MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-24 18:37:32+00:00
This is probably a good day to take time away from social media. Doom scrolling won’t do anything

Instead there’s DHS funding going through Congress which could give Congress leverage to restrict ICE. To be clear ICE will still operate past the funding deadline. But Congress can create limits like mandating allowing states to investigate these crimes. Restrict who can carry firearms.

Write your senators and ask them to block DHS funding
by MSFT_Edging | 2026-01-24 18:38:16+00:00
I believe that's more along the lines of being alienated from the work itself.

IE a potter sees the results of his work in the pots he creates.

A worker in an assembly line sees a small aspect of the pot creation and is separated from the end result.

Many of us will understand the joy of a personal project and the lack of joy in completing an issue ticket. It's generally good for one's mental health to have some kind of purpose behind their work.
by fragmede | 2026-01-24 18:39:02+00:00
Did you actually read them?

I didn't go to NYC, but Money is fungible so it's a simple math problem.

How much non-parasite good can you do making $50k/year * 10 years? Even if we ignore taxes and you donated your entire salary, that tops out at $500k worth. If instead you could make, say, $500k/year * 10 years, and then quit and form your own non-profit for $2,000,000 and do 4x as much good.
by tengwar2 | 2026-01-24 18:39:03+00:00
And I said that the man pages would be a part of what you have to examine. 95 pages in the case of bash (that's after running it through troff). man pages were fine when they were three pages long, but their lack of any internal index has become a problem.

Ok, now you might have a dozen files which could contain the information, where the location of each file can be modified by environment variables. It's tolerable if you are working on something you change weekly, but a practical problem if you do it yearly or it's entirely new.
by RaftPeople | 2026-01-24 18:39:13+00:00
> you're trying to twist reality to fit a premise that is just impossible to make true: that estimates of how long it takes to build software are reliable.

It's not binary, it's a continuum.

With experience, it's possible to identify whether the new project or set of tasks is very similar to work done previously (possibly many times) or if it has substantial new territory with many unknowns.

The more similarity to past work, the higher the chance that reasonably accurate estimates can be created. More tasks in new territory increases unknowns and decreases estimate accuracy. Some people work in areas where new projects frequently are similar to previous projects, some people work in areas where that is not the case. I've worked in both.

Paying close attention to the patterns over the years and decades helps to improve the mapping of situation to estimate.
Ask HN: Weekend Social: Top two programming languages and what they can borrow?
by susam | 2026-01-24 18:39:26+00:00
Hello HN! Just creating a weekend social topic here to see what kind of answers might come up in this thread. Here are the questions:

(1) What are your two most favourite programming languages? (Call them A and B below.)

(2) What is one feature from A you wish B had? And one feature from B you wish A had?

(3) When starting a new project, how do you choose between A and B?
by vorticalbox | 2026-01-24 18:39:50+00:00
After I have wrote a feature and I’m in the ironing out bug stage this is where I like the agents do a lot of the grunt work, I don’t want to write jsdocs, or fix this lint issue.

I have also started it in writing tests.

I will write the first test the “good path” it can copy this and tweak the inputs to trigger all the branches far faster than I can.
by Agingcoder | 2026-01-24 18:39:55+00:00
Im reasonably familiar with the exotics quant space.

It’s essentially IT/data work - the days of sophisticated maths are mostly gone. There always was a lot of code, but these days for most people there’s little to no new maths.

From what I’ve seen, post-2008 the job changed significantly, with more IT, less maths, more standardization - basically the job moved from bespoke everything to super industrialized. You’ll be able to have your model work for one underlying and one product, but what’s really useful is for lots of underlyings and many products - and that’s very hard.

That being said, and that’s important, you must understand the maths behind, otherwise you won’t be able to do anything useful.
by i_cannot_hack | 2026-01-24 18:40:20+00:00
It seems you are purposefully removing all the specific context to be willfully indifferent.

You would need to actually grapple with the specific context to be convincing. Otherwise you could just as well respond to a police officer smuggling an automatic weapon into the senate chamber and unloading the magazine into the lawmakers with "hate to break it to you - but officers killing people in the US is not new".
by crazygringo | 2026-01-24 18:40:22+00:00
> But in school, and especially with non-fiction, we're so often told to "just re-word it to make it your own" which is actually the most insidious form of plagiarism.

I think you might be confused, or had unclear teachers.

You're told to re-word it but still cite it. There are different combinations here:

1. Copy verbatim, no quotes, cite. Plagiarism, because you're copying the wording without quoting (even though you're citing).

2. Copy verbatim, quote, cite. Correct.

3. Paraphrase, no quotes, cite. Correct.

4. Paraphrase, no quotes, don't cite. Plagiarism if not "common knowledge".

Teachers should be telling you to do 3 rather than 1. You are maybe confusing 3 with 4, thinking they were telling you to do 4? (Or your teachers were just wrong?)

