MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mu_killnine | 2026-01-04 16:41:17+00:00
Very neat. I work for a small manufacturer and wanted to implement LED signage like i had at my old gig: show machine speed, job info, etc.

But the signs we used before were serial with ethernet converters that were pretty fragile and as the sole contributor i dont want that hanging over my head.

Are there larger forms of these signs available? I understand TVs are trivially expensive at this point but theres something about the brightness and design of LED displays that seems uniquely better in the manufacturing space.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-04 16:41:34+00:00
It all starts to unravel badly once we get here:

> In theory, null is still a perfectly valid memory address

Crucially C's pointers are not addresses. So now we're at best talking only about Odin, which wasn't the subject of Tony's "Billion dollar problem" claim in the first place.

And honestly I doubt that in practice Odin's pointers are just addresses either because Odin uses LLVM.
by firefoxd | 2026-01-04 16:42:26+00:00
They are pretty insightful. Particularly this one:

> 3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.

I have my own version of this where I tell people that no amount of good advice can help you make a blank page look better. You need to have some published work before you can benefit from any advice.
by valdair3d | 2026-01-04 16:42:36+00:00
I feel you on this. The market is rough right now, especially for remote roles in the UK/Europe. A few things that helped me and others I know:

1. The "hidden job market" is real - most roles never get posted publicly. LinkedIn connections and warm intros close more doors than cold applications.

2. Consider targeting specific niches where your Rails/Node/Go stack is highly valued. Fintech and healthtech companies often prefer experienced engineers who can ship reliable code over "move fast and break things" types.

3. Don't underestimate smaller companies (50-200 employees). They often pay competitively but get far fewer applications than FAANG-adjacent companies.

4. Your GitHub looks solid. One thing that sometimes helps is having a few short-form technical posts on your own site or blog - it helps establish expertise when hiring managers Google your name.

The market will turn. 10+ years of shipping real products is valuable, and companies that recognize execution skills will find you. Keep pushing.
by ivankra | 2026-01-04 16:42:37+00:00
I actually captured max RSS size while running benchmarks as a rough approximation, but it's not exposed anywhere. If you go to the repo, you can run `./bench/compare -f rss_mb -lT bench/amd64/*.json` to see a table in the terminal. No big surprises there, Java engines (Rhino, Nashorn, GraalJS) are most memory-hungry.
by tekne | 2026-01-04 16:42:45+00:00
You could, but the issue is that now when I'm defining a type I need to think about it's nullable behaviour.

Versus if I instead view nullability as a way of transforming types (aka a functor) that works by reflection; this gives me some parametricity: the behaviour of my function will be the "same" regardless of which generic I slot in (though fields don't play that well with generics... something something row polymorphism something something).

Ill formed thoughts really; what I'm handwaving at is I slightly agree with the anti-complexity crowd that an operator should usually do the same thing, and yet I think it harms terseness and hence often readability and understanding to have non-overloaded boilerplate everywhere (addf64, addu32, addi16...).

Parametricity is a nice compromise for non-primitive ops, imo.
by l00sed | 2026-01-04 16:42:48+00:00
That's true. Even then, though, you're dealing with backwards-compatibility support as the system updates. A compiled binary might run well for the systems it was compiled for, but what about longer timelines (a decade)? Will the newest system be able to easily run that compiled binary? Not always... and there's always the possibility it might include vulnerabilities that weren't discovered until later.

I was reading about terminal text editors (em, en, vi, vim, neovim, etc.), and it's interesting how some of the software that "lasts" is more like Theseus' Ship. All the original components replaced over time, but the core concepts last.
by lpcvoid | 2026-01-04 16:43:55+00:00
Even when it worked, it was more clunky than AMD at all times. It came in form of a huge driver bundle you had to install manually (or rely on a distro to do it for you), while AMD GPUs just worked due to `amdgpu` being part of the kernel since forever. Then is the EGLStreams debacle where nvidia lost a lot of goodwill in my opinion, including mine. And finally, nvidia has managed to opensource their driver on Linux - except that it's less performant then the closed source one, and thus a second class citizen, still. Correct me if I am wrong, please.

