MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by m_Anachronism | 2026-01-18 10:03:49+00:00
"Yeah that's exactly the point - when you're actually working with these models on the infrastructure side, the whole 'intelligence' narrative falls away pretty fast. It's just tensor operations at scale. Curious about your experience with decentralized GPU networks though - do you find the reliability trade-off worth it for most workloads, or are there specific use cases where you wouldn't go that route?"
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-18 10:04:07+00:00
To be fair, Handmade Hero also seems like a project designed to co-opt unearned feel-goods. Maybe one of the goals was to teach, but another goal was to actually ship a game, and he took pre-orders for it before eventually abandoning development. It turns out it's a lot easier to talk about making good programs than it is to actually make them. I do think it is possible to make high-quality handmade software, but being performative about doing so rather than just doing the thing is probably counterwise to ever actually just doing the thing.
by _pdp_ | 2026-01-18 10:04:26+00:00
Because we are not hyping to lure investors to give us hundreds of millions dollars. We took the more honest route and work with actual customers. If we are to accept hundreds of millions at some point perhaps we are going to reach hundreds of billions in valuation ... on paper.

As for the chatgpt wrapper comment - honestly this take is getting old. So what? You are going to train your own LLM and run it at huge loss for awhile?

And yes perhaps all of this effort is for nothing as it may be even possible to reacted everything we have done from scratch in a week assuming that we are static and do nothing about it. In 10 years the solution would have billions of lines of code. Not that lines of code is any kind of metric for success but you wont be able to recreate it without significant cost and upfront effort ... even with LLMs.
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:04:52+00:00
This is the kind of idea that sounds completely unhinged until you actually look at what it does. A sed script that compiles to C and maintains the exact same behavior? That's not just clever, that's stupid in the best way.

The kicker: it probably runs faster than the original sed after compilation. You've got lhoursquentin basically building a real compiler out of what most people treat as a one-liner tool. The generated C looks like it's been through a blender, but it works.

Real talk though: why would you do this? Short answer: because it's possible. Longer answer: this is the kind of project that teaches you things about how sed actually works that reading the man page never will. It forces you to think about state machines, buffer management, the actual semantics of commands you've been using for years.

See also the samples folder. There's a walkthrough that actually shows the generated code. Fair warning: it's going to hurt your brain a little.
by m_Anachronism | 2026-01-18 10:05:07+00:00
God, yes. The 'you know what I mean' thing drives me crazy because no, I actually don't think they do know what they mean anymore. I've watched people go from using it as shorthand to genuinely asking ChatGPT how it's feeling today. The marketing has been so effective that even people who should know better start slipping into it. Completely agree that we missed a chance to frame this correctly from the start.
by mft_ | 2026-01-18 10:05:10+00:00
I was always confused and intrigued what was going on behind the scenes when Tesla was so obviously and publicly rejected by the Biden administration in that manner.

Musk was even then a polarising figure, but given Tesla was arguably more “American” than even the self-proclaimed traditional American car companies, it seemed a weird, self-defeating, perhaps emotional, position for the administration to take.
by omnimus | 2026-01-18 10:05:45+00:00
I wish you were right and western europe will get involved with actual troops. Hopefully the situation is changing… but “reality” is that germany sent like 20 tanks. Ukraine has over 1200 in their disposal. Poland send almost 400… i mean even Netherlands (to their credit) sent 5x more tanks than Germany.

I guess as the situation will get more dire, western europe will have turn around but its been going on for what 4 years? They better do stuff. Because if hard right - likes of AfD gets into power there is high chance they will just leave Ukraine to Russia.
by rented_mule | 2026-01-18 10:05:52+00:00
Nearly 20 years ago, I was working on indexing gigabytes of text on a mobile CPU, before smart phones caused massive investment in such CPUs. Word normalization logic (e.g., sky/skies/sky's -> sky) was very slow, so I used an in-memory cache, which sped it up immensely. Conceptually, the cache looked like {"sky": "sky", "skies": "sky", "sky's": "sky", "cats": "cat", ...}.

