MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josephg | 2026-01-15 11:03:49+00:00
> the Rust ecosystem's churn (constant breakage, edition migrations, dependency hell in Cargo.lock) creates its own class of problems.

What churn? Rust hasn't broken compatibility since 1.0, over a decade ago. These days it feels like rust changes slower than C and C++.

> Either way, I would like to reiterate that the comparison is flawed at a more fundamental level because hash tables and B-trees are different data structures with different performance characteristics. O(1) average lookup vs O(log n) with cache-friendly ordered traversal. These are not interchangeable.

They're mostly interchangeable when used as a map! In rust code, in most cases you can just replace HashMap with BTreeMap. In practice, O(log n) and O(1) are very similar bounds owing to how slowly log(n) grows with respect to n. Cache locality often matters much more than a O(log n) factor in your algorithm.

If you read the actual article, you'll see that Cantrill benchmarked his library using rust's b-tree and hash table implementation. Both maps outperformed his C based hash table implementation.

> Neither tells you anything about Rust vs C.

It tells you rust's standard library has a faster hash map implementation than Bryan Cantrill. If you need a hash table, you're almost certainly better off using rust than rolling your own in C.
by jamesblonde | 2026-01-15 11:04:05+00:00
If they are exploding categorical variables using OHE and storing the columns - that is the wrong thing to do. You should only ever store untransformed feature data in tables. You apply the feature transformations, like OHE, on reading from the tables, as those transformations are parameterized by the data you read (the training data subset you select).

Reference:
https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/a-taxonomy-for-data-transforma...
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-15 11:05:02+00:00
Youtube Description:

How can I stick with my project? Are rewrites bad? How do I get the community involved? What are some development practices which can make life saner in a long-running project?

In this talk, we'll discuss answers to each of these questions. We'll cover my experience building jank, the native Clojure dialect, for over a decade. We'll also look forward, at the next decade of jank development.

You'll leave this talk equipped with some practical philosophies to help you finish your projects and hopefully some inspiration to check out jank.

Biography

Jeaye is the creator of the jank programming language, a Clojure dialect on LLVM with seamless C++ interop.

Jeaye has a background in C++ systems programming, focusing on games and game engines. After over a decade in game development, he's focused on building tools to make native programming saner.

Recorded Nov 14, 2025 at Clojure/Conj 2025 in Charlotte, NC.
by jijijijij | 2026-01-15 11:05:34+00:00
> This feels like the start of treasure hunt like game. Between username of rabinovich (as others have pointed out) and the prior submission by rabinovich of an archive.today like tool 3 months ago - https://ghostarchive.org/. When you click into the search query examples for ghostarchive such as this one https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://docs.google.com. Many of the documents are very weird indeed.

This is what someone trying to start a treasure hunt like game would say....

Mom! Am I an NPC? Mom! Am I real???
by latexr | 2026-01-15 11:06:29+00:00
I notice you skipped two of the names, including Dolly Parton, which I included specifically for nitpickers.

And you’re treating Al as a has-been, but his latest album was number one in the US charts.

What exactly makes a “great artist” then? Surely that’s subjective, and popularity isn’t the only metric. We’re talking “great”, not simply “famous”.

But alright, take your pick:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahdobro/nicest-celebs-people-ha...

https://www.quora.com/What-famous-rock-musicians-are-genuine...

https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/s4rrug/artists_th...

Plenty of names there who are “generally considered the very top of their profession”, and bigger than the ones you picked.
by ranguna | 2026-01-15 11:06:40+00:00
I don't have one yet, unfortunately. But it's definitely going to include immich (not EU software I think), nextcloud, some form of email server, a secure chat app (which I don't think the EU has), mastodon, an android spinoff like GrapheneOS, Linux (ofc), open source EU LLMs, and I don't know much else, I'll have to think about it more.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-15 11:07:04+00:00
In my 30 year experience across 10 jobs, a line level manager can’t be “good”, the most they can do is “not be bad”. They are completely useless in helping their reports get raises and promotions and they rarely control budgets.

For the 2 jobs I had before going into consulting (working full time for consulting companies) where I was a strategic hire, one of my requirements were that I reported to the director/CTO and not the line level managers. Someone who could actually sign off on a decision.

In consulting it doesn’t matter. The client drives the decisions.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-15 11:07:11+00:00
Meh. A bit too touchy feely for my taste, and not much in ways of good arguments. Some of the things touched on in the article are either extreme romanticisations of the craft or rather naive takes (docs are product truth? Really?!?! That hasn't been the case in ages, with docs for multi-billion dollar solutions, written by highly paid grass fed you won't believe they're not humans!)...

