MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bflesch | 2026-01-15 15:08:27+00:00
I don't think you are correct. Take for example something like workday where companies manage their HR data. It's not only about the web interface but also about the fact that all of the implemented IT processes have been checked to be legally correct for each country, that the website is resilient to hackers and has availability that covers their customer's needs. You can't copy that without building a large org such as workday.

Even on a technical level the interfaces with country-specific legacy software used all over the place are so badly documented the AI won't help you to shortcut these kind of integrations. There are not 10k stackoverflow posts about each piece of niche software to train from.
by arghwhat | 2026-01-15 15:08:32+00:00
Not really, especially as garbage collection doesn't achieve memory safety. Safety-wise, it only helps avoid UAF due to lifecycle errors.

Garbage collection is primarily just a way to handle non-trivial object lifecycles without manual effort. Parallelism happens to often bring non-trivial object lifecycles, but this is not a major problem in parallelism.

In plain C, the common pattern is trying to keep lifecycles trivial, and the moment this either doesn't make sense or isn't possible, you usually just add a reference count member:

struct some_type {
uint32_t refcnt;
uint32_t otherfields;
};

struct some_type *some_type_ref(struct some_type *a) {
a->refcnt++;
return a;
}

void some_type_unref(struct some_type *a) {
a->refcnt--;
if (a->refcnt == 0) {
free(a); // or some_type_destroy(a);
}
}

In both Go and C, all types used in concurrent code needs to be reviewed for thread-safety, and have appropriate serialization applied - in the C case, this just also includes the refcnt itself. And yes you could have UAF or leak if you don't call ref/unref correctly, but that' sunrelated to parallism - it's just everyday life in manual memory management land.

The issues with parallelism is the same in Go and C, that you might have invalid application states, whether due to missing serialization - e.g., forgetting to lock things appropriately or accidentally using types that are not thread safe at all - or due to business logic flaws (say, two threads both sleeping, waiting for the other one to trigger an event and wake it up).
by basch | 2026-01-15 15:08:33+00:00
Can I ask, did you pull all this from subtitles and scripts?

Quite frankly, the corpus of film criticism might be a better source. Analysis of context, interpretation, intent, result, success, failure, contention might be more useful to shape a story than the literal story itself. It's asking too much of current gen LLMs to be able to synthesize motif at a higher abstraction. In my experience they get stuck on specific examples and crudely stitching pastiche together, instead of working in the blank empty space between thoughts and ideas.

I also am unsure that "describe your opening scene" is the best place to start. I may have a story that has a tangible beginning, middle, end, and want to fix certain elements along the way. "This must happen to start act 3" so the story coherently steers correctly towards goals.
Architecture+cost drivers for a deterministic rule/metric engine 1,200metrics
by Trackdiver | 2026-01-15 15:08:40+00:00
I’m designing a large-scale deterministic analytics engine and would appreciate architectural + cost/effort advice from people who’ve built similar systems.

The core challenge:
• ~1,200 domain-specific metrics
• All rule-based (no ML), fully deterministic
• Metrics share common primitives but differ in configuration
• Metrics combine into composite indices
• Outputs must be auditable and reproducible (same inputs → same outputs)
• I want metrics definable declaratively (not hard-coded one by one)

The system ingests structured event data, computes per-entity metrics, and produces ranked outputs with full breakdowns.

I’m specifically looking for guidance on:
• Architectures for large configurable rule/metric engines
• How to represent metric definitions (DSL vs JSON/YAML vs expression trees)
• Managing performance without sacrificing transparency
• Avoiding “1,200 custom functions” antipatterns
• What you’d do differently if starting this today

Cost / effort sanity check (important):
If you were scoping this as a solo engineer or small team, what are the biggest cost drivers and realistic milestones?
• What should “Phase 1” include to validate the engine (e.g., primitives + declarative metric format + compute pipeline + 100–200 metrics)?
• What’s a realistic engineering effort range for Phase 1 vs “all 1,200” (weeks/months, 1–2 devs vs 3–5 devs)?
• Any common traps that make cost explode (data modeling mistakes, premature UI, overengineering the DSL, etc.)?

