just asked chatgpt about 72 hour preparedness kit. I said what I had already and asked it about the best way to store it first. It said something to the effect of "good, you are thinking about this in exactly the right way -- make sure you have the containers in place and then get the exact contents right later" not exactly the wording but you get the picture and can probably guess where I'm going with this.

When I asked again, this time I asked about the items first. I had to prompt it with something like "or do you think I should get the storage sorted first" and it said "you are thinking about this in exactly the right way -- preparedness kits fail more often due to missing essentials than sub optimal storage"

I can't decide which of these is right! Maybe there's an argument that it doesn't matter, and getting started is the most important thing, and so being encouraging is generally the best strategy here. But it's definitely worrying to me. It pretty much always says something like this to me (this is on the "honest and direct" personality setting or whatever).
by wood_spirit | 2026-01-04 20:18:01+00:00
It’s oblique but this puts me in mind of an old adage I recently heard about war: Of 100 men, one should be a warrior, nine should be soldiers, and 90 shouldn't be there at all.

I think this is true of software developers too: only in companies, the 90% don’t really know they shouldn’t be there and they build a whole world of systems and projects that is parallel to what the company actually needs.
by will__ness | 2026-01-04 20:18:04+00:00
Author here. I kept hitting the same tradeoff with Claude Code:
1) move fast, ship bugs, slow down feature development due to bad code
2) manually review all code and move super slow

This post covers the workflow I landed on:
1) sub-agents for plan review and code review (each gets fresh context)
2) persistent memory across coding sessions (not just markdown files)
3) a closing session protocol that handles tests/lint/format/cleanup/commit/push/merge conflicts.

The key insight: your main agent juggles too much. Sub-agents specialize. Each starts fresh, does one job well, returns findings.
Example: Code Review Sub-agent = detailed document about my exact code standards. When it spins up, it has a brand new context window and its only job is to ensure the `git diff` matches your code standards.

There's an interactive demo showing how it works.

Happy to answer questions about the setup.
by nine_k | 2026-01-04 20:18:16+00:00
But we don't have a linear address space, unless you're working with a tiny MCU. For last like 30 years we have virtual address space on every mainstream processor, and we can mix and match pages the way we want, insulate processes from one another, add sentinel pages at the ends of large structures to generate a fault, etc. We just structure process heaps as linear memory, but this is not a hard requirement, even on current hardware.

What we lack is the granularity that something like iAPX432 envisioned. Maybe some hardware breakthrough would allow for such granularity cheaply enough (like it allowed for signed pointers, for instance), so that smart compilers and OSes would offer even more protection without the expense of switching to kernel mode too often. I wonder what research exists in this field.
by 24hrmvp | 2026-01-04 20:18:47+00:00
The other side to the equation is you have a ton of CXOs that got burned on cap ex trying to use bluetooth beacons to implement effective indoor way finding solutions

You tell a CXO they can have indoor wayfinding to improve patient experience scores and there is no cap ex because there is no hardware - there is literally zero reason to turn it down.

They have nothing to lose and everything to gain
by metalman | 2026-01-04 20:19:09+00:00
Delcy Rodriguez, is the current leader of Venezuela, and was confirmed by there supream court in that roll for 90 days, has the backing of there parliment, and military, and trump threatened to kill* her if she will not do whatever he tells her to do.

*paraphrasing "something worse than what has happened to maduro"

I can guarantee that many countrys are rehearsing the "what we do if the US goes rouge" strategy and working on new contingency plans.
going after maduro had a microscopic venier of legalism and precident, but to touch the current leader of Venezuela would be a declaration of war on the whole planet, which is in fact lining up behind Delcy Rodriguez in her role as Venezuelas sole legitimate leader.
by fozem | 2026-01-04 20:19:24+00:00
Good overview on Rust error handling.

I like errors that are unique and trivially greppable in a codebase. They should be stack efficient and word sized. Maybe a new calling convention where a register is reserved for error code and another register is a pointer to the source location string that is stored in a data segment.

The FP fanboy side of me likes the idea of algebraic effects and ADTs but not at the expense of stack efficiency.
Show HN: Privacy-First MCP Servers for Claude – Linear, Postgres, Notion, GitHub
by nahsuhn | 2026-01-04 20:19:36+00:00
I built a collection of MCP servers that let Claude access your tools without sending data through third-party services.

Install: npx mcp-servers-cli init

7 servers: Linear, Postgres, Notion, Obsidian, SQLite, GitHub, Filesystem

- Everything runs locally on your machine
- One command setup (detects your tools, auto-configures Claude)
- Read-only by default for databases
- SQL injection protection, path traversal prevention
- Rate limiting on API servers (configurable)
- 80 tests, MIT licensed

Happy to answer questions about the security model or MCP implementation.
by aed | 2026-01-04 20:19:38+00:00
This is cool! I love stuff like this, it's fun to use stuff like this to see the passage of time a little more clearly.

Similar ideas:

I've been keeping notes in Roam Research for nearly 6 years now. Whenever I'm writing notes for that day, I'll go back to the same day 5, 4, 3, etc. years ago and see what I was working on.