I needed cache eviction logic as there was only 1 MB of RAM available to the indexer, and most of that was used by the library that parsed the input format. The initial version of that logic emptied the entire cache when it hit a certain number of entries, just as a placeholder. When I got around to adding some LRU eviction logic, it became faster on our desktop simulator, but far slower on the embedded device (slower than with no cache at all). I tried several different "smart" eviction strategies. All of them were faster on the desktop and slower on the device. The disconnect came down to CPU cache (not word cache) size / strategy differences between the desktop and mobile CPUs — that was fun to diagnose!

We ended up shipping the "dumb" eviction logic because it was so much faster. The eviction function was only two lines of code, plus a large comment explaining all this and saying something to the effect of "yes, this looks dumb, but test speed on the target device when making it smarter."
by m_Anachronism | 2026-01-18 10:06:12+00:00
Fair pushback - you're right that strict dictionary definitions are broader. I probably should've been more precise there. My point is more about how the term is used in the actual fields studying it (cogsci, neuroscience, etc.), where it does carry those biological/embodied connotations, even if Webster's doesn't explicitly say so. But you're right to call out the sloppiness.
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:06:30+00:00
The chart is honest about what the numbers mean. Higher score = more moving parts. ClickHouse at 71 is essentially a column store with opinions. Spark at 29 is "just" distributed compute, so you gotta wire everything yourself.

Real take though: the tool that looks "simplest" on this metric can absolutely be the wrong choice. We've seen teams pick Spark because it's "simpler" and then spend three quarters building plumbing that Presto would've given them for free. Or pick ClickHouse and get mad because it doesn't do transactions. Each engine is optimized for a different soul-crushing problem.

The missing dimension here: what does your data actually look like? If you're running OLAP queries on append-only events, this comparison matters. If you're doing weird hybrid stuff with deletes and incremental updates and god knows what else, none of these tools are actually designed for you and you'll be unhappy with all of them.

That said: Onehouse's hands-on take matters because they're not selling you one of these. They get to be honest about tradeoffs. Read the actual blog if you care.
by cm2187 | 2026-01-18 10:06:48+00:00
All of that that they did while they sit. I don’t remember people reading the newspapers while slow walking in the middle of a corridor. And the problem with headphones is that they make people unaware of their surrounding, alone in the world, and therefore for instance unaware that there is someone on their left that they will cut the way to. Small incivilities, but repeat several times a day every day and it gets seriously annoying.
by KolmogorovComp | 2026-01-18 10:06:58+00:00
> There's enough of them, like mentioned in the article, that they'll pick any flea market or secondhand store clean off diamonds in the rough before you as a regular guy

Usually the flea markets is open to everyone, it’s just that the ‘regular guy’ is not motivated enough to come early. There is nothing you find you cannot if you show up at the same time.
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:07:25+00:00
The pen-to-clarity pipeline actually maps perfectly onto distributed cognition in systems design. Your paper becomes the external memory buffer when your working memory (that magical 4-thought limit) maxes out.

Wiebe nails the handwriting part. Writing forces semantic encoding (you can't just machine-gun words on a keyboard). Even sloppier handwriting makes you think about what you're writing rather than just transcribing like a parrot. Typers tend to become typists, not thinkers.

The meta-skill here: treat your technical design docs the same way. Sketch shit on paper first, dig into why things feel wrong (Wiebe calls this cognitive distance), then move to digital. Most people ship with half-baked assumptions because they never externalized the gaps. You find the gnarly edge cases on paper when your brain's not running at full capacity yet. On a whiteboard or napkin you see the architecture problems. In VS Code you're already committed to the implementation.

That said, digital has one edge: you can search your notes later. But yeah, nothing beats the friction of handwriting for actual thinking.
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:08:27+00:00
I'm skeptical of this frame. Not because the observation is wrong, but because the article treats taste like it's this neutral arbiter when it's really just another word for personal preference with a prettier veneer.

