MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nix-zarathustra | 2026-01-04 04:15:31+00:00
I disagree. This doesn't really change anything. It's not like China needed justification to invade Taiwan, they already do, nor it is not like China or Russia follows the rules based order, see South China Sea or Ukraine. From their perspective, the rules based order was created by the US to attack them, and the West hypocritically apply the rules where they see fit.

Ultimately, the international rules based order was mostly created to protect smaller and weaker powers that be and to constrain the strong. Since nobody can enforce international law, the strong do what they like anyway.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-04 04:15:33+00:00
What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead.

Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers.

(As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated in for many years are still online and still pretty healthy, all things considered.)
by viccis | 2026-01-04 04:15:42+00:00
This is a very confused article, I think. The fact that people associate these extravagant roaring 20s parties with the character of Gatsby has everything to do with his character and over-the-top parties being the strongest cultural touchstone that people today have with that era, given that almost all of us (in the US at least) have to read it in high school.

The fact that the aesthetic qualities of Gatsby that are paid homage to have nothing to do with the subtext of those parties when you learn about his character is not a contradiction.

This happens all the time. Rappers loved Scarface and mob movies back in the 90s/00s and used to imitate those aesthetics all the time, despite Tony Montana being clearly depicted as a complete idiot whose lack of impulse control is his undoing. The didn't "misunderstand" Scarface. They just loved the aesthetics and power fantasy.
by casey2 | 2026-01-04 04:16:44+00:00
I think you overestimate 2 by a longshot most problems only appear novel because they couched in a special field, framework or terminology, otherwise it would be years of incremental work. Some are, they are more appropriately put in a recreational journal or BB.

The reason the "experts" hung around SO was to smooth over the little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but required too much moderation and as other have pointed out, ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs.
by namanyayg | 2026-01-04 04:16:57+00:00
I had a similar beautiful experience where an experienced programmer answered one of my elementary JavaScript typing questions when I was just starting to learn programming.

He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer possible attacking the question from various angles.

He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of programming exist the way they are. I'm still thankful.

If this was repeated today, an LLM would have given a surface level answer, or worse yet would've done the thinking for me obliviating the question in the first place.

I wrote a blog post about my experience at https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning
by akoboldfrying | 2026-01-04 04:17:06+00:00
> Jane Crowther's newly published novel, Gatsby, updates the plot to the 21st Century, and flips the genders

I was tired of the idea of gender-flipping a story before the first story was ever gender-flipped, and I'm no less tired of it now.

I suspect that even people who think it's important to perform the rite of gender-flipping a story don't actually like the stories that result. Because it's the same story as before, but now you have the feeling the author is standing in front of you, waiting for an opportunity to remind you that the main character is a woman now and isn't that incredible?
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-04 04:17:34+00:00
I agree with everything thundergolfer says, but I would further like to add that even when the goal actually is truth it is often better expressed by allegory or analogy. All of the greatest teachers in human history have understood and used this to their advantage.

However, we have a growing problem in the world now. Our declining attention spans are killing reading, and with it reading comprehension. I regularly see otherwise intelligent people struggle to understand even high school level writing. Everything has to be explicitly stated now, and even then it's often not understood.

Fifty three percent of Americans read below the sixth grade level now, and for those TikTok people subtext does not exist. That does not mean that subtext isn't real or valuable.

If 53% of the world gave themselves intentional color-blindness we wouldn't talk about how little value color adds to painting, we would worry about those who'd forgotten how to perceive it and think of ways we might grant them the ability to perceive the world they'd gone blind to.
by gorgoiler | 2026-01-04 04:17:42+00:00
It can’t be fun running HN right now. Sorry, dang et al.

It’s like you’re the owners of a particularly popular pub that’s suddenly filled up with Johns, Jameses, Evas, and Annes, all loudly making their thoughts known while ordering a nice normal Western drink at the bar.

Vodkas, baijius, and sojus all round!

(To be fair, there are probably some Coors Lite and Stella drinkers here too.)
by another_twist | 2026-01-04 04:18:03+00:00
None of the generic thought leadership books are particularly useful. I've noticed that the best way to keep relevant as an engineer is to ignore flavor of the day frameworks and tech but rather focus on the basics. For example, if you're working in financial modeling, one way to improve as an engineer to get better at the domain. Maybe "Advances in Financial Machine Learning" by Marcos López de Prado. You'd have to work through the math and pick up finance on the go (which I assume should be easier part). As for people doing cool stuff in Zig / Rust, what matters is the problem not the hammer they're using to solve it.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-04 04:18:17+00:00
The reality is that humans suck at telling AI. Sure, there are obvious tells for certain things, but if one really tries, they can make AI generated content indistinguishable from human made. You even see this on Twitter, where actual human artists are sometimes subjected to a modern day witch hunt by others saying their art is AI, and the artists literally have to prove that it was made by them, sometimes by pulling up various stages of the drawing in progress (and what is even funnier is that now Google's Nano Banana Pro can even generate that sort of progress compilation images).
by naishoya | 2026-01-04 04:19:11+00:00
My late grandfather (passed in 2022 at the age of 104) showed us all how it could be done. In 2014! During one of my infrequent visits to his house; he was complaining about the state of the latest Windows installation on his new laptop, and saw me driving Debian+KDE and asked about switching.