I’m not looking to hire here — just trying to sanity-check design decisions and expected effort before implementation.

Thanks in advance for any insight.
by alecco | 2026-01-15 15:08:52+00:00
In 2011 the Greens won key conservative regions with their Fukushima fearmongering and outright lies (see GP comment). They drove massive anti-nuclear protests. And with all this they forced Merkel to u-turn on nuclear or she would lose power.

"Policy Reversal: In May 2011, just months after extending reactor lives, Merkel's government announced a total phase-out of all nuclear plants by 2022."

This is literally what we are discussing in this comment thread. Facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...

> Eight German nuclear power reactors (Biblis A and B, Brunsbuettel, Isar 1, Kruemmel, Neckarwestheim 1, Philippsburg 1 and Unterweser) were declared permanently shutdown on 6 August 2011, following the Japanese Fukushima nuclear disaster.
by CalRobert | 2026-01-15 15:08:53+00:00
Right - I think it was to handle Carbon monoxide (and general ventilation). If you look at part F here I think current regs are 6500 square mm for most rooms https://www.seai.ie/sites/default/files/publications/Domesti...

(TBF Irish standards have gotten much better for airtightness)
by andsoitis | 2026-01-15 15:09:00+00:00
> if I offload more of my thinking to AI, I could go faster and get more done. Think less, move faster.

my mental model, and experience, is that you can think at higher levels and delegate lower-level thinking to the machine. In the past, you could only delegate routinized, procedural thinking, but generative AI is more creative so there's a larger portion of thinking you can delegate.

for example, what are the questions to ask? what decisions/suggestions/ideas that the AI generates should you pick or run with? it requires judgment. it requires agency. it requires taking responsibility for your consequent actions. all of that requires thinking.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-15 15:09:05+00:00
To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.

I also don't think all software needs to be free. I also don't think all software needs to be a gift. (But then I just said the same thing twice.) The part that I care about is which direction the default [default definition?] shifts.

In my perfect world, more code would be MIT not GPL. But in my perfect world, the GPL wouldn't be useful in practice. The world is far from perfect.
by barrenko | 2026-01-15 15:09:12+00:00
To get something usable out of an LLM (aka vibecooding, vibe engineering et al), it works best if you're an expert yourself -> a.k.a you need to know the "lingo".

So there's the possibility of skipping the intermediate work in between by exposing yourself to just the input and the output of the process for certain domains, this is for frontend I think.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2026-01-15 15:09:26+00:00
A builtin part of the shell, just like `if` and `then` and `fi`. Not all shells have `[[`, the one that doesn't which people unknowingly run into most is probably `dash` as used by Alpine Linux. POSIX doesn't require `[[` in a shell, BASH & Zsh support it but others often don't.
by throwawaypath | 2026-01-15 15:09:28+00:00
>Another thing that should not have happened is installing the cable in loops in this way: any 'building' or 'underground' type cable needs to be of the exact length required at the demarcation point

This is awful advice I would discard immediately. It's poor practice and against code.

When pulling cable, especially fiber, the ends of the cable should be able to reach the fathest corner of the room. Excess cable should be in a service loop, properly secured to a wall, and terminated on a patch panel. Both ends of the cable should follow this rule. That means you're typically pulling cable that's 15m longer or more, depending on the room and configuration.

NEVER buy and pull cable that is the exact size. The cable literally comes from the factory looped up, it's designed to be looped (watch bend radius).

>Loops are definitely allowed though, but that use case is mostly for aerial fiber to enable repair splices

Again, awful advice that's against code. Underground fiber must have service loops at both ends, and must be terminated to a patch panel.
by lsiq | 2026-01-15 15:09:30+00:00
Agreed. I will say that Renesas does have one thing going for them, being Japanese it has the lowest supply chain/geopolitical risk right now of anybody other than TI.
And the Microchip/Atmel low end stuff is so overpriced/outdated, that you're be better off stockpiling reels of the 8 cent Puya chips or going with the the TI MSPM0.
by samiv | 2026-01-15 15:09:54+00:00
Re software and landfill.. true to some extent but there are still ramifications as you pointed out electricity demand and hardware infrastructure to support it. Also in the 80's when the computer games market crashed they literally dumped games cartridges in a hole in the desert!