But the difference between 3 and 4 can actually get legitimately confusing in certain cases, even for academics, because there are a lot of ideas that are just "in the air" and it's not always clear if something is "common knowledge" or if there's some original citation for it somewhere.
by theptip | 2026-01-24 18:40:26+00:00
Of course, I should have been more clear, I meant that we are only now investigating these states with modern scientific rationalist/empiricist approaches.

Eg the example I gave has apparently never been measured before the last couple years, despite being known in the Buddhist tradition for thousands of years.

Perhaps not known to Westerners though, it could just be that more esoteric states are only recently being described in English.
by vunderba | 2026-01-24 18:40:39+00:00
I've commented on this before, but issuing a prompt like "Fix X" makes so many assumptions (like a "behaviorism" approach to coding) including that the bug manifests in both an externally and consistently detectable way, and that you notice it in the first place. TDD can reduce this but not eliminate it.

I do a fair amount of agentic coding, but always periodically review the code even if it's just through the internal diff tool in my IDE.

Approximately 4 months ago Sonnet 4.5 wrote this buried deep in the code while setting up a state machine for a 2d sprite in a relatively simple game:

// Pick exit direction (prefer current direction)
const exitLeft = this.data.direction === Direction.LEFT || Math.random() < 0.5;

I might never have even noticed the logical error but for Claude Code attaching the above misleading comment. 99.99% of true "vibe coders" would NEVER have caught this.
by cxr | 2026-01-24 18:41:26+00:00
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts>

----

> There is no HTML5. It's just a buzzword.

> [HTML5]'s not a technical term.

> Telling them HTML5 does exist does even more harm cause it doesn't exist. Telling them it does exist is entirely wrong and is even a false statement

> there is no HTML5 standard

Source: Literally all you, here, in this thread.

If you want to switch gears now and try rewrite the record and say that, actually, what you're really saying and have said all along is that HTML5 is no longer the latest Recommendation, go jump off a bridge.
by YoukaiCountry | 2026-01-24 18:41:26+00:00
Oh no, it appears to have received the hug of death?

I am interested in this, I have been using Raspberry Pis for various projects and home servers since the original - Currently one is hosting my navidrome music server, my password manager, and several other local network servers.

I feel the upgrade each time, and then get used to it, as I suppose we tend to do. I still remember the upgrade from 1 to 2 being the most impactful to me personally though. (I think maybe because that's when game emulation became viable?)
by mindslight | 2026-01-24 18:41:44+00:00
Yes, but neither airline agents nor LLM agents hold themselves out as having legal authority to bind their principals in general contracts. To the extent you could get an LLM to state such a thing, it would be specious and still not binding. Someone calling the airline support line and assuming the airline agent is authorized to form general contracts doesn't change the legal situation where they are not, right?

Fundamentally, running `sdkmanager --licenses` does not consummate a contract [0]. Rather running this command is an indication that the user has been made aware that there is a non-negotiated contract they will be entering into by using the software - it's the continued use of the software which indicates acceptance of the terms. If an LLM does this unbeknownst to a user, this just means there is one less indication that the user is aware of the license. Of course this butts up against the limits to litigation you pointed out, which is why contracts of adhesion mostly revolve around making users disclaim legal rights, and upholding copyright (which can be enforced out of band).

[0] if it did then anyone could trivially work around this by skipping the check with a debugger, independently creating whatever file/contents this command creates, or using software that someone else already installed.

(I edited the sentence you quoted slightly, to make it more explicit. I don't think it changes anything but if it does then I am sorry)
by invl | 2026-01-24 18:41:46+00:00
"first-class support for returning errors and propagating them" certainly sounds like exceptions! In fact, the compiler can even emit special tables that let the runtime completely skip over stack frames that don't need to do any cleanup during that propagation step!

Some languages have even innovated new kinds of exceptions that you can throw but that you are admonished should almost certainly never be caught.

Unfortunately even this is also better for tool support, a problem that using a bunch of macros solves. It's cool and good when a variable gets declared inside the guts of some macro expansion (and--critically--escapes those guts).
by jecel | 2026-01-24 18:41:50+00:00
The naming of processor sizes is the subject of debate. I call a "pure 8 bit processor" one that has 8 bits for both data and addresses. Like the Kenbak-1. But these are so rare and educational rather than practical that it is very reasonable to call hybrid 8 bit / 16 bit processors just "8 bit".

This use of sloppy terms shouldn't make us forget that they are using an address extension trick, just like all those 16 bit processors that wanted to go beyond 64KB (for byte addressed such as the PDP-11, Z8000 or 8086) or 128KB (for word addressed, like the Xerox Alto's modified Data General Nova model).
by samsolomon | 2026-01-24 18:42:06+00:00
Not this community's opinion on agents, but I've found it helpful to check the lmarena leaderboards occasionally. Your comment prompted me to take a look for the first time in a while. Kind of surprising to see models like MiniMax 2.1 above most of the OpenAI GPTs.