I told him that Ubuntu was probably the best fit for someone changing/doing one's own install. And that was pretty much the extent of the conversation, we went on to talk more about raising beef on land without petrochemical fertilizers, and how he missed the flavor from his youth, circa 1930's vs what he could get in the store today.

A few years later, the next time I was in his living room, his somewhat older - the same - laptop was on his kitchen table with OpenOffice spreadsheets and something he was working on, running the latest Kubuntu flavor. I asked who he had asked to install it; he has a number of technically proficient descendants who live much closer and who visit far more frequently than I did, so I presumed one of my cousins had helped.

He acted a little gruff, told me he had switched to Ubuntu+gnome by reading and following the instructions, and had then decided he tried out the K Desktop and preferred it enough to just make the switch without reinstalling.

Had a bit of fun hearing him explain how he "hadn't been fond of some of the Ubuntu decisions with window managers but liked having both environments installed as somethings were better in K, and other things were better from Gnome."

In thinking about how ready he was, in his 90's, to fully read and follow instructions reminds me that he was from a generation whose automobile user manual came with instructions for adjusting the piston timing as well as how to bleed and adjust brake pressure.

Why does everyone act like switching to Linux from Windows is just too hard for "Kathy and Wayne"? The fact of the matter seems to be we have lost either the _ability_, or the _willingness_, to read-and-follow-directions in the general population. The end result of either is the same.
by jeremyjh | 2026-01-04 04:19:12+00:00
This is not exactly the same as the Result pattern. It doesn't require an ADT feature and does not require the programmer to specify a type for the possible error value.

Also syntactically it is quite different: it means you add exactly one character to the function head to denote that its possible to return an error.

So, calling that feature "Result" could also be confusing to people who have not yet learned this language.

Tell me, was it a blunder when Rust swapped "Result" from the commonly understood name of "Either" from OCaml/Haskell ?
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-04 04:20:24+00:00
Decide to do what?

SO didn't claim contributions. They're still CC-BY-SA

https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

AFAICT all they did is stop providing dumps. That doesn't change the license.

I was very active, In fact I'm actually upset at myself for spending so much time there. That said, I always thought I was getting fair value. They provided free hosting, I got answers and got to contribute answers for others.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-04 04:20:24+00:00
For Dioxus?

I was looking into something similar, on Flutter it uses FFIgen and JNIgen, might be something to look into on the Rust side. From what I've seen, it's quite difficult from pure Kotlin to Rust, as I was looking for the equivalent of the flutter_rust_bridge package when experimenting with Compose Multiplatform, as I have some crates I need to use, but I ultimately gave up because it was not straightforward at all.
by viccis | 2026-01-04 04:21:45+00:00
My point was that the mistake didn't happen during prop creation. Those aren't milk cartons, those are HDP cartons, so the props are correct.

As to the content of your post: It doesn't make sense. Thinking something is not human created when it turns out that the real reason was that it wasn't created by a human in the show is not a valid reason to stop applying that as a useful discriminator between AI and human art. It's a Gettier case, but the J part of JTB knowledge still stands, and there's a reason grappling with the Gettier problem is so gnarly in epistemology.
by arjie | 2026-01-04 04:21:51+00:00
Haha this is true. It reminds me of when Bootstrap first showed up on the scene. Now that version of it looks laughably outdated, but it suddenly meant you could no longer judge if something was legit by whether it looked kinda good. It took someone with an eye for detail to make things look good and everyone had components that rendered as grey box if they weren't careful.

So you make the beautiful splash page to show you can. But then suddenly it became trivial. No longer a useful signal.

Perhaps language is like that. Once you could not do it without also being smart. Now (in the era of modern education and literacy) it is within reach of many (perhaps all), so even the most stupid of sentences can be rendered poetic.
by vel0city | 2026-01-04 04:22:18+00:00
So you've said:

> I'm firmly convinced that the bulk of the details aren't communicated to him and/or he forgets them.

But at the same time:

> time no one wanted to risk contradicting his fancies on recorded television.