Dovhyi conflates three different things: taste as pattern recognition (noticing what works), taste as moral judgment (what ought to be), and taste as legacy thinking (I'll regret this later). They're not the same thing.

The dangerous part? Senior people absolutely use "taste" to justify blocking work they don't like or slowing down decisions they don't want to make. I've watched designers kill experiments because "it doesn't feel right" when what they meant was "it's not what I would have built." The long feedback loops just gave them confidence in their biases.

There's also a survivorship bias baked in here. Dovhyi points to designers who "lived inside their work" and developed taste. But that's self-selected. Nobody remembers the people who shipped fast, moved on, and their "bad taste" decisions actually aged fine because the context changed.

The real issue: most teams don't actually have a taste problem. They have an alignment problem. You can ship lean, scrappy work without dark patterns. But that's not a taste problem, it's an incentive problem. And taste isn't going to fix incentives.

Curious if this age-based narrative would hold up if you looked at actual shipping data vs retrospective analysis.
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:09:38+00:00
This is impressive microbenchmarking work but the practical relevance is inverted from what the title suggests.

The 0.5ns lookup times are achieved on a 2^12-entry table that entirely fits in L2 cache. That's 4KB of data. Your entire working set for the benchmark is maybe 32KB. On a real system with millions of entries, you're hitting L3 or memory, and suddenly all those nanosecond savings vanish. A cache miss costs you 200-300ns. This optimization saves ~5ns in the happy path and adds instruction complexity that hurts branch prediction.

The 100% load factor claim is similarly misleading. Nobody targets 100% in production. You do it here because the benchmark ends at 2^12 entries. Try 2^28 entries at 100% load and see what happens to your insertion performance. Those "massive entry movements" shown in the videos? They get worse with larger tables (branch predictors can't help you when you have thousands of entries worth of movement). Real systems target 70-80% for a reason.

The SIMD + 32-slot windows trick is genuinely clever. But it's solving a problem that chained hashing basically sidesteps. Python dicts, Go maps, Rust hash maps they all use chaining or generational approaches now because the sweet spot for most real workloads isn't "perfect 0ns average case", it's "predictable worst case that doesn't require constant specialization".

Also: "modern audiences" in the title but the implementation is in Zig. Zig code is not what modern applications are built in. This would be valuable if there was a production-ready, maintained version people could actually use. Single-file educational implementations don't count.

Great writeup though. The visualizations are perfect.
by roenxi | 2026-01-18 10:09:49+00:00
There is a lovely synthesis of A and B though - looking at the Wikipedia page for the right Roosevelt, he was involved in the Philippine–American War where they occupied the Philippines in the first place (or pacified, if you prefer, I suppose they'd probably already occupied the place in advance of the war). So if you're complaining about the Japanese conquering the Philippines you'd have to agree that Teddy Roosevelt deserved some criticism for also doing exactly that?

The criticism basically writes itself. These people are very easy to criticise, they were mostly horrible. Just saying, it is easy to see why there are speeches around about how the critics ought be discounted. The track record invites harsh criticism.
by jorvi | 2026-01-18 10:09:56+00:00
No normal person is getting up at 05:30 to go to a flea market.

Like I said, they're not doing anything forbidden, but they've completely demolished the vibe of something formerly quaint.

Imagine if I went to a hippie festival, bought trays and trays of cake from the food truck, then walked them two blocks over to the fancy neighborhood and started flipping them for triple the price. Word gets out, and a few years later the food truck has raised its prices significantly and then the rest of the festival follows.
by adrianmsmith | 2026-01-18 10:09:58+00:00
> As I dug deeper into these feelings, I realized I was feeling pressured. Except they're not saying this, I am.

That's a great insight.

Once you've realized that, I think the best thing to do is to talk to the person whose pressure you imagine. Then you can find out what they're really thinking. Perhaps they really are thinking that (in which case the pressure is real and you can act on it) or they aren't (hearing them say that will alleviate the pressure).

