MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timeon | 2026-01-05 08:19:51+00:00
> I remember when PHP 4 was a thing. jQuery was new and shiny. Sites were built with tables, not divs. Dreamweaver felt like a life hack. Designs were sliced in Photoshop. Databases lived in phpMyAdmin.

> It probably didn’t feel like it at the time, but looking back, those were simpler days.

jQuery was bloat, there were others like MooTools. People idealize tables but it was not just grid, it was often used as hacks as well, like weird offsets, etc. Dreamweaver produced mess. Sliced designs? "This site is optimized for 800x600"

Not saying current state is good. I just find interesting how nostalgia can distort memories even in tech.
by mirsadm | 2026-01-05 08:20:11+00:00
You're overestimating people's willingness to write code even if they don't have to do it. Most people just don't want to do it even if AI made is easy to do so. Not sure who you're talking to but most people I know that aren't programmers have zero interest in writing their own software even if they could do it using prompts only.
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-01-05 08:20:36+00:00
I've had one job like this where they were desperate for a solution and after months of searching couldn't find anybody to do the work. I just happened to have the intersection of several skills they needed and be available. It also helped that they were losing a lot of money every day they didn't have a solution.

On the other hand I've grown to be wary of customers who push for a fixed price. They are usually doing that because they know something that you don't.
by reincarnate0x14 | 2026-01-05 08:20:46+00:00
I had a pre-teen death rivalry with another kid over Samurai Showdown. I was the blue tuberculosis guy and he was the long haired samurai, and we'd meet Tuesday-Friday afternoons to burn quarters killing each other. At one point the owners used toy finger-handcuffs to tie us to the machine until one of us won. There was pizza!

I've always wondered what happened to him.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-05 08:20:47+00:00
> He claimed that the Trump team couldn’t let anyone in Congress know about the Maduro mission ahead of time, for fear of leaks. And that this caution extended even to the “Gang of Eight” in Congress. These are the select, bipartisan assemblage of leaders who are supposed to be briefed on the most sensitive security matters—and who (in contrast to the Trump team) have had over the decades zero cases of leaking sensitive information before military operations.

Rubio also claimed elsewhere that they couldn’t say anything because it wasn’t planned ahead of time and that a bunch of things lined up with a small window. A couple weeks ago he told Congress that involvement in Venezuela wasn’t about regime change. He’s lying at every turn. But he speaks in a tone that makes low information people think Rubio is credible.

Let’s be plain about this: these people have assumed authoritarian dictatorship above America - not just Venezuela. They’re breaking American law by invading another country and deposing its rulers without congressional approval. If this isn’t a constitutional crisis I’m not sure what is.
by _delirium | 2026-01-05 08:21:05+00:00
There are many unresolved gray areas around what exactly the 4th amendment permits in the way of what United States v. Knotts called "dragnet-type law enforcement practices". Knotts suggested they might not be permitted, even if they were made up of permissible individual parts, but didn't elaborate. More recent case law has held, for example, that cell phone companies turning over large quantities of records is a 4th amendment search requiring a warrant, even if they do it voluntarily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States). Most other types of dragnets haven't been litigated enough to have solid caselaw on their boundaries afaik.

I don't know if it's likely a court will do anything about this particular program, but from what I've read I don't think 4th amendment scholars think this area is at all settled.
by threeducks | 2026-01-05 08:23:40+00:00
Could you explain how? I can't seem to figure it out.

DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp has 37B active parameters, GLM-4.7 and Kimi K2 have 32B active parameters.

Lets say we are dealing with Q4_K_S quantization for roughly half the size, we still need to move 16 GB 30 times per second, which requires a memory bandwidth of 480 GB/s, or maybe half that if speculative decoding works really well.

Anything GPU-based won't work for that speed, because PCIe 5 provides only 64 GB/s and $2000 can not afford enough VRAM (~256GB) for a full model.

That leaves CPU-based systems with high memory bandwidth. DDR5 would work (somewhere around 300 GB/s with 8x 4800MHz modules), but that would cost about twice as much for just the RAM alone, disregarding the rest of the system.

Can you get enough memory bandwidth out of DDR4 somehow?
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-05 08:24:13+00:00
This article is a bit abstract for me, although I think I agree with its premise.

> The mature aesthetic values coherence over novelty, proportion over impact, durability over statement.

I see this in the Venezuela situation. Today Trump may enrich himself and his family or friends by stealing Venezuelan oil. Millions of Americans will support him in this. What happens ten years from now? None of them know or care. But the destruction of America’s reputation will have permanent consequences.

