MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by utopiah | 2026-01-01 08:28:53+00:00
It's because both "side" tries to re-adjust.

When an "AI skeptic" sees a very positive AI comment, they try to argue that it is indeed interesting but nowhere near close to AI/AGI/ASI or whatever the hype at the moment uses.

When an "AI optimistic" sees a very negative AI comment, they try to list all the amazing things they have done that they were convinced was until then impossible.
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-01 08:29:18+00:00
On the 6502, which a relative gifted me when I was around 9. The cool part was that they also gifted me a huge stack of boxes with C64 magazines in them that contained new games and programs the publishers found cool and wrote about. Then you could type in the code of those games and play or modify them, as a lot of them were commented codes.

The amazing part was the reader comment section in the end, where people were writing letters to the magazine publishers with their modifications to programs from one of the magazines before, so patches were literally transmitted via paper.

To me as a child, I never understood that this was programming. This was just how I could play games on the device.

Amazing memories with the C64, and I was so lucky to get one as a child because it was more common in the human generations before me. Getting a used 386 turbo as the second device was literally child's play when I was learning to write assembly for it when I discovered an assembler program on its hard drive.
by bobowzki | 2026-01-01 08:31:20+00:00
My father had a an old HP Vectra 286. Somehow I found the 5.25 floppies with QBasic 4.5 and the manuals and just started experimenting with it. I must have been around 11-12 years old. When I was 14 and doing work experience in system administrator I got a Free sad CD. That started my Unix journey.
by chias | 2026-01-01 08:31:40+00:00
These are not all improvements. Listed:

* The year of YOLO and the Normalization of Deviance

* The year that Llama lost its way

* The year of alarmingly AI-enabled browsers

* The year of the lethal trifecta

* The year of slop

* The year that data centers got extremely unpopular
by tempestn | 2026-01-01 08:31:46+00:00
Wouldn't normally nitpick, but just in case it's helpful as an author - compound verbs that end in prepositions, like "set up", "break down", "log in", "check out", etc., are all two words when used as verbs. They all have single, compound word versions, but those are the noun forms. So, you set up the page, and now the setup is done.
by stevekemp | 2026-01-01 08:31:51+00:00
When I was 11 years old my parents bought a 48k ZX Spectrum for the family. These were huge in the UK, and to a lesser extent they were popular in Spain too.

The tape-recorder which was used to load programs from cassette-tape did not work, so my sisters ignored the machine and I started reading the manual, which had instructions and an introduction to BASIC.

Got hooked on BASIC, then z80 assembly, later graduated to working in intel assembly and similar low-level stuff.

These days I'm sysadmin/devops/cloud/whatever pointless title and while I program for fun, and to do terraform, etc, I'm not a coder per se.
by Tzk | 2026-01-01 08:32:57+00:00
No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content. And yet here we are.

Today most commercial or news sites use those plus dark patterns to make it go away as hard as possible. I usually just close the tab and never come back. My choice is “no” not “ask again later”…

Same for those annoying chatbot buttons which just take away screen space.
by calmbonsai | 2026-01-01 08:33:06+00:00
I'll point you to my prior comment re:bike-commuting in D.C. versus the same in Boulder, Colorado. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367940

There needs to be an entire wholesale change in both infrastructure and culture to make bike-commuting workable in most extant cities.

Relatively speaking, the infrastructure is the easy part.

I think we'll get to the heat death of the universe before bike-commuting in Houston, Texas would ever be "a thing".
by algo_trader | 2026-01-01 08:33:25+00:00
> food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects

a. how does that solve the transmission problem?

b. amazing work by EU bureaucrats to regulate businesses that dont exist yet

c. they can export the feed to fish farms or china or whatever. the question is do the economics work. US soy bean is just incredibly productive (and subsidized)
by AlbertoGP | 2026-01-01 08:33:29+00:00
The move to Singapore has been mentioned in several comments but he does address it in the linked piece:

> Some might say: “Hang on, it’s all very well James Dyson telling Britain to support doers and makers, but he took his company’s manufacturing to Malaysia in 2002 and then set up a global headquarters in Singapore in 2019.”