Maybe my opinion is just biased and I'm in the comfortable position to pass judgment but I'd like to believe that more people would be more ethical and conscious about their materialistic needs if things had more value and were better quality and instead of focusing on the "price" as the primary value proposition people were actually able to afford to buy other than the cheapest of things.

Wouldn't the economy also be in much better shape if more people could buy things such as handmade shoes or suits?
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-15 15:10:19+00:00
I don't see too much of an issue with resales - it's like if an adult buys booze for someone underage which can't really be prevented.

My issue with having them expire is that people would have around 70 years of proving their age whilst minors only need to be prevented from accessing websites for up to 18 years (more likely just 10 years or so).
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-15 15:11:01+00:00
> All of the components getting sourced by one supplier means the whole "X is leaving the consumer market" point is moot, and allows better bulk deals to be negotiated.

I don't think that checks out. The fabs are booked out AFAIU. This is going to hit SoCs (and anything else you can come up with) sooner rather than later because it all depends on the same fabs producing the same silicone at the end of the day. It's just packaged differently.

They left the consumer market due to the price difference. It's not that there aren't middlemen willing to purchase in bulk right now. It's that the OEMs aren't willing to sell at any price because they've already sold their entire future inventory at absurd prices for the next however many months or years.

I assume there will still be at least a few SoCs to choose from but the prices will likely be completely absurd because they will have to match the enterprise price for the components that go into them.
by wongarsu | 2026-01-15 15:11:09+00:00
The correct calculation is not 900€/36 months but (900€-$resell_value)/36 months. If you sell your GPU for 450€ after three years you saved a good bit of money. If the AI bubble doesn't pop, your resale value might even be a good bit higher than that. I've had a used 1080TI that I used for five years and then sold for nearly the same price, making it effectively free (minus electricity use and opportunity cost)
by lapcat | 2026-01-15 15:11:12+00:00
> That’s how it read. Which is what my previous comment responded to.

My problem with your previous comment is that it was written after my clarificatory reply to you, and indeed after your reply to that, so you obviously read my clarificatory reply, but instead of revising your initial interpretation based on my clarification, you chose, for whatever reason, to repeat the initial misinterpretation.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-15 15:11:19+00:00
You and me both, bud. I often feel these days that humanity has never had a more fractured reality, and worse, those fractures are very binary and tribal. I cope by trying to find fundamental truths that are supported by overwhelming evidence rather than focus on speculation.

I guess the fundamental truth that I’m working towards for generative AI is that it appears to have asymptotic performance with respect to recreating whatever it’s trying to recreate. That is, you can throw unlimited computing power and unlimited time at trying to recreate something, but there will still be a missing essence that separates the recreation from the creation. In very small snippets, and for very large compute, there may be reasonable results, but it will never be able to completely replace what can be created in meatspace by meatpeople.

Whether the economics of the tradeoff between “nearly recreated” and “properly created” is net positive is what I think this constant ongoing debate is about. I don’t think it’s ever going to be “it always makes sense to generate content instead of hire someone for this”, but rather a more dirty, “in this case, we should generate content”.
by someguyiguess | 2026-01-15 15:11:21+00:00
My portfolio site which is just a fun project to try to replicate Mac OS X Tiger. (You have to view on desktop or else it displays an iOS view which is way less cool).

Plenty of Easter eggs in there:
https://nicksmith.software

Built using react, zustand, tailwind, and some other libraries for the genie effect and Mac hover animation, iOS view, etc… Credits are in the readme on GitHub.

—

My personal site that is a work in progress:
https://nicholaspsmith.com

Built in Angular after having been a full time react engineer for the better part of a decade. Man I’m sick of react haha
by matthewsinclair | 2026-01-15 15:11:30+00:00
Personal site:
https://matthewsinclair.com

A couple of other sites that I maintain for side projects:
https://quantumfaxmachine.com
https://whatnext.dev
https://playprolix.com

And my "own-my-own-stack" personal CMS that I use to host all of my sites:
https://laksa.io
by killerstorm | 2026-01-15 15:11:36+00:00
True.