Also, I wonder who the author thinks are mature civilizations? China? India? Japan? And what is the playbook to make America mature - when its citizens don’t seem to care about this?
by vkou | 2026-01-05 08:24:15+00:00
> is not the same as a system that supports the lawful arrest

That is not the system that the US has had since 2025, and the executive has made it very clear that it is not the system that it wants the US to have.

Meanwhile, SCOTUS has made it very clear that nothing this executive does will have any consequences for it.

Rule of law is a fairy tale when ICE can snag anyone they want off the street and throw them into some CECOT torture pit.

Rule of law is a fairy tale when the executive disregards direct judicial orders.
by KnorrFG | 2026-01-05 08:24:36+00:00
- Location: Germany
- Remote: Yes (within Europe)
- Willing to relocate: No
- Email: knorr.felix<at>gmx.de
- CV: https://felix-knorr.net/assets/cv.pdf
- Github: https://github.com/knorrfg
- Technologies: Rust, C, C++, Python, Linux, Machine Learning

I currently am an embedded engineer, but I have a background in machine learning. I'm looking for a job where I can write Rust, and that's not just simple backends. Ideally something research-adjacent.
by sph | 2026-01-05 08:25:33+00:00
Nothing stops you from having upward growing stacks in RISC-V, for example, as there are no dedicated stack instructions.

Instead of

addi sp, sp, -16
sd a0, 0(sp)
sd a1, 8(sp)

Do:

addi sp, sp, 16
sd a0, -8(sp)
sd a1, -16(sp)
by 20kHz | 2026-01-05 08:29:04+00:00
> But unfortunately, looking at others is seen as being a weirdo

No it’s simpler than that:

1) sitting alone - you’re a weirdo

2) sitting doing nothing public, staring off into space like you’re a zen master - no, you’re a weirdo

3) blogposting how you sat alone in a public space for 30 minutes and how this is an “unbearable joy” - do I need to spell it out?

This person needs help. They are having an episode. If someone has gone so far as to have this level of emotional outburst by leaving their phone at home, there’s deeper issues to unpack.

For the rest of us, sitting down at the cafe to have a nice drink and something to eat while we look at the cars and foot traffic going by is a perfectly normal activity.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-05 08:30:04+00:00
Every switch that changes the language semantics creates a separate language. If you have n such switches, your compiler is supporting n x n languages. I've also had troubles writing portable C code with all warnings enabled as different compilers contradicted each other on what was acceptable.

I tried pretty hard to make D a warning-less language, but still some crept in grump grump.

Have fun with this one:

for (int i = 0; i < end; ++i);
foo(i);

One of the best programmers I know came up to me with this loop and told me my C compiler was broken because the loop was only executed once. I pointed at the ; and you can guess the rest.

I added a warning for that in the C compiler, and for D simply disallowed it. I've noticed that some C compilers have since added a warning for that as well. The C folks should just make it illegal.

I've also fixed printf in D so that:

char* p;
printf("%d\n", p);

gives an error message, and the right format to use for `p`. It was a little thing, but it sure found a lot of incorrect formats in my code.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-05 08:30:11+00:00
Google has done Google-scale traffic analysis and determined that even a 100ms delay has noticeable impacts on user retention. If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, over 50% of visitors will bail. To say that there is no payoff for optimization is categorically incorrect.

The incentives are there. Web developers are just, on average, extremely bad at their jobs. The field has been made significantly more accessible than it was in decades past, but the problem with accessibility is that it enables people who have no fundamental understanding of programming to kitbash libraries together like legos and successfully publish websites. They can't optimize even if they tried, and the real problem for the rest of us is they can't secure user data even if they try.
by zkmon | 2026-01-05 08:30:22+00:00
> As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm

In some villages, where plenty of stone is available, people used it for everything - roof slabs, pillars, walls, flooring, water storage bowls etc. Also, villages which had plenty of wood around, they used it for everything.

As techies, we say there is an app for everything, or there is a web-technology for everything. When you have a hammer in hand, everything looks like a nail.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-05 08:30:23+00:00
There's no target. Someone is just experimenting with Claude. 2026 gonna be year of slop. And note this project is not FOSS. (Not sure what author is thinking. Don't they know nowadays someone can code launder their code through Claude?)

P.S. The English-to-AST though could be useful to other projects that may want natural-ish language input without having to resort to a LLM. E.g. a modify CSV tool in natural language like one posted yesterday.
by judofyr | 2026-01-05 08:32:34+00:00
Very cool project! Always happy to see more work around static analysis.