> The answer is worth exploring. In 2002 Dyson was expanding rapidly and urgently needed a new factory, but planning permission was refused. We were able to use empty factories in Singapore and Malaysia.

> However, Dyson now employs about 2,000 people in Britain, which is about twice the number we employed at the time of the move.
by another_twist | 2026-01-01 08:33:43+00:00
Started by reading lots of articles on Topcoder (they have a dynamic programming tutorial which imo is the best material on DP). Then did exercises from CLRS before writing a single line of code. I considered it leg work and not of very high value (remains true though, the best paying jobs in tech are research and in finance its quant trading). Then I dived head first into C++ and Java, slogged through the pain and I got absolutely hooked. I learnt almost all of the computer science I know through books, good old fashioned working through exercises, doing lectures on MIT Ocw. Never paid a single cent for any professional courses or bootcamps or any of that jazz. I did write some Python in high school but most of the work I did while at uni studying something else entirely. My initial objective was not to build anything at all but to just get better at competitive coding. But then I built something reasonably complicated and I have been an engineer ever since. I have worked in ML, distributed systems, low level systems programming in the past 10years. To answer the question I learnt coding by self study.
by throw1235435 | 2026-01-01 08:33:56+00:00
How many pay? And out of that how many are willing to pay the amount to at least cover the inference costs (not loss leading?)

Outside the verifiable domains I think the impact is more assistance/augmentation than outright disruption (i.e. a novelty which is still nice). A little tiny bit of value sprinkled over a very large user base but each person deriving little value overall.

Even as they use it as search it is at best an incrementable improvement on what they used to do - not life changing.
by gentooflux | 2026-01-01 08:34:13+00:00
Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, and then The C Book by Mike Banahan, Declan Brady and Mark Doran. No clue why those books in that order, but they both proved to be decent choices.

Then I had a couple of jobs where I was given access to data and opportunities to go beyond my expected duties by doing things with that data, i.e. automation and reporting.
by onion2k | 2026-01-01 08:34:49+00:00
My father was a software engineer (working on satellite control systems ... very cool stuff) and he bought a ZX Spectrum in the mid 80s when I was about 8. That gave me access to Basic and I picked up the fundamentals from there. I didn't love it until university and using the Internet for the first time though. There's something about writing code that people can access from anywhere in the world that I find really exciting.

Considering I've spent 40 years coding things I really should be better at it.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-01 08:35:00+00:00
> Language model capability at generating text output.

That's not a metric, that's a vague non-operationalized concept, that could be operationalized into an infinite number of different metrics. And an improvement that was linear in one of those possible metrics would be exponential in another one (well, actually, one that is was linear in one would also be linear in an infinite number of others, as well as being exponential in an infinite number of others.

That’s why you have to define an actual metric, not simply describe a vague concept of a kind of capacity of interest, before you can meaningfully discuss whether improvement is exponential. Because the answer is necessarily entirely dependent on the specific construction of the metric.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-01 08:35:23+00:00
Maslow's hierarchy of needs would assume that there is a point beyond which extra material comfort does not make you happy or content, but it also is quite clear that there is a point at up to which it does. Most books on happiness are written for people who are long past the point where increasing their monetary inputs will increase their happiness and contentment, but it is also clear those people exist and are perhaps even in the majority of humanity.
by sodafountan | 2026-01-01 08:37:08+00:00
I was probably about 12-13 when I started learning how to code. I liked video games, and I wanted to have a creative outlet. I started building games with C# and the XNA framework. Eventually, I turned it into a career. (Doing webdev, I've never done professional game development)

That was probably about 20 years ago, I'm 32 years old now.
by noufalibrahim | 2026-01-01 08:37:26+00:00
Yeah. I recently stumbled across this in an interesting way. Went down a rabbit hole. I was recreating an old game for my education[1]. Scummvm supports Eye of the Beholder and I used it to take screenshots to compare against my own work. I was doing the intro scenes and noticed that the title screens are 320x200. My monitor is 1920x1200 and so the ratios are the same. It displays properly when I full screen my game and all it good. However, on scummvm, it looked vertically elongated. I did some digging and found this about old monitors and how they displayed. Scummvm has a setting called "aspect ratio correction" which stretches the pixels vertically produces pillarboxing to give you the "original nostalgic feel".