So they're making plans, but they won't actually commit to any of the plans because in the end the plans are meaningless and Trump is going to push for whatever he wants at the moment. Doesn't that make the actual plans practically worthless?
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-04 04:23:02+00:00
Hate is a strong word, and it wasn’t categorical. He was just very wary and suspicious of it. This is one example of where Aristotle differed from his teacher quite sharply.

We must distinguish between rhetoric and sophistry. In our sloppy speech today, we have taken on the bad habit of calling vapid or dishonest or rabble-rousing political speech “rhetoric”…which it isn’t. Sophistry is a much better term, as the sophists were master bullshitters. Their aim was the same as that of our politicians and ad men: to say things that produce desired effects with total indifference to the truth of what’s being said. Language as an instrument of domination and manipulation rather than communication.

Rhetoric is not like that, strictly speaking. Rhetoric is the skillful use of language to communicate and persuade someone of the truth, at least as the speaker sees it. The presupposition is that what you wish to communicate is true, hence the emphasis on logos, ethos, and pathos. Sophists don’t care about logos. True rhetoricians do.
by dahart | 2026-01-04 04:23:29+00:00
> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.

My personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and maintenance needed to keep it current and thriving. The over-moderation you described helps people for a short time but then doesn’t help the person who googles much later. I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.
by bn-l | 2026-01-04 04:24:16+00:00
The code it produces (svelte, typescript, python) is usually riddled with small errors , deprecated usage, reimplementation, and terrible segmentation. This is opus 4.5. Literally every single time if I did not review it carefully and edit it thoroughly it would be a mountain of extremely hard to debug tech debt. It’s a toss up if it’s actual faster to be honest. I think the phenomenon of people expressing their hopes of the technology as if they were the current reality is an extremely interesting phenomenon.
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-04 04:24:48+00:00
Reading a few hundred mostly low effort reactionary posts of people using the events in Venezuela as validation for their politics had a strong effect on my mood.

These sorts of events are tricky on HN, all the user can do is flag flag flag and hope you or others like you (mods) will sort it all out and give the front page its one thread on the topic, if we don't the front page will be consumed and the community will die. But we can't always rely on mods, you have lives and have to rely on certain pragmatism, you have to wait and see how the community reacts/events unfold to see if something should get a thread on the front page or risk the consequences. And I think you did weigh in but vouching on a single thread may have won out against the flagging, as it should. So I gave the thread a chance and started reading.

One of the only changes I think HN could use, is mods being able to make a post in a thread that can not be voted on or replied to but will remain top post and simply stating that the community has ruled and this submission will live but every related submission will be killed as a dupe until the thread dies. But that would be very difficult to do without being accused of having an agenda by one side or the other.

Part of the reason I avoid becoming too much a part of sites like HN is because I fear being asked to be more than a user. I do not envy your position but I appreciate all you do.
by hedayet | 2026-01-04 04:24:54+00:00
And still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because it was - "too broad".
I mean it was 2025 and how many very precise software engineering questions are there that any flagship models couldn't answer in seconds?

Although I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it; that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well.
by Llamamoe | 2026-01-04 04:24:56+00:00
> Why do we ponder over sentences that rearrange words into appealing order,

> An ice cube melts with quiet discipline, surrendering its edges before its core, shaping the drink long before flavor has a chance to speak. Even in something so small, form decides outcome.

This doesn't sound good to me at all, it sounds like whoever wrote it is either an LLM, a lazy student padding the wordcount their essay, or thinks too highly of themselves.

If there's any reason that people think more of it, it's that the non-straightforward manner in which it's written forced us to process the words rather than filter them out as the bullshit they are.

> and disregard sentences as meaningless when they sound disorderly and bland?

> Climate change is killing people. I am upset when people die. I want polar bears to live longer.

They're just too short and do not contain any explanation/justification/making a case for the core claim.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-04 04:25:30+00:00
React Native is not webview based, it's basically a translation layer that takes your JSX markup and turns it into SwiftUI / Kotlin UI code, native on each device.

Personally I like Flutter, a lot of people, even hardcore Android native devs, say Flutter could be the way to go for Android development in general [0].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/1np26m4/do_othe...
by jamesd_comelang | 2026-01-04 04:26:07+00:00
I am coming up with a new Language called Come ;)
It’s 2026. Yes, AI writes code now. This is still happening.
Come(C Object and Module Extensions) is a systems programming language inspired by C. It preserves C’s mental model while removing common pitfalls.
I’m sharing one demo file (come_demo.co), no spec.
If the language needs a manual to be readable, that’s already a failure.
What you’ll see in the demo:
Explicit module , no hidden globals
Grouped const / import / export / alias
const enum with auto-increment (and explicit starts)
C-style functions with multiple return values
var for local type inference (still static)
switch with no accidental fallthrough
UTF-8 strings that are just… strings
map , array, string, struct, union composite type etc
method support for struct/union
No pointer
No malloc , use ubyte array.resize() instead
Goal: C-like performance so we burn fewer watts in the AI era
instead of throwing more GPUs at problems we could’ve solved in C and hopefully save some head-scratching along the way.
Demo attached.
If this makes sense without docs, that’s a win.
If not—tell me where it falls apart.
come_demo.co
by tayo42 | 2026-01-04 04:26:18+00:00
Game of thrones will be. No main character is safe since Ned Stark was killed on TV.