However, looking at the recent commits it doesn't quite look like the most solid foundation: https://github.com/shuaimu/rusty-cpp/commit/480491121ef9efec...

fn is_interior_mutability_type(type_name: &str) -> bool {
type_name.starts_with("rusty::Cell<") ||
type_name.starts_with("Cell<") ||
type_name.starts_with("rusty::RefCell<") ||
type_name.starts_with("RefCell<") ||
// Also check for std::atomic which has interior mutability
type_name.starts_with("std::atomic<") ||
type_name.starts_with("atomic<")
}

… which then 30 minutes later is being removed again because it turns out to be completely dead code: https://github.com/shuaimu/rusty-cpp/commit/84aae5eff72bb450...

There's also quite a lot of dead code. All of these warnings are around unused variable, functions, structs, fields:

warning: `rusty-cpp` (bin "rusty-cpp-checker") generated 90 warnings (44 duplicates)
by lostlogin | 2026-01-05 08:34:24+00:00
> In both systems the law is being carefully followed to support inhumane goals

I’m not sure it is though, there are plenty of headlines about judicial orders being disregarded. This last few weeks it has been the required release of the Epstein papers, though that has been railroaded by a conveniently timed attack on a neighbour.

There are plenty of other examples.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-05 08:34:31+00:00
There is not much doubt that this was a crime. The question is what will be done about it and the answer is 'probably nothing'. Every time there is a holiday, a long weekend or some other period when congress and/or the senate are not in session Trump pulls some stunt. That's a well established pattern by now, be it the demolition of the Whitehouse, bombing some foreign country or now kidnapping a head of state.
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-01-05 08:35:18+00:00
>It's all 100% about company selection.

I found the more I got paid the better I was treated. I had one client I was doing work for under my previous employment. When I left I charged triple what my previous employer had been charging. Not only did they not bat an eyelid about the price but they started treating me better as well.

The worst customers were those working on slim margins, for a while I was doing a lot of work for component distributors. They were terrible to work for.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-05 08:36:25+00:00
> Where does the initial iris data come from?

Visa photos. DACA applications [1]. Basically anyone who trusted the government at any point in the past.

It won't catch cartel members. But cocaine seems to be the one thing whose price this administration has driven down [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/mexico-drugs-cartel-osegu... "Cocaine prices have fallen by nearly half to around $60 to $75 a gram compared with five years ago"
by yetihehe | 2026-01-05 08:37:25+00:00
> what would a normal intelligent human do in this situation?

Problem is that this requires testing what actual "normal intelligent human" would do, because very often programmer has other ideas and UI/UX people have other ideas.

> A human would copy every file it could, maintaining a list of issues.

How do you know? From your idea what should be done instead of current version? I would not do it like you said.

Also, there are many reasons for transfer not succeeding and depending on a reason why transfer didn't succeed, you should make different decisions. sometimes reasons are not predictable by a program (a new file transfer method over pidgeons was transparently added to the system and "carrier attacked by predator" was not included in "how to handle this reason").
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-05 08:38:03+00:00
> we just pulled off the most high profile abduction of a geopolitical rival in history

We literally did the same thing in 1989 [1]. Russia planned to do it to Zelensky when they first invaded.

None of this makes it okay. But it's hyperbolic to say it's unprecedented, even in U.S. history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-05 08:38:40+00:00
> Depending on the crime, most people would agree that face/gait recognition is warranted, for example in case of murder or rape

That's the problem with dragnet surveillance. People are okay with it for extreme cases. And then the scope creeps.

Free or secure. You can't have both. And you usually can't even have just the latter.
by xnorswap | 2026-01-05 08:39:27+00:00
I really dislike this pattern:

try
{
id = int.Parse(inputId);
}
catch (Exception ex) when (ex is FormatException or OverflowException)
{
throw new InvalidOperationException("DeactivateUser failed at: parse id", ex);
}

Where all you're doing when you catch an exception is throwing it in a more generic way. You could just let the FormatException or OverflowException bubble up, so the parent can handle those differently if needed. If you want to hide that implementation detail, then you should still consider throwing more specific types of exception for different errors. Just throwing InvalidOperationException for everything feels lazy.

You've gone out your way to destroy the information being passed up when using exceptions, to demonstrate the value in having error types.

It would be far more conventional to also provide a `TryDeactivateUser` function that cannot throw an exception. The article does note this, but hand-waves it away.

I'm not against Result types, but I don't find this article entirely convincing.
by 20kHz | 2026-01-05 08:40:49+00:00
That neuroscience bit sounds like complete bullshit, but your annoyance is justified and I think shared by others in this thread.

There are many walks of life and some people are wired in ways that annoy us when they present themselves, or talk about themselves as this individual has. It is not only to elevate the mundane to the realm of the sublime, rather it’s to beat a profound lesson of life into us by proxy of whoever the characters are. Notice the shift from the friends, to I, to “you”. Notice the use of “you” in the blog post. You are being lectured. You need to be taught things that this individual just discovered, because you are clueless and they are wise. That is why you feel annoyed.