Notes:
1. https://eye-of-the-gopher.github.io/
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-01 08:38:22+00:00
ice climbing is way more meditative than rock!

(because (a) crampons mean you get to study the ice and make your holds, instead of rapidly making use of what's there, and (b) the process of making them takes time... I was very pleasantly surprised; I'd expected it to be more thrilling and above all „Besonders Im Winter Arsch-Kalt“ but it was actually relatively low-adrenaline and high-activity)
by shakna | 2026-01-01 08:38:38+00:00
Bitflips are waaay more common than you think they are. [0]

> A 2011 Black Hat paper detailed an analysis where eight legitimate domains were targeted with thirty one bitsquat domains. Over the course of about seven months, 52,317 requests were made to the bitsquat domains.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquatting
by rmunn | 2026-01-01 08:38:50+00:00
This is indeed a great technique. The only way it could be improved is to expand on step 3 by keeping a list of the random mutation functions called and the order in which they were called, then if the test passes you throw that list away and generate a new list with the next seed. But if the test fails then you go through the following procedure to "shrink" the list of mutations down to a minimal (or nearly minimal) repro:

1. Drop the first item in the list of mutations and re-run the test.
2. If the test still fails and the list of mutations is not empty, goto step 1.
3. If the test passes when you dropped the first item in the mutation list, then that was a key part of the minimal repro. Add it to a list of "required for repro" items, then repeat this whole process with the second (and subsequent) items on the list.

In other words, go through that list of random mutations and, one at a time, check whether that particular mutation is part of the scenario that makes the test fail. This is not guaranteed to reach the smallest possible minimal repro, but it's very likely to reach a smallish repro. Then in addition to printing the failing seed number (which can be used to reproduce the failure by going through that shrinking process again), you can print the final, shrunk list of mutations needed to cause the failure.

Printing the list of mutations is useful because then it's pretty simple (most of the time) to turn that into a non-RNG test case. Which is useful to keep around as a regression test, to make sure that the bug you're about to fix stays fixed in the future.
by throw1235435 | 2026-01-01 08:41:22+00:00
> But otherwise I think it's harmful to society, even if beneficial to the individuals

I disagree a little in that stability/predictability to people also adds some benefit to society - constant disruption/change for the sake of efficiency I believe at extreme levels would be bad for mental health at the very least and probably cause some level of outrage and dysfunction. I know as an SWE tbh I'm feeling a bit of it - can't imagine if it was everyone.

I personally think there is a tradeoff; people on average have limits to adaptability in their lifetimes and so it needs to be worth it for people to invest and enter in a given profession (some level of economic profit that makes their limited time worth spending in it). It shouldn't be excessive though - it should be where both client and producer get fair/equal value for the time/effort they both need to put in.
by arionmiles | 2026-01-01 08:41:51+00:00
By solving problems in my life.

When I was in high school, I needed to automate downloading torrents (I was downloading tons). So I plugged together a bunch of tools including:

1. QBittorrent to run a FileBot script once the file was finished downloading.

2. FileBot script was a Groovy script that renamed and rearranged the contents into proper folders and

3. A small Python script that called the Telegram API to send me a notification that the download was complete.

Then I got into college and learnt they had a web portal which showed metrics like attendance (which turned out to be important) and test scores. So I wrote a Telegram Bot that would scrape these figures and save it into a database and run some calculations such as

1. Tell me how many lectures I needed to sit through to get to a required threshold.

2. If I decided to bunk college on certain days, how much attendance I'd end up losing.

Then I opened up this bot to allow my friends to register. Near the end of the first semester, the test scores were only available on the website but there was no direct link to that page from the public portal. I had found it out playing around on it and noticed they had directory listing enabled on some endpoints which led me to those "unlinked" but functional pages.