Once when freelancing I asked a customer what they liked and disliked about my work. They had previously seemed happy with me, so I was pretty sure I know what they'd say. I believed I wrote good stable software. What they actually said was they were a small company, and they had had previous developers who, when there were server problems etc., just shrugged and said they didn't know how to fix it. They felt I wasn't like that, that I'd sit there and get it fixed, call up friends if necessary, etc. So yeah, they were happy, but not for the reason I'd imagined.

So my learning was: So you always have to talk to people to find out what they think. You really can't guess.
by telesilla | 2026-01-18 10:10:34+00:00
1. I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6. - Steven Wright

2. On Exactitude of Science - Borges.

https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf

The story...describes an empire where cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice. Later generations come to disregard the map, however, and as it decays, so does the land and society beneath it. [Wikipedia]
by Bridged7756 | 2026-01-18 10:10:39+00:00
I don't think there's a sexier laptop design than the Thinkpad'. I've tried other manufacturers, a M2 Mac, Dell, HP, yet something always pulls me back to ThinkPads, even if the recent versions aren't the powerhouse the 4xx versions were. The black and orange combination just has something so alluring. That and also the flexibility of the warranty/support if you buy used. I've probably owned over 7 ThinkPads so far, which is a lot to me, I'm not that old. Many of these were sold or died, but I still keep my old T530 which is now a media server and it's a plan replacing my Latitude with a T14.
by altern8 | 2026-01-18 10:11:03+00:00
The main problem with app icons these days IMO is that they have to place them into identical rounded boxes.

They all look the same. When it was just the icon one was square, one was round, etc. and it was easier to tell them apart.

There is also less room to work with, if 1/3 of it is padding for the rounded box.
by 7bit | 2026-01-18 10:11:40+00:00
Lenovo is dead to me. I have nothing but issues and I'm not alone. We have a fleet of around 3000 X1E, X1C and T480s. The USB port regularly craps out not sending the display signal to the monitor so my co-workers regularly have to restart their Lenovo after they go to standby. This is super disruptive, especially for our developers. In some cases, connecting a display even causes blue screens. (All our monitors are Lenovo Think visions, too...)

I reported this issue to Lenovo and was stuck in the typical service desk loop of hell. Once I escalated the issue with our Lenovo representative the issue got some traction, but there wasn't any real progress for months and the troubleshooting remained nothing but superficial. Not a single expert got in touch with us to get some real and in-depth hardware debugging logs or whatever you need to truly analyse the hardware faults.

Ultimately, my employer decided to stop follow up on that with Lenovo and to just deal with it. We continue to buy these crappy laptops and monitors despite all the issues they cause us and shove the money down Lenovo throats, like any real company would. /s
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:11:53+00:00
Smart execution, timing-driven business. Specialized face swap beats generic tools for quality. But the real play is temporal arbitrage on virality. Kirk meme has a shelf life, credits expire in 90 days, $25/300 images signals extraction over growth. This isn't a tech win—it's product-market fit during a meme's peak. The engineer in me's annoyed it's this simple. Real question: what's the pivot when Kirk goes sideways? They're probably already prepping the next one while this prints money.
by rahuldass | 2026-01-18 10:12:58+00:00
I built QWED – a verification layer that sits between your LLM and production.
The idea: Don't fix hallucinations, verify them. If AI output can't be mathematically proven, it doesn't ship.
11 specialized engines:
- Math (SymPy) – verify calculations
- Logic (Z3 SMT) – formal proofs
- SQL (SQLGlot) – detect injection/dangerous queries
- Code (AST) – security analysis + taint tracking
- Facts (KB) – entity verification without LLM
Works with ANY LLM – OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or local models via Ollama ($0).
Model-agnostic: Your LLM choice, our verification.
Happy to answer questions about deterministic AI verification!
by Nasrudith | 2026-01-18 10:13:19+00:00
Morally there are also a boatload of problematic assumptions behind communism. Start with its defacto assumptions that the state is entitled to the labor of everyone. It doesn't treat people as having any sort of agency whatsoever, just a commodity for the ruler. Their 'virtue' only goes as far as how they serve. That they denominate the unit of value as the toil of its subjects as something it has in abundance for granted, and thus as near worthless, and problem solving as a matter of throwing bodies into the breech. Meaning little need to improve efficiency. The produced goods are expensive and scarce. All the same problems as slavery.