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/code

Also, I'm not sure if it's exactly the case but I think you can look at throughput of the models on openrouter and get an idea of how fast/expensive they are.

https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m2.1
by apsurd | 2026-01-24 18:42:12+00:00
OT: Your visual on "stacked PRs" instantly made me understand what a stacked PR is. Thank you!

I had read about them before but for whatever reason it never clicked.

Turns out I already work like this, but I use commits as "PRs in the stack" and I constantly try to keep them up to date and ordered by rebasing, which is a pain.

Given my new insight with the way you displayed it, I had a chat with chatGPT and feel good about giving it a try:

1. 2-3 branches based on a main feature branch
2. can rebase base branch with same frequency, just don't overdo it, conflicts should be base-isolated.
3. You're doing it wrong if conflicts cascade deeply and often
4. Yes merge order matters, but tools can help and generally the isolation is the important piece
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-24 18:42:14+00:00
Agreed! I really liked Ken Liu's translation of T3BP.
I don't speak any Chinese or Asian-based lingo for
that matter, but am a fan of the culture and rich
history. Some of us that don't know the lingo, have
issues with reading subtitled movies, for example,
can only enjoy the art via audio dubbing. Godzilla
Minus 1 comes to mind, as a good example of a movie
that generated some controversy when translated and
people claimed that it lost something in the translation.
I'm sure they were right, but I thoroughly enjoyed it
and was glad when it was dubbed into other languages.
by 12_throw_away | 2026-01-24 18:42:24+00:00
> The Ruby on Rails tax.

Yeah, from my experience administering a pretty small self-hosted instance, I think it's got to be this. Every single admin action you try to take on the backend is SLOWWWWW. Restarting the services takes a few minutes. Just to bring up an admin console on the server in a CLI takes well over a minute, which indicates a tremendous amount of overhead purely on the ruby side.

There's just something fundamentally slow about how it's all put together. I wouldn't blame the language or tech stack, exactly - but perhaps Ruby on Rails is not a great fit, anymore, for a fully featured forge of this scale?
by ack_complete | 2026-01-24 18:42:56+00:00
The timeline for fast multiplies is also a bit off, IMUL was already 4c latency / 1c throughput on the Pentium Pro (1995) and Pentium II (1997). Pretty sure IMUL was also only a few cycles on the AMD K6 (1997). Though Intel slowed it back down again in the Pentium 4, until they reverted back to the P6 architecture in the Pentium M.
by serial_dev | 2026-01-24 18:42:58+00:00
In a professional setting where you still have coding standards, and people will review your code, and the code actually reaches hundreds of thousands of real users, handling one agent at a time is plenty for me. The code output is never good enough, and it makes up stuff even for moderately complicated debugging ("Oh I can clearly see the issue now", I heard it ten times before and you were always wrong!)

I do use them, though, it helps me, search, understand, narrow down and ideate, it's still a better Google, and the experience is getting better every quarter, but people letting tens or hundreds of agents just rip... I can't imagine doing it.

For personal throwaway projects that you do because you want to reach the end output (as opposed to learning or caring), sure, do it, you verify it works roughly, and be done with it.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-24 18:43:54+00:00
To clarify, this is about forcing schools to default admit kids who aren't vaccinated, instead of having a waiver process. All these vaccines are already optional and have been for decades, and schools currently make judgement calls on a case by case basis about admitting kids who don't have them (due to medical or religious reasons, and taking into account current population disease burden). The article body clarifies this, but the headline is buying into a framing that is not honest.
by jcalvinowens | 2026-01-24 18:44:08+00:00
That's pretty silly IMHO, it should be incredibly obvious to anybody who is ever in a position to port code to a machine with non-8-bit-bytes that there will be dragons there. It also requires including limit.h which you might not otherwise need.

It's just not a realistic edge case, the machines like this are either antiquated or are tiny microcontrollers that can't practically run a POSIX OS. Very little code in the real world is generic enough to be useful in that environment (a good example might be a fixed point signal processing library).