The better path on Linux was always AMD, and still is, to this day, since it simply works without me needing to care about driver versions, or open vs closed source, at all.
by ottoselymesi | 2026-01-04 16:44:32+00:00
OP here.
Wrote this to handle ragged/irregular data without padding or sorting.
Instead of "one thread per stream" (divergence hell), it uses a holistic grid-stride traversal.

Benchmarks on GTX 1070 (Pascal):
Ragged Reduction: ~2.45x faster than baseline.
Nested Analytics: ~1.98x faster (single-pass).

Header-only C++17. Happy to answer questions.
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-04 16:44:40+00:00
The main "feature" of LLM is it has world-knowledge and can create plausible arguments for just about everything. "Nothing is true, Anything is possible"

Which is a fascinating thing to think about epistemologically. Internally consistent knowledge of the LLM somehow can be used to create an argument for nearly anything. We humans think our cultural norms and truths are very special, that they're "obvious". But an LLM can create a fully formed counterfactual universe that sounds? is? just as plausible.
by sdoering | 2026-01-04 16:44:42+00:00
I was also instantly struck by the intro of this piece of writing. It just doesn't make sense to me to state one's subjective interpretation as a universal fact, a universal law, as "the reason cafés exist". As if there is only one reason.

I really do not get the tendency to reduce everything down to one singular reason or cause. Is this a monotheistic religious thing? Is this a binary thing? I just can't wrap my head around this. But that might just be me - having originally studied literature and history (after graduating from high school with mainly stem subjects) I always felt I had one foot in each of those worlds - one in the "hard sciences" one more in the humanities. Never able to reduce myself to just one reason of being or one interest - and never able to attribute only one reason/meaning to a work of art.

So my long winded way of saying, that I just did not buy the premise.
by phatfish | 2026-01-04 16:45:00+00:00
I enjoy looking back at what I had been listening to in previous years as well. But playlists in Spotify have a "Date added" column, so you get a chronology from there. I guess splitting them out into years means you can shuffle a single year. Apart from that it seems to just complicate the process.

My "Starred" playlist has the first song added in 2010. When Spotify decided "Like" was now going to be how to favourite songs i just ignored it and kept using the Starred playlist.

I do wish the play history and play counts were kept longer. Would be a nice bonus for premium accounts to have lifetime play counts, and maybe 2 years of play history.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-04 16:45:28+00:00
> a single world government. And I think that that is something I could get behind because countries are not stable enough over a long enough period of time to give us what we need.

I assume you would want such a world government to be some form of democracy? If so, it would mean near-zero voice for Australians (0.32% of world population), Germany (1%), The Netherlands (0.21%), UK (0.83%), France (0.83%).

It would, however, mean much more say for Russia (1.7%), China (17.2%), India (17.8%).

What moral code should such a democratic world government adopt? Would it be secular or religious?

Even if we thought that end-state is ideal, I have a very hard time seeing practical steps that get us there other than through bloodshed (similar to how many current nation states got formed). One exception might be a common enemy that unites the vast majority of humans, e.g. an alien invasion.

Given the huge coordination problem of forming and maintaining a single world government (top-down), I would prefer a more bottoms-up, federated approach where secular, democratic, free-ish market, values continue to spread.
by csmantle | 2026-01-04 16:46:22+00:00
What surprises me is that under the "Show variants" checkbox, SpiderMonkey 24 from 2013 outperforms 147alpha by ~2000 pts -- almost 10% --, while having 1/4 LOC, 1/3 binary size and almost 1:1 on other metrics. (SM 24 targets ES5, however)
by EPWN3D | 2026-01-04 16:46:23+00:00
> There was a particular button on the user interface that bugged him. It bugged him because it was a slightly different shade of green in the screenshots than it was in the staging environment. The team looked into it, and sure enough, we had tested a slightly older version of the software, not the exact version we nearly shipped to the customer. He saw and noticed the button but what would have been deployed would have had multiple bugs in the code that weren’t visible and passing because the tests were on the old version too. That’s bottom-up thinking.