The parts about hallucinations and processes are also a bit dated. We're either at, or very close to the point where "agentic" stuff works in a "GAN" kind of way to "produce docs" -> read docs and try to reproduce -> resolve conflicts -> loop back, that will "solve" both hallucinations and processes, at least at the quality of human-written docs. My bet is actually better in some places. Bitter lesson and all that. (at least for 80% of projects, where current human written docs are horrendous. ymmv. artisan projects not included)

What I do agree with is that you'll still want someone to hold accountable. But that's just normal business. This has been the case for integrators / 3rd party providers since forever. Every project requiring 3rd party people still had internal folks that were held accountable when things didn't work out. But, you probably won't need 10 people writing docs. You can hold accountable the few that remain.
by masswerk | 2026-01-15 11:07:43+00:00
https://masswerk.at/

The site covers mostly retro- and classic computing. (Strictly no AI generated content.) Here in convenient format:

(
:name "Norbert Landsteiner"
:site "https://masswerk.at/"
:blog "https://masswerk.at/nowgobang/"
:feed "https://masswerk.at/nowgobang/feed.xml" //covers blog only
:about "https://masswerk.at/info/" //legal info
:hnuid "masswerk"
:bio "web developer and designer, site content is mostly retro- and classic computing."
)
by Someone | 2026-01-15 11:08:06+00:00
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Power-Play-The-Economics-...:

“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”

I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.

And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.

Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.
by braiamp | 2026-01-15 11:08:35+00:00
This is the yearly stats published by staff of Stack Overflow. It seems that there has been some interest about the health of the site and its determinants. This table focuses on moderation actions, like closing questions, deleting, reviewing, editing, etc.

The highlights considering what the conversation usually is about when referring to "moderators" actions:

* There's a process that deletes posts that are old and haven't seen a single positive interaction [1]. This is the biggest responsible for deletion of post for the site. Then users, then elected moderators. In that order.

* Authors are the ones that most close questions. This is due a mechanic [2] that allows authors to accept a suggestion that their question is a duplicate. Non-authors and moderators represent a relatively small part (~15%) of all closures of questions on the site.

* There are certain actions that only elected moderators can do and no amount of coordination by users are capable of, because of their sensible nature [3], those are the special attributes of moderators. Anything else most users can accomplish them.

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/213575

[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/250930/213575

[3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192/213575
Show HN: I built a game on my old phone without knowing what I was building
by kikkupico | 2026-01-15 11:08:54+00:00
I'm calling this "Vibe Discovery" — distinct from vibe coding because I didn't know the requirements upfront. Started with "make something with the accelerometer" and discovered through 6 iterations that I wanted a WebGL marble game.
The interesting part was the dev setup: Claude Code running in Termux on a Redmi Note 9 (4GB RAM). The same-device feedback loop — code, test accelerometer, react, iterate — made rapid discovery possible in a way that laptop-to-phone deployment wouldn't.
by IanCal | 2026-01-15 11:09:21+00:00
They've got a huge amount of space, solar has a low cost and provides an additional consumer to build out yet more capacity for supplying the world.

> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear

If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.

They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.
by irthomasthomas | 2026-01-15 11:09:37+00:00
I love this quote from Walmart describing loss leaders turned inside out.

A store, for example, might ... charge slightly more for several items in order to sell something else at a break-even price or even below cost.

Imagine,
Alice: "I think we can sell this plastic gizmo for 1000% markup"
Bob: "Wonderful, we can use those profits to lower prices on things people need!"
by mritchie712 | 2026-01-15 11:10:03+00:00
I made something called `ultraplan`. It's is a CLI tool that records multi-modal context (audio transcription via local Whisper, screenshots, clipboard content, etc.) into a timeline that AI agents like Claude Code can consume.

I have a claude skill `/record` that runs the CLI which starts a new recording. I debug, research, etc., then say "finito" (or choose your own stopword). It outputs a markdown file with your transcribed speech interleaved with screenshots and text that you copied. You can say other keywords like "marco" and it will take a screenshot hands-free.

When the session ends, claude reads the timeline (e.g. looks at screenshots) and gets to work.