There is no assertion in the entire Linux kernel that CHAR_BIT is eight, despite that assumption being hardcoded in many places.
by 1313ed01 | 2026-01-24 18:44:09+00:00
There is another old site ("since September 23, 1996"), my second favorite maze site, that has some articles about things like that. Like on the page below ("Tips on how to create difficult and fun Mazes, and how to solve and analyze them").

https://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/psych.htm

I think there is a difference if you want to make it only expensive to solve using popular maze solver algorithms, vs to make it difficult for a human to solve. Many of the recommendations on that page are for how to do things that can make a maze more difficult for humans to solve, but will not always matter to an algorithm that just mechanically tries solutions in some order.
Ask HN: How to redeem a Gift Card without risking lock-out?
by magnetic | 2026-01-24 18:44:50+00:00
My young daughter got 2 Amazon Gift cards for her birthday, but they look like they've been tampered with.
I would like to check whether they are valid or not without having to go through the redeeming process: I want to avoid being at the mercy of a fraud detection algorithm that may lock me out of my account.
There was a HN story not too long ago about someone who got locked out of their iCloud account for similar reasons, and the risk doesn't seem to be worth it to me.
Surely, I can't be the only one with this problem. How do people do this "safely"?
by duxup | 2026-01-24 18:44:57+00:00
ICE has regularly attacked protesters and bystanders who are simply recording, walking away and so on.

Even people just driving through their neighborhood have been dragged out of their vehicles and apprehended.

They aren’t professionals and operate with neither the training, nor the will to obey the law.

Much of the time they seem to believe trying to bait folks into an encounter

https://www.reddit.com/r/ICE_Raids/comments/1q7u4kz/ice_agen...

https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1q7y43s/cbp_poin...
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-24 18:45:03+00:00
If supporting domestic terrorism for economic gains, sure. State charges cannot be pardoned. Based on the general strike this week, good luck finding a favorable jury for aiding and abetting.

"You can just do things." If the federal government sues, ignore them and keep going while you tie it up in court and run out the clock on this administration. It is easy to forget that supporters of this admin and these actions are in a minority.
by lance_ewing | 2026-01-24 18:45:06+00:00
Do you mean specifically the Frogger game? Or in general? - If you mean in general, it hopefully does sound very close to the original VIC 20. I actually reversed engineered the VIC chip schematic from photos of the silicon chip, so the sound emulation is based on what I worked out from the reversed engineered schematic. Some of my discussion on that is covered here:

https://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.p...
by bigyabai | 2026-01-24 18:45:30+00:00
Take it a step further, even - "End-to-End-Encryption" is complete security theater if the user doesn't control either end.

We joke and say that maybe Microsoft could engineer a safer architecture, but they can also ship an OTA update changing the code ad-hoc. If the FBI demands cooperation from Microsoft, can they really afford to say "no" to the feds? The architecture was busted from the ground-up for the sort of cryptographic expectations most people have.
by nradov | 2026-01-24 18:47:27+00:00
Software estimates for projects that don't involve significant technical risk can be made reliable, with sufficient discipline. Not all teams have that level of discipline but I've seen existence proofs of it working well and consistently.

If you can't make firm delivery commitments to customers then they'll find someone who can. Losing customers, or not signing them in the first place, is the most harmful thing to everyone in the organization. Some engineers are oddly reluctant to accept that reality.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-24 18:47:34+00:00
You're right to intuit that the framing doesn't make sense. The source article clarifies that, when regime officials say "optional", what they actually mean is that they deny any collective responsibility for public health. The opinion of this "vaccine panel chair" is that you should not be permitted to exclude unvaccinated children from anything for any reason.

He explicitly acknowledges that this will lead to more children getting tragic and preventable diseases, to be clear. There's no dispute about that. He's just decided that sacrificing those children is worth it for the sake of medical autonomy.
by rsynnott | 2026-01-24 18:47:55+00:00
I like how ‘refine 1’ is correctness, followed by ‘refine 2’, which is of course ‘oarity’.

I’m convinced that AI has totally broken the brains of its users; how on earth could you look at this thing and think “yes, that is a reasonable thing to post in public”? For whatever reason, for many users, the lesson of the AI revolution seems to be “just produce arbitrarily shoddy nonsense, it’s fine, nobody cares anyway”… The worrying thing is that this may be _true_.
by sharifhsn | 2026-01-24 18:47:58+00:00
The “fancy math” associated with quant usually refers to pricing derivatives like options.

The thing is that there isn’t really strong institutional demand for exotic derivatives, people are happy using existing methods and just applying those to current markets.

The other type of fancy math has to do with deriving alpha, which is also not that complex, from a statistics perspective you’re mostly using linear regression or other basic forms of regression.

The hard part of quant is implementation, making sure your data is right, hunting through poorly understood markets, and managing risks carefully and understanding them.

There’s also ML but that’s equally complex in quant as it is anywhere else.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-24 18:48:28+00:00
> No, it's worth exactly what it's meant for: in case your laptop gets stolen!

If my laptop gets stolen and it's worth something, the thief will wait until they can crack the management keys. We see this with corporate-locked laptops and Macbooks, iPhones and Androids, and other encrypted curiosities that get cracked at a lab in Tel Aviv for pennies on the dollar.

> Those who actually care about privacy will setup FDE themselves

This line is equivalent to forfeiting your position so I don't even know what to argue over anymore. I do care about privacy and I have no idea who you're arguing in-favor of.