Also true that most tech writers are bad. And companies aren't going to spend >$200k/year on a tech writer until they hit tens of millions in revenue. So AI fills the gap.

As a horror story, our docs team didn't understand that having correct installation links should be one of their top priorities. Obviously if a potential customer can't install product, they'd assume it's bs and try to find an alternative. It's so much more important than e.g. grammar in a middle of some guide.
by hmcabrera | 2026-01-15 15:11:40+00:00
Hi HN,
I’ve been working on ModuleFlow , a modular, multi-tenant SaaS where users activate only the modules they really need — such as invoicing, eBook generation, email marketing, and more.

The goal is to offer a flexible, scalable experience especially for freelancers, indie makers, and small teams.

It’s live, and currently there’s a waitlist while we prepare to roll out the first modules.

I’d really appreciate any feedback:
• What kind of modules would be most useful to you?
• Does this modular approach sound appealing?
• Any red flags or improvements you’d suggest?

Thanks for checking it out.
by jabl | 2026-01-15 15:11:49+00:00
Aluminum got a bad rep due to a lot of poor installations made in the 1960 and 70'ies. Subsequently new alloys (AA-8000 series) for wiring, new installation and termination procedures etc. have been developed, and AFAIU the situation today is much better. It's still trickier than copper wiring, so probably not a good option for DIY, but for some industrial installation with competent personnel and where the savings can be substantial it could certainly be an attractive option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
by jimmaswell | 2026-01-15 15:12:22+00:00
As a web dev, Safari is like the new IE6 - it does everything slightly wrong and I have to sprinkle my code with special cases for it because too many people use it to ignore. This modal scrolls properly in Firefox and Chrome? Not Safari, better add a million extra css attributes and maybe even some JS for fun to deal with it. This CSS parses exactly the same in Firefox and Chrome? Not Safari, they decided to Think Different. My workplace's frontend codebase is absolutely polluted with /* Safari fix: ... */

https://www.google.com/search?q=examples%20of%20code%20that%...
by commandlinefan | 2026-01-15 15:12:23+00:00
> OpenSSL code was not pleasant or easy to read

I published a book about SSL a while back - my original plan for the book was going to be to work through the OpenSSL source code and relate each piece back to the relevant specifications, step by step. I found that the OpenSSL source code was so complex that I would have spent a lot more time discussing the intricacies of the C code itself than the cryptographic algorithms they were implementing - so much so that it made more sense to just write my own SSL implementation and walk through that.

In fairness to OpenSSL, though, I can see how and why it got so complex: they're trying to be all things to all people in a backwards compatible way. At the time, OpenSSL still had support for SSLv2, an albatross that LibreSSL doesn't have around its neck.
by steveklabnik | 2026-01-15 15:12:26+00:00
When a basic question is asked, a basic answer is given. I didn’t say that I think that’s the coolest or most interesting answer. It’s just the most obvious, straightforward one. It’s not even about Rust!

(And also, I don’t think things like work stealing queues are relevant to editors, but maybe that’s my own ignorance.)
by knollimar | 2026-01-15 15:13:39+00:00
This isn't true at all unless you narrowly dwfine "the entire system".

Each feeder can be aluminum if you put special goop on any copper connections. Breakers accept it just fine, etc.

You should avoid it for smaller wiring, though. There's special 8000 series aluminum if you're trying to be serious with Al feeders
by bombcar | 2026-01-15 15:14:10+00:00
The thing with range is it's another "thing to worry about" - with a gas car, it's basically nothing to worry about unless you happen to be absolutely on empty and no time to fill up the tank (5-10 minutes unless you have to go way out of your way for gas; rare).

It's like when phones went from 8-10 hour capacity to over a day; suddenly it wasn't a thing you think about anymore.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2026-01-15 15:15:12+00:00
Probably neat, but “Show HN” should be removed from the title as this is a signup page for a product you have to pay to use.