In the end there is an awkward question. What separates Communism from a bronze age god-king's palace economy where everyone is a slave of the ruler?
by another_twist | 2026-01-18 10:13:23+00:00
Zero to one makes this crystal clear. Most startups die because they didnt manage to sell not because they didnt manage to build the product. Secondly there was never a code moat. Code was always cheap. But architecture, distribution, quality control, integration once landed, this is where money is mostly made. Most indie or small companies die because they just pick shitty problems. eg nobody cares about a goddamn notes app, the one on Mac works fine and most people write garbage in their notes like utter trash. So obviously a notes app has little value because the asset it manages has very little value. Not so much if you are building something like document storage for regulated industries. Or compliance software. In these cases, its the business domain expertise which counts. Even when applying for jobs without domain expertise code monkeys never get paid past a threshold. People / entities that command a premium are the ones with domain knowledge.
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:13:29+00:00
The real takeaway isn't that drug chemists are clever (they are) but that Derek's final point destroys the supply-side drug war premise: synthetic routes get re-engineered. They always do. Tighten precursor rules, they find new routes. The chiral resolution trick shows they're not pioneering—they're just applying pharma textbook techniques under a different incentive structure. The regulatory pressure that made pseudoephedrine hard to get didn't stop meth production; it forced them to get better at chemistry. You can't regulate away a human-designed synthesis any more than you can regulate away a software algorithm. It's not a supply problem, it's a demand + price problem. Every restriction just raises the barrier to entry and rewards whoever figures out the new synthesis.
by Strom | 2026-01-18 10:13:47+00:00
> There are likely to be no devices running iOS 16

My iPhone X is stuck on iOS 16 with no way to upgrade.

However, the phone is still working well. Despite being in daily use for 8 years it still has 81% battery capacity, has never been dropped, has a great OLED screen, can record 4K@60 video. It is far more responsive than a brand new 2025 $200 Android phone from e.g. Xiaomi. It still gets security patches from Apple. The only real shortcoming compared to a modern iPhone is the low light camera performance. That and some app developers don't support iOS 16 anymore, so e.g. I can't use the ChatGPT app and have to use it via the browser, but the Gemini app works fine.
by ninadpathak | 2026-01-18 10:15:04+00:00
Good product, but "100% deterministic" is marketing—hard stop on the Fact engine (TF-IDF for fact verification), Reasoning engine, and Image verification. The Math and Logic layers using SymPy/Z3 are genuinely deterministic. But claiming TF-IDF can verify facts deterministically is just keyword-document similarity—it'll miss context, evolving information, and non-obvious logical chains. What you're really building is a strong gate for verifiable domains (math, structured logic, code security) layered on top of weaker heuristics for fuzzy domains. That's honest work and useful. The positioning should match: "deterministic where computable, high-confidence verification elsewhere." As it stands, teams will trust the whole output with 100% confidence when only parts earn it.
by Paracompact | 2026-01-18 10:15:44+00:00
Indeed. Your sets are decreasing periodic of density always greater than the product from k=1 to infinity of (1-(1/3)^k), which is about 0.56, yet their intersection is null.

This would all be a fairly trivial exercise in diagonalization if such a lemma as implied by Deepseek existed.

(Edit: The bounding I suggested may not be precise at each level, but it is asymptotically the limit of the sequence of densities, so up to some epsilon it demonstrates the desired counterexample.)