I can clean it up and push to github if anyone would get use out of it.
Show HN: CharacterTest.app–Scientific character matching using Big Five and LLMs
by echoadam | 2026-01-15 11:10:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve always felt that traditional "Which character are you" quizzes were too static—relying on rigid branching logic and simple scoring that often yields predictable, low-accuracy results.

To solve this, I built CharacterTest.app. Instead of simple keyword matching, it uses an LLM-powered engine to perform semantic personality mapping. We decode user responses into the Big Five (OCEAN) and MBTI dimensions, then calculate proximity within a high-dimensional trait database covering 2,000+ characters across 100+ universes.

Technical Stack:

Framework: Next.js (App Router) with SSR for sub-second page loads and SEO.

AI Logic: Custom prompting architecture to prevent "personality bleed" and ensure multi-language consistency (supporting EN, JP, KR).

Privacy: No signup required for basic tests. I believe in "value first, data later."

I’m particularly curious about your thoughts on the mapping accuracy and the latency of the AI matching process. Would love to hear your feedback!
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-15 11:11:15+00:00
> I was genuinely interested. Not anymore, but I do strongly hope that there will be an alternative someday. Apparently not today.

Why are you no longer interested? The more eyes, the shallower the bugs, the more heads and hands, the sooner they're squashed and with that the the closer that alternative will be viable. It doesn't happen by itself, not back in the Netscape->Mozilla->Firefox days and not now. Run it besides your current browser for less critical tasks - like commenting here - and see how far you can take it. When it tells you it crashed - which for me has happened a few times, not the shell but the engine - see if you can recreate the crash and report it or - better still - submit a patch.
by ainiriand | 2026-01-15 11:11:51+00:00
And here I am, 2026, and one of my purposes for this year is to learn to write better, communicate more fluently, and convey my ideas in a more attractive way.

I do not think that these skills are so easily replaced; certainly the machine can do a lot, but if you acquire those skills yourself you shape your brain in a way that is definitely useful to you in many other aspects of life.

In my humble opinion we will be losing that from people, the upscaling of skills will be lost for sure, but the human upscaling is the real loss.
by heraldgeezer | 2026-01-15 11:12:15+00:00
>that is its always Iran/China bad

I mean, yes? They are.

Cold war never ended.

You are on the wests side or you are not. If you live in the west I hope you appreciate it.

The people of Iran are protesting due to horrible economics and infrastructure of the country. They dont even have water anymore. Yes, some nations are better to live in than others.
by ben_w | 2026-01-15 11:12:20+00:00
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?

Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.

Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.

If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.

> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?

No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.

If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.

> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?

Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.

Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.
by DeborahWrites | 2026-01-15 11:12:25+00:00
Yeah. AI might replace tech writers (just like it might replace anyone), but it won't be a GOOD replacement. The companies with the best docs will absolutely still have tech writers, just with some AI assistance.

Tech writing seems especially vulnerable to people not really understanding the job (and then devaluing it, because "everybody can write" - which, no, if you'll excuse the slight self-promotion but it saves me repeating myself https://deborahwrites.com/blog/nobody-can-write/)

In my experience, tech writers often contribute to UX and testing (they're often the first user, and thus bug reporter). They're the ones who are going to notice when your API naming conventions are out of whack. They're also the ones writing the quickstart with sales & marketing impact. And then, yes, they're the ones bringing a deep understanding of structure and clarity.

I've tried AI for writing docs. It can be helpful at points, but my goodness I would not want to let anything an AI wrote out the door without heavy editing.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-15 11:12:47+00:00
> Does it worry anyone else that this is all actually a government attack on anonymity? [...] Is this just stealth digital ID cards?

Of course this is the intention, or did anybody seriously believe that politicians deeply care about protecting the children? "But you have to think of the children ..." is just the argument silence the critics of these to-be surveillance laws.
by aeonfox | 2026-01-15 11:12:54+00:00
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear?

But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.

For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.
by lpribis | 2026-01-15 11:13:34+00:00
The Z80 instruction set lives on via the eZ80, Z180 and others which are binary compatible with the original Z80 instruction set. Unfortunately Zilog stopped making the 40 pin DIP package a couple years ago so yeah this specific board will be hard to source. You can still find them on gray market, mostly ones that have been desoldered from existing boards.

Even if you made a version of this board with the footprint changed to the QFP eZ80, it probably wouldn't work because the eZ80 has different memory mapping and clocking differences.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-15 11:13:44+00:00
>let us say they ll last 4 more years

Why not 50 more years if we're just making up numbers? I still have an IBM thinkpad from 2006 in my possession with everything working. I also see people with Macbooks from the era with the light up apple logo in the wild and at DJs.