No, that's spotting a problem. Like, come on.
by johnwheeler | 2026-01-04 16:46:54+00:00
I had the hardware for both units and use them extensively so 100% familiar with how they sound. Also I've used another plug-in the UM 282 that does not sound correct at all. And I'm not doing it based off of my ears. I know the algorithm, have the exact coefficient, and there was no guesswork except for the potentiometer curves and parts of the room algorithm that I'm still working out, which is a completely separate component of the reverb. But when I put it up for sale, I'll make sure to go into detail about all that so people who buy it know what they're getting.
by tekne | 2026-01-04 16:47:30+00:00
On one hand, yes: expanding bullet points to slop makes things strictly worse.

On the other hand, if one uses AI but keeps content density constant (e.g. grammar fixes for non-native speakers) or even negative (compress this repetitive paragraph), I think it can be a useful net productivity boost.

Current AI can't really add information, but a lot of editing is subtracting, and as long as you check the output for hallucinations (and prompt-engineer a lot since models like to add) imo LLMs can be a subtraction-force-multiplier.

Ironically: anti-slop; or perhaps, fighting slop with slop.
by utopiah | 2026-01-04 16:47:33+00:00
Well I'm glad you find new ways to progress on whatever you find interesting.

This honestly though does not help me to estimate if what you claim to be is what it is. I'm not necessarily the audience for either project but my point remains :

- when somebody claims to recreate something, regardless of why and how, it helps to understand how close they actually got.

It's not negative criticism by the way. I'm not implying you did not faithfully enough recreate the DSP (or the other person the NES). I'm only saying that for outlookers, people like me who could be potentially interested, who do NOT have a good understanding of the process nor the initial object recreated, it is impossible to evaluate.
by hoppp | 2026-01-04 16:47:51+00:00
The language is not actively changing.

It's done, the language is complete.

Issues piling up, Im not sure.. the compiler has only 4 unresolved issues in 2025...

Looking at the github.. they don't seem to be piling up that much.

Sometimes a programming language is well written and its done, no need to actively work on it.
by driverdan | 2026-01-04 16:48:15+00:00
> I see so many of my colleagues using AI not only for their job, but even for their week-end programming projects

When writing code in exchange for money the goal is not to write code, it's to solve a problem. Care about the code if you want but care about solving the problem quickly and effectively more. If LLMs help with that you should be using them.

On personal projects it depends on your goal. I usually want the tool more than whatever I get from writing code. I always read whatever an LLM spits out to make sure I understand it and confirm it's correct but why wouldn't I accelerate my personal tool development as well?
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-04 16:48:22+00:00
Changing UI framework all the times is fine, so is not changing anything for decades. Different strategies that both have value. Reasonably you want to be somewhere in the middle, depending on the use case. In an industrial setting, production infrastructure, etc... you generally want to change as little as possible "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". On emerging, consumer-facing technology such as mobile in the 2000s, "move fast and break things" makes sense.

But anyways, it is not the problem. The problem is just that Microsoft today is doing a terrible job.

The best example, I think, is the control panel. Starting from Windows 8, they changed it. Ok fine, you may like it or hate it, but to be honest, it is not a big deal. The problem is that they never finished their job, more than a decade later! Not all options are available in the new UI, so sometimes the old control panel pops up in a completely different style with many overlaps in features. And every now and then, they shuffle things around in hope that one day, the old control panel won't be needed anymore.

If you make a change, commit to it! If you decide to replace the old control panel, I don't want to see it anymore. It is certainly easier said than done, but if you are a many-billion dollar company and that's your flagship product, you can afford to do hard things!