I also recently went through the trouble of getting all of my running data into a spreadsheet. I started in 2018 and have gone through three different apps. Currently on my to-vibe-code-list: a little app that takes all of my runs from Apple Health and makes a neat dashboard showing pace, miles, routes, etc. over the years.
by solenoid0937 | 2026-01-04 20:19:57+00:00
> It’s very dangerous to do the “right thing” for the wrong reasons in a complex situation.

Venezuelans do not care for this train of thought. No one else was going to do it, and their equivalent of Hitler has just been ousted.

Far better, from their perspective, to have the evil guy removed than endless do-nothing hand-wringing from the international community that shares your train of thought.

Democratically held elections will be run again in the country.

The "wrong reasons" can still be mutually beneficial. The US gets its oil and Venezuela gets its dictator disappeared.
by witnessme | 2026-01-04 20:19:58+00:00
2025 was the year when we saw extreme impact of supply chain attack. npm did something last month to counter this by retiring old auth tokens in favor of a new authentication method they call trusted publishing, it uses OIDC to authenticate automated publishing via CI. but it seems like a rushed decision. poor coordination and incomplete docs. result: many package publishers are stuck and not able to release the updates to their package. It's not been two weeks and we already see almost 2k issues on github, the number will rise exponentially.

* Search results on github : https://github.com/search?q=npm+trusted+publishing&type=issu...

* the case in point: https://github.com/gitcommitshow/resilient-llm/issues/39

* Docs issue : https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/8884

* The bug : https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/8730
by Rygian | 2026-01-04 20:20:00+00:00
Sorry for the small digression. It's on topic.

Just a few minutes ago, while copying 63 GB worth of pics and videos from my phone to my lapto, KDE forwarded me the error "File <hard to retain name.jpg> could not be opened. Retry, Ignore, Ignore all, Cancel".

This was around file 7000 out of 15000. The file transfer stopped until I made a choice.

As a user, what am I supposed to do with such a popup?

It seems like a very good example of "Eror Handling Without Purpose" as the article describes, but at user level.

Except that here, the audience is "a plain user who just dragged a folder to make a copy" and none of the four options (or even the act of stopping the file transfer until an answer is chosen) is actually meaningful for the user.

The "Putting It Together" for this scenario should look like: a non-modal section populates with "file <hard to retain name.jpg> failed due to reason; at the end of the file transfer you'll get a list with all the files that failed, and you'll have an option to retry them, navigate to their source position to double-check, and/or ignore".
by theandrewbailey | 2026-01-04 20:20:04+00:00
Over the summer, the "friend of a friend" the bosses hired to run the website had up and fscked off (and not answering calls), and the rented VPSes had expired. Since I was the only person there (of a dozen or so in an e-waste recycling company) who did websites once upon a time, they said that if I could get a website for the company up, they'd give me $200. I threw a plain HTML page together in 15 minutes (mostly copy-pasted from the old site on Internet Archive), then spent about 45 minutes to figure out how Github Pages works with custom domains. I don't think I've ever gone from nothing to deployed website in an hour before!
by api | 2026-01-04 20:20:20+00:00
An open secret in our field is: the current market leading OSes and (to some extent) system architectures are antiquated and sub-optimal at their foundation due to backward compatibility requirements.

If we started green field today and managed to mitigate second system syndrome, we could design something faster, safer, overall simpler, and easier to program.

Every decent engineer and CS person knows this. But it’s unlikely for two reasons.

One is that doing it while avoiding second system syndrome takes teams with a huge amount of both expertise and discipline. That includes the discipline to be ruthless about exterminating complexity and saying no. That’s institutionally hard.

The second is that there isn’t strong demand. What we have is good enough for what most of the market wants, and right now all the demand for new architecture work is in the GPU/NPU/TPU space for AI. Nobody is interested in messing with the foundation when all the action is there. The CPU in that world is just a job manager for the AI tensor math machine.

Quantum computing will be similar. QC will be controlled by conventional machines, making the latter boring.

We may be past the window where rethinking architectural choices is possible. If you told me we still had Unix in 2000 years I would consider it plausible.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-04 20:20:34+00:00
> It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").

This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/
by arjie | 2026-01-04 20:21:14+00:00
I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-04 20:21:21+00:00
>I take a lot of idle time in cafes or trains or the park. I don't see the issue.

Well, it sounds like you're not american. You have trains to use and clean parks, for one. That's nice.

>The sooner one realizes that working hard isn't the key to life the sooner one realizes you'll have plenty more time.

We're given decreasingly less choices, sadly. Work hard and cheap or be unable to pay rent and be kicked to the streets. The Social network over here is so broken that many have zero safety net, in terms of both government and community. Let alone a new book and a shower (well, maybe you get a gym subscription. I've heard that as a "life hack" for homeless people).
by scoofy | 2026-01-04 20:21:29+00:00
There are some subtleties in Gatsby that most people miss, and isn't even addressed in the article.

Jay Gatsby (James Gatz) is probably Jewish.

Nick Carraway is probably gay, but at least bisexual.