>A PI would last a lot longer.

Because you say so? OK, sure.
Show HN: Built an AI turns security scan results into human-readable insights
by mrcloudxiao | 2026-01-15 11:14:39+00:00
We’re building Appcan, a security testing platform.
While running scans ourselves, we kept hitting the same problem: the reports were accurate, but hard to act on.

Most scan outputs are long lists of findings with severity labels, but very little context. You still have to decide what actually matters, what to fix first, and what can wait.

So we added an AI interpretation layer on top of existing scan results.

Instead of just showing raw findings, the AI reads the report as a whole and produces a short, structured summary explaining what the real risks are, why they matter, and where to focus first. It doesn’t re-scan anything or invent data; it only interprets what’s already there.

The goal isn’t to replace security engineers. It’s to reduce the cognitive load for teams who need to understand risk quickly and move forward.

We’re still early and learning. I’d love to hear from people who deal with security reports:
does this kind of AI-generated insight actually help, or does it create new problems?

Happy to answer questions and get feedback.
by vintermann | 2026-01-15 11:14:51+00:00
The social benefits do not come from alcohol. At the very best, they come from what we have learned to believe about alcohol.

Alcohol consumption follows a nasty curve. The average adult in the UK drinks about 11 liters of pure alcohol per year on average. Which is obviously a lot. But what's worse is, almost no one drinks 11 liters. The median is much lower, exactly how low is hard to find numbers on but as much as 1 in 5 Brits don't drink at all.

That means most of the alcohol is consumed by people who drink way too much by any sane definition.

If you own a pub, or an "off license", or arrange a music festival or pretty much any cultural venue, you know that in your bones. Staying afloat without selling alcohol, in particular without selling alcohol to people who drink far more than they should, is hopeless. You can't change things on your own. And even suggesting we should maybe work together to change will alienate your most profitable customers, who are understandably defensive about their drinking.

No, it's not a criminal enterprise, by definition. But you'll do better if you have a criminal's attitude - pick one: denial (consuming a lot yourself may help), rationalization ("if I didn't do it someone else would") or callousness. That's one reason pub chains do better.
Show HN: MindMapp – Mind mapping app built by AI in 12 hours
by ChopSticksPlz | 2026-01-15 11:15:53+00:00
This is a simple Mind Mapping web based app built with open weight LLMs with focus on using locally deployed models like Devstral Small and Seed OSS.

Created this to get more familliar with AI assisted coding. 99% of code was written by LLM, however thinking, testing and debugging was still mostly done by me.

App is open source, code is on GitHub: https://github.com/cepa/mindmapp
by afandian | 2026-01-15 11:16:06+00:00
Ok. I think you're misunderstanding that word as it was used. It's not the way I, and other responders, think the author intended it. They did not say 'exclusive benefit'.

A benefit of living in a house is that you don't get wet when it rains. If you didn't live in a house, you might get wet when it rained. But there are other things you could also do to not get wet, such as living in a tent.

It would not be reasonable to say "that's not a benefit of living in a house, because if I lived in a tent, or wore a rain-coat, I would not get wet".

The benefit of "staying dry" belongs to both "a house" and the superclass of "a sheltering structure".

If you defined benefits only on single dimensions, and only allowed them to belonging to level of abstraction at which they are exclusive, then you could argue that no language or technology has any benefit whatesover.

I think most people would think of "benefits of X" as an aggregation of individual specific benefits which may also belong to other aggregations.
by vhurg | 2026-01-15 11:16:18+00:00
Please don’t use 3rd party relays for your URLs. It’s bad enough to have your own server, domain, etc. as single points of failure and bottlenecks without adding a 3rd party into the mix, who either themselves or someone that takes over their domain later track users, randomly redirect your users to a malicious site, or just fail.

I know people have fond memories of long ago when they thought surely some big company’s URL shortener would never be taken down and learned from that when it later was.
by schnitzelstoat | 2026-01-15 11:16:19+00:00
> Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!

Wasn't this the reason behind different versions of the game for PAL and NTSC etc.? So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?
by drob518 | 2026-01-15 11:16:23+00:00
The best tech writers I have worked with don’t merely document the product. They act as stand-ins for actual users and will flag all sorts of usability problems. They are invaluable. The best also know how to start with almost no engineering docs and to extract what they need from 1-1 sit down interviews with engineering SMEs. I don’t see AI doing either of those things well.