> Off topic: […], sign-up pages, […]. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.

From the rules for Show HN posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
by anon5739483 | 2026-01-15 15:15:28+00:00
In Thailand, regular smoking is shunned by the public but vapes are literally everywhere.

I've even seen 15-16 year old boys in Thailand pick up their girlfriends on motorbikes, race their friends to the food court, drink a couple of beers and vape once they get there, then ride their girlfriends home again while still under the influence, all without helmets mind you.
by erelong | 2026-01-15 15:16:53+00:00
I've had this kind of idea when I was thinking about becoming a teacher

that maybe in the future it will be more common to have a split career of, in the 40 hrs work week tradition, manual labor / trade for ~20 hrs/week and a "cognitive" job at like ~20 hrs/week (or however many hours)

This would allow workers to exercise both mind and body
by SilasX | 2026-01-15 15:17:27+00:00
This! I've run into very frustrating examples of legit sites doing that, for no defensible reason at all.

For example, the healthcare.gov emails. For links to that domain, they would still transform them with lnks.gd, even though:

1) The emails would be very long and flashy, so they're clearly not economizing on space.

2) The "shortened" URL was usually longer!

3) That domain doesn't let you go straight to the root and check where the transformed URL is going.

It's training users to do the very things that expose them to scammers!
by bombcar | 2026-01-15 15:17:32+00:00
I knew someone who had a Tacoma for construction work; he got it because everyone had one.

Later he had to take it in to the shop and they gave him a loaner cargo van, and from then on he regretted not getting a cargo van instead of a truck.

The vast majority of what he did with the truck was carry tools, which are easier to access in a van; the few times he carried materials he would have to unload the whole truck or get the trailer anyway.
by hn_acker | 2026-01-15 15:17:39+00:00
EFF explains a few differences between showing your ID in person and verifying your age online [1]. With respect to transmission, storage, and sharing of user data by the verifier/website, the risks of age estimation overlap with those of age verification.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/why-isnt-online-age-ve...
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-15 15:18:48+00:00
GDPR says that consent for non-essential tracking purposes should be freely given, you can't use dark patterns nor make the "consent" option more prominent than the "decline" option. Similarly, inaction (ignoring the banner) does not count as consent.

Most products fail on that alone, and that's the very basics. But happy to be proven wrong.
by rirze | 2026-01-15 15:18:48+00:00
Probably referring to the rat's race between making trash cans hard for bears to tamper but usable for tourists.

The analogy is probably implying there is considerable overlap between the smartest average AI user and the dumbest computer-science-related professional. In this case, when it comes to, "what is this suspicious file?".

Which I agree.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-15 15:18:57+00:00
I've found that the best aid to keeping a mental model of the structure of a project is to document it well using Literate Programming:

http://literateprogramming.com/

which then affords a PDF w/ a ToC, indices, and sidebars and other navigational aids all hyperlinked so as to make moving through the code and its documentation quick and fluid.

Then, when I arrive at the section of code which needs to be updated, the documentation and reasoning about its current state is right there.

Not sure if this scales up to multiple developers though....
by blakeem567 | 2026-01-15 15:19:03+00:00
I been doing development for over 25 years and I completely agree with what they are saying. It's similar to going from punch cards to terminals. We were using assembly, COBOL, and Fortran in the 1990's and into the early 2000s. Zork even had a game engine. These are not the revolutions you think and have no hard cut off when change happened.
by a4isms | 2026-01-15 15:19:13+00:00
I'm a wagon-person. I picked up four new toilets when I moved into my home, take as many as four bikes to the trailhead, and our full-sized Chesapeake Bay Retriever likes having the entire "trunk" area to himself.

I also do not allow my lifted pickup and Model Y neighbours to choose my vehicle for me.
by bombcar | 2026-01-15 15:19:16+00:00
Surprisingly to many, rural and very rural places are actually a great location for EVs - if they have enough range.

Because even very rural places have electricity - almost always. I can find quite nice homes that are 20 miles from a gas station, but have power and could easily charge a vehicle. If I lived there, a vehicle I could use without a gas station would be quite desirable.