Both of these traits forced people into lower castes this era in high-status society. To me the lens of the book is repeatedly the failure of "if only I can win them over" slowly becoming the unsatisfying "these people were always assholes." Whether it's parties, a potential spouse, or important friends, the entire concept of class structure is poison. If people are good people, it shouldn't matter how they present themselves... that's just what I've always taken away from it. It seems like a theme that someone with Fitzgerald's background would want to convey, especially someone with that background who enjoined the company of people like Hemingway. And I think that's been a theme of American culture since reconstruction.
by michaelbuckbee | 2026-01-04 20:21:38+00:00
I run several add-ons in the Heroku ecosystem and having dipped my toe into both Laravel Cloud and Vercel+Next...it's hard not to look at the generalized Heroku ecosystem and see it suffer in comparison.

I worry that Heroku is now in an uncomfortable middle position between much easier to use systems and much more enterprise devops systems like AWS.
by ar_turnbull | 2026-01-04 20:21:51+00:00
> The thing I’ve learned about leveling up in your career, or breaking through different ceilings, is that you really only realize that it happened in retrospect. Just like you don’t notice your hair growing or your face aging, you can’t really feel it as it’s happening. Be patient—evaluate later. Don’t kick yourself now because you think you’re stuck. You might be the opposite of stuck and just not know it.

—-

This one resonates hard for me right now. Having spent the last year feeling stuck, I’m finally starting to see the path out (I’m a UXer moving towards Product leader roles). I’ve spent a lot of time kicking myself, and now all of a sudden it’s starting to feel like I might be on the other side.
by epgui | 2026-01-04 20:22:35+00:00
I almost (?) always advise against “what” comments. I have rarely (if ever?) encountered any cases where “what” comments didn’t have a better (and practical/cheap/easy enough) solution.

In my experience, when I review junior contributors’ code and see “what” comments, it’s usually caused by 1) bad naming, or 2) abstractions that don’t make sense, or 3) someone trying to reinvent maths but incorrectly, or 4) missing tests, or 5) issues with requirement gathering / problem specification, or 6) outright laziness where the contributor doesn’t want to take the time to really think things through, or 7) unclear and overcomplicated code, or… any number of similar things.

At the very least, any time you see a “what” comment, it’s valuable to take notice and try really hard to think about whether the problem the comment tries to solve has a better solution. Take it as a personal challenge.
by Polizeiposaune | 2026-01-04 20:22:35+00:00
Yes, using ZFS's snapshot and clone mechanisms.

A snapshot is a low-cost read-only view of a filesystem at a point in time; a clone is a writeable filesystem with initial contents shared from a snapshot.

It's an amazing safety net, though it requires understanding and sysadmin discipline to use well -- starting with keeping user/application data separated from the filesystems managed as part of the BE. ZFS makes this easy (a pool can contain many separate filesystems) but you have to do it.

One gotcha is that if you run an update that creates and activates a new BE but don't reboot right away, changes made to the BE-managed part of the running system after the snapshot creation will be "lost" (stranded in the old BE) when you reboot to the new BE.
by agentifysh | 2026-01-04 20:23:43+00:00
6 months ago I agreed with your statement

but AI being solely a force multiplier is not accurate, it is a intelligence multiplier. There are significantly better ways now to apply skills and taste with less worry about technical debt. AI coding agents have gotten to the point that it virtually removes ALL effort barrierrs even paying off technical debt.

While it is still important to pay attention to the direction your code is being generated, the old fears and caution we attributed to previous iteration of AI codegen is largely being eroded and this trend will continue to the point where our "specialty" will no longer matter.

I'm already seeing small businesses that laid off their teams and the business owner is generating code themselves. The ability to defend the thinning moat of not only software but virtually all white collar jobs is getting tougher.
by paxys | 2026-01-04 20:24:11+00:00
I’m willing to bet this person was paid a one-time fee (just like you) and the bosses expected him to provide free maintenance and tech support for life. And if you’re not careful this will be your fate as well. I’ve been in this position myself, and after a point you are forced to say “sorry, I’ve done my part, you are on your own now”. People aren’t willing to accept that even a simple website can have a recurring cost of a few engineering hours a month. And those hours aren’t free.
by convolvatron | 2026-01-04 20:24:31+00:00
its entirely possible to implement segments on top of paging. what you need to do is add the kernel abstractions for implementing call gates that change segment visibility, and write some infrastructure to manage unions-of-a-bunch-of-little-regions. I haven't implemented this myself, but a friend did on a project we were working on together and as a mechanism it works perfectly well.

getting userspace to do the right thing without upending everything is what killed that project
by djaouen | 2026-01-04 20:24:51+00:00
Web development is perhaps "fun" again if you consider PHP 4 and jQuery as "fun". A "problem" arises for those of us who prefer Ruby, Rails, and HotWire.

I'm not gonna lie, I use AI every day (in the form of Grammarly). But LLMs and so-called "agents" are less valuable to me, even if they would help me to produce more "output".

It will be interesting to me to discover the outcome of this bifurcation!