I wrote a neat feature which would allow querying this page and send a screenshot of it via my bot. I was running this entire thing on a Raspberry Pi 3B at my home and one morning I woke up to see logs from students I didn't know trying to use the bot (and ended up crashing it haha). Word had gotten around that test scores are accessible only through my bot.

It was one of the best projects I ever worked on. At its peak, I had 300 DAUs and I would hear from my friends in other departments that their entire batch is using Telegram solely for my program. I was also able to monetize it towards the end which felt nice.

These projects served as a learning tool for a lot of stuff for me. I learnt how to manage VMs, containerization, async I/O, DB and ORM integration, how to write good docs.

I still miss it.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-01 08:42:04+00:00
Have an excellent 2026! (and a good slide in, on the slim chance it's not too late for you)

PS the US Navy (although its final cause is instrument of empire) is one of the easier ways for a young man with little cultural capital and even less economic capital to find himself in an organisation that not only values lifetime learning but even goes out of its way to support it.
by electroglyph | 2026-01-01 08:42:05+00:00
i started with x86 intel asm. i just derped around with ollydbg a lot while i referenced the intel instruction set pdf that i had.

after i was able to do basic patches i learned C# (then 1.0) so that i could load and patch processes in Windows. my patches were relocatable and assembled in the hackiest way, heh. why didn't i do C or C++ like a sane person? dunno, but that's how i started =)
Show HN: EventFlux – Lightweight stream processing engine in Rust
by grainier | 2026-01-01 08:42:47+00:00
I built EventFlux, a FOSS stream processing engine in Rust. The idea is simple: when you don't need the overhead of managing clusters and configs for straightforward streaming scenarios, why deal with it?

It runs as a single binary, uses 50-100MB of memory, starts in milliseconds, and handles 1M+ events/sec. No Kubernetes, no JVM, no Kafka cluster required—just write SQL and run.

To be clear, this isn't meant to replace Flink at massive scale. If you need hundreds of connectors or multi-million event throughput across a distributed cluster, Flink is the right tool. EventFlux is for simpler deployments where SQL-first development and minimal infrastructure matter more.

GitHub: https://github.com/eventflux-io/engine
Docs: https://eventflux.io

Feedback appreciated!
by atoav | 2026-01-01 08:43:25+00:00
The US' main problem (seen from the outside) is that there seems to be no long term strategy just a sports-like us-versus-them mentality, where each team just thinks about how they can win more by making others lose. Winning the points is the goal, while all people forgot this was supposed to be a friendly game ans some even forgot which sport it is supposed to be.

This may well be the end game of capitalism, no pun intended.
by w4rh4wk5 | 2026-01-01 08:45:06+00:00
My first coding experience was through the StarCraft 1 map editor. It offered a text-snippet-based scripting system to build rudimentary logic. It was relatively easy to pick up thanks to its documentation and localization.

After that, I played around with HTML/CSS which led me to building things in PHP as this was the go to language for implementing logic on the web.
by amluto | 2026-01-01 08:45:43+00:00
I think that quite a few large companies are currently entrenched in a way that is rather unfortunate for their customers: they are so hard to displace that it’s not longer important whether their product is good enough that the customers like it.

Microsoft: Windows is pretty bad lately (and is certainly not ahead of Linux when used as a desktop system in the way that it was, say, 20 years ago). But Microsoft barely cares whether anyone likes Windows because so many corporations are already thoroughly committed to Microsoft. If Microsoft were just starting out with its current product, it would be a hard sell. (Not just desktop — a lot of their serious enterprise stuff like AD is awful. But AD doesn’t need to be good any more — it just needs to be AD.)