No ending was going to be good. Sopranos had a controversial ending too.

Silicon Valley captured the feel of the bay area and did a good job with satire.

2000s would be easier, I think 2010 is about the switch to super hero movies.
by SirSavary | 2026-01-04 04:27:05+00:00
I'm well aware, I had the opportunity to read it in high school, though that was because of my grade stream; students in a 'lower' stream didn't get the same material.

Our prom theme the year I graduated was "The roaring 20s". The 2013 film had released months prior, and I remember discussing with friends how misleading it was--making the parties look incredible, while missing the book's subtler commentary. People who only glanced at the book, or only saw the film, can easily walk away thinking the Roaring Twenties were all glamour and fun, which is exactly the gap I was (poorly) pointing out in my earlier comment.
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-04 04:29:24+00:00
I kind of wonder if there will be more or less. Maybe more doing it for fun but less over all?

I watch a few DJs on Twitch. They seem like they are having fun but I'm pretty confident many of them would stop if there was no money in it. Maybe after they don't need the money they'd still do it. They need the money now and it's a fun way to get it.

Similarly, I watch Veritasium and Kurzgestat. They both put lots of work in with teams of people. I think they both enjoy it, but some of that enjoyment comes from "making a living at it". If that disappeared, if they didn't need the living from it I wonder if they'd continue.
by apparent | 2026-01-04 04:29:28+00:00
I agree that some people use the phrase loosely. I would ask such people what they would say to distinguish between someone who actually won the majority of the popular vote versus someone who did not. It's not a "super-majority" situation, IMO. But surely it's worthwhile to have a different way of referring to the two cases, especially now that the less-common one has happened in recent history.
by huimang | 2026-01-04 04:29:34+00:00
Sure, its's free*.

- except the cost of materials and gas to drive to the hardware store, which you'll likely do twice or thrice as you realize you bought the wrong thing or need some other specific tool, that you'll use one time a year or less

- except the cost of your own time away from personal projects and family

- except the cost of hiring a plumber afterwards to professionally fix the problem you caused by DIY'ing it without the knowledge and experience that a professional brings
by achille | 2026-01-04 04:29:47+00:00
heya 0xfaded, thanks for sharing that, it was simple, neat.
Out of curiosity I asked a few models to solve that same problem, then followed up with a request to optimize it so it runs more effectively.

chatgpt & gemini's solutions were buggy, but claude solved it, and actually found a solution that runs even more efficient. It only needs to compute sqrt once per iteration. It's more complex however.

yours claude
------------------------------
Time (ns/call) 40.5 38.3
sqrt per iter 3 1
Accuracy 4.8e-7 4.8e-7

Claude's trick: instead of calling sin/cos each iteration, it rotates the existing (cos,sin) pair by the small Newton step and renormalizes:

// Rotate (c,s) by angle dt, then renormalize to unit circle
float nc = c + dt*s, ns = s - dt*c;
float len = sqrt(nc*nc + ns*ns);
c = nc/len; s = ns/len;

See: https://gist.github.com/achille/d1eadf82aa54056b9ded7706e8f5...

p.s: it seems like Gemini has disabled the ability to share chats can anyone else confirm this?
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-04 04:29:53+00:00
I find that my nose is only really good for scrolling. Having better accuracy for nose pointing would make it more useful, but I think I'll stick to using it au natural vs. this stylus.

I absolutely have scrolled my phone w/ my nose before. It was never necessary back when phones were a reasonable size to use one-handed. Now that every phone is a tablet-sized monstrosity I resort to nose-scrolling in the few-and-far-between times when I'm forced to use my phone one-handed.
by thereisnospork | 2026-01-04 04:31:08+00:00
Pretty much zero chance of that. The complexity (moving parts, machined parts, number of generators, number of electrical interconnects (etc.) is so much higher per kilogram basis compared to pumped hydro. Much of the country does half of pumped hydro (storing potential energy in water towers) and delivers it to your door for fractions of a penny per kg, a price that includes a complete distribution network and sourcing/purification of the water.