Using a web engine to build UIs is fine too. As an OS-wide component, a web engine is not that big in terms of resource use, if properly optimized. The problem with Electron is that every app ships with its own engine, so if you have 10 apps, you have 10 engines loaded. But everything uses the same engine, and apps don't abuse it, then the overhead is, I think, almost negligible. It is rare not to have a browser loaded nowadays, so system components can take advantage of this. But again, you need to do it right and it takes skills, effort and resources.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-04 16:48:32+00:00
"typically work by prompting students to enter their views on contested topics such as abortion, immigration, and policing, then matching them with peers who hold opposing positions for structured online exchanges"

Is the purpose of university really for like in-person twitter fights? I went to school at a fairly liberal university, and the only topic that came up was policing but that's because I opted into taking criminal justice courses.

But how many major's have abortion or immigration as a major topic, not zero, but I don't think I would how to pay $60,000 per year for my kid to express their opinion about abortion. I didn't care if I felt comfortable talking about my opinions on abortion in university, I cared that I learned something.

There's this weird conflict that's like - some people complain that universities spend too much time on social sciences, and then FIRE spends all their time worrying about whether or not people can share their perspectives on abortion. And I really have trouble believing the biggest problem on campus is that Milo Yiannopoulos might not be invited to lecture at Harvard.

Either elite institutions are supposed to have standards or anyone should have a voice, and it feels like people want to have it both ways, but like shouldn't we be most worried about whether or not folks are engaged in learning that can make them productive for the workspace, and not whether they got to express their "unique" positions on common social issues?
by simonw | 2026-01-04 16:48:39+00:00
I first learned about the "innovation tokens" idea in "Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead" from this, still one of my favorite essays on software architecture: https://boringtechnology.club/

Likewise, "Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call." made me think of this 23 year old classic from Joel Spolsky, the Law of Leaky Abstractions: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
by zahlman | 2026-01-04 16:48:47+00:00
> Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.

I have more reach here than blogging about it, unfortunately.

But, ironically, it also helps illustrate the point about duplicate questions.

> If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.

No, that's literally the opposite of how communities work. There is no "force"; there are only conditions on having your contributions welcomed. Having your question closed on Stack Overflow is no more "force" than having your PR rejected on GitHub. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether the goal is "working", because the site is not there to provide you a service of asking questions, any more than Wikipedia is there to provide you a service of sharing opinions on real-world phenomena.

There's no reason that the Stack Overflow community should give, or ever have given, a damn about "the site being in a death spiral". Because that is an assessment based on popularity. Popular != good; more importantly, valuing popularity is about valuing the ability of the site to make money for its owners, but none of the people curating it see a dime of that. They (myself included) are really only intrinsically motivated to create the thing.

The thing is demonstrably useful. Just not in the mode of interaction that people wanted from it.

The meta site constantly gets people conspiracy theorizing about this. Often they end up asserting things about the reputation system that are the exact opposite of how it actually works. For example, you can gain a maximum of 1000 reputation, ever, from editing posts, and it only applies to people whose edits require approval. The unilateral edits are being done by someone who sees zero incentive beyond the edited text appearing for others. They're done because of a sincere belief that a world where third parties see the edited text is better than a world where third parties see the original text.

> Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.

You're talking about people who, in almost every case, as an objective matter of fact, are not moderators. The overwhelming majority of "moderation actions" of every stripe are done by the community, except for the few that actually require a moderator (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658).
by shagie | 2026-01-04 16:48:56+00:00
The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started.

In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it.

That portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding.

However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult.

Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate.

Making it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back.

This is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone. The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude.

Lastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered.
by zikani_03 | 2026-01-04 16:49:02+00:00
This has inspired me to move my personal blog to Hugo aswell. I have been using Hashnode[0] for the past few years and while it's okay, they recently automatically deleted one of my blog posts which was written in my local language, Chichewa and was one of my popular amongst, even non-developers.

Ironically, my company's blog and websites are built with Hugo.

[0]: https://code.zikani.me