Apple, too: their last few generations added very little benefit and a whole lot of bugs. Their hardware is no longer ahead of anyone else’s, and I don’t think their software really is either. But people have bought in to the ecosystem.

Android: Ditto, except there is barely even canonical hardware. Want apps but not iOS? You’re using Android.

Boeing: The 737 MAX seems to have been a commercial success more or less solely because quite a few buyers specifically wanted planes compatible with their existing 737 investments. Boeing doesn’t seem to be trying to make planes that buyers would choose if they were unconstrained.

The list goes on. Not that any of this is really new,
by padjo | 2026-01-01 08:46:25+00:00
The quality of evidence in exercise training is generally pretty terrible. 10 week study with untrained college students tells you very little about what happens over a lifetime of lifting. Personally I’ve found that switching rep range on an exercise is a great way to break through plateaus.

Ultimately you’re engaged in an n=1 study and general advice is of limited use. You need to learn what tools are available, how your body reacts to different stimuli, what keeps you consistent etc. Everything is context dependent, trying to find some universally “best” way is a wild goose chase.
by abhishekbasu | 2026-01-01 08:47:33+00:00
this was a great read to start the new year! having worked extensively with mixed integer programs, it is always a bit disheartening to see them not used enough for everyday decision-making. one of my goals this year is to create a layer to make it easier to formulate mips and test them, via plain text input. this would hopefully increase adoption through a lower barrier to entry.
by bmacho | 2026-01-01 08:47:49+00:00
Giving them your browsing history, attached to an account, for what? To store and remember a URL?

You can ask claude to write you a 10 lines userscript that integrates with google/ddg/kagi/whatever is your search engine, and hides the websites from the result page.

Generally, you shouldn't do server side what you can do on client side
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2026-01-01 08:48:16+00:00
His inspiration is a big reason why I still drive my 1993 Honda Civic after owning it for 15 years. I bought it for $1000 after graduating college. I say a little prayer every time I turn the key that it actually starts. I gave it its own github repo where I track the maintenance I do on it. It reminds me where I come from, and that I don't need shiny shit to be happy. I believe this to be a virtue.

My girlfriend years ago thought it was incredible and amusing that I was working a fancy tech job and drove this old car around. We are now happily married.

These days, I could buy a Bentley with cash. But I don't need one.

Warren Buffet's example is an inspiration that should be followed by more people who go into debt buying crap they can't afford with money they don't have in order to look rich.
by johannahaffner | 2026-01-01 08:48:19+00:00
Took a few computational science courses at university and left with basic knowledge of Python and C, and an inkling that I loved coding.

I got good at it by picking GitHub repositories I liked, making sure I understand their architecture top to bottom, as well as why specific technical choices were made. In addition to contributing features, solving issues for users really helped build a strong mental model for the code bases, and that is how I learned. All of this work was done while working towards my PhD, on evenings, weekends and during holidays.

Personally I think this approach has really worked for me! I do think that it does depend on picking great projects to contribute to, in which the quality of the code is extremely high. That is the best way to pick up good habits.
by romanhn | 2026-01-01 08:49:47+00:00
Fifth grade, early 90s, informatics class with Russian-built 8-bit computers (Corvettes). The "programming language" only had drawing commands (LINE, CIRCLE, etc) and the first program was the homework to draw a house. We were to write the program on a piece of paper and then type it up in class the next day. Everybody came in with your basic six-line box + roof. I had two pages of code with a 3D house, door, windows, chimney, shining sun, etc. I was hooked.

After that, a Logo-like language called Roo (with a kangaroo instead of a turtle) on school 286 PCs, then BASIC (with help from magazines) on home ZX Spectrum, and finally Turbo Pascal (with help from, well, the IDE help files) in after-school club, all during middle school. Made up my mind to become a programmer very early on.