Whenever you hear someone using the royal “we” to lecture you, you’re always welcome to ask “who is we?”, because it’s appropriate to understand who is actually being discussed. This individual thinks that we are clueless and they are carrying the stone tablets to teach us. They have a long way to go.
by ssdspoimdsjvv | 2026-01-05 08:42:04+00:00
Is the consensus that software will be both developed and tested by machines? Will there still be a human in the loop? I hope at least some testing or approval will still be done by people, otherwise the software we use everyday will become even worse than it is now. Unless we envision that machines will also be the only end users of the software. At that point there hopefully will be an interface that allows for immediate reporting and fixing of defects.
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-05 08:43:21+00:00
Thank you for your insightful comment! I appreciate your enthusiasm for this innovative approach. You've highlighted several key strengths of this design:

- Pragmatic syntax choice: The comment-based annotation system is indeed a clever solution that minimizes friction for adoption

- Avoiding past pitfalls: By learning from previous safety proposals, this approach sidesteps the intrusive syntax issues that hindered earlier efforts

- Incremental adoption pathway: The ability to gradually introduce safety guarantees without requiring a complete rewrite is a game-changer for legacy codebases

- Democratizing compiler expertise: Leveraging LLMs to tackle problems that traditionally required specialized knowledge is an exciting development

Overall, this represents a promising step forward in bridging the gap between C++ and Rust's safety guarantees. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in production environments!
by danielfalbo | 2026-01-05 08:43:55+00:00
Maybe off-topic but,

If you're not familiar with the CMU DB Group you might want to check out their eccentric teaching style [1].

I absolutely love their gangsta intros like [2] and pre-lecture dj sets like [3].

I also remember a video where he was lecturing with someone sleeping on the floor in the background for some reason. I can't find that video right now.

Not too sure about the context or Andy's biography, I'll research that later, I'm even more curious now.

[1] youtube.com/results?search_query=cmu+database

[2] youtu.be/dSxV5Sob5V8

[3] youtu.be/7NPIENPr-zk?t=85
by framapotari | 2026-01-05 08:44:45+00:00
I find it interesting how you take your experience and generalize it by saying "you" instead of "I". This is how I read your post:

> I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. I don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where I'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If I have a half an hour, I tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then I continue when I have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because I can't make myself stop.)

Reading it like this makes it obvious to me that what you find fun is not necessarily what other people find fun. Which shouldn't come as a surprise. Describing your experience and preferences as something more is where the water starts getting muddy.
by MohskiBroskiAI | 2026-01-05 08:46:25+00:00
Deepfake - when you cannot believe your own eyes. Or your ears.

A sad time for humanity. Skepticism has turned into paranoia.

Before we were open to ideas. Now we're watching for vaporware. Worried about being scammed.

One day - the people choosing to abuse these technologies will be faced with one reality.

You can't over milk the cow. We got a whole generation watching for lies so hard that complete truth is being rejected out of hand.

That's the problem with us. We always seem to swing from one extreme to another.

What do you think?
by xeonmc | 2026-01-05 08:47:10+00:00
IMO DeltaChat is better thought of as “chat tunnel disguised over email” and works best when there is no consideration made for traditional mailbox compatibility, since its killer feature is inbox-fluidity due to only using them as dumb relays and so you can change/add multiple randomly generated fallback addresses for the same identity without being tied to any one inbox.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-05 08:49:19+00:00
No they don't, you cannot use C in Android outside the NDK, and even on the NDK you need to go through JNI for 80% of the OS APIs.

This is the only set of APIs exposed via a C API to Android applications,

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

You can argue that JNI technically is exposed via C, yeah if you ignore the JVM/ART semantics that go along with it.

Likewise on Windows, technically you can use bare bones structs with function pointers to deal with COM, use CLR COM APIs to call .NET via reflection, and a similar story with WinRT, but it is not going to be fun, and then there is the whole type libraries that have to be manually created.
by nosianu | 2026-01-05 08:49:19+00:00
See Arab spring. It does not matter how many people go out in the street, unless the elites voluntarily give up control, as happened in East Germany (which I experienced). The only thing that matters is if influential parts of the elites want a change too.

> You can’t kill/arrest 25% of your population.

Unnecessary.

> That is why Russia/China/etc are so scared to let any protests begin

Especially Russia's issue is that lots of the elites want change too. But you also underestimate that what the population also does not want is a repeat of 1990s chaos, and Russian weakness.
by jaccola | 2026-01-05 08:49:22+00:00
Glad someone is rational. I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.

This AI fear wave has outed that many people have not even the most basic grasp of economics, or the ability to carry a thought to its natural conclusion.

For example, I'll often see people espousing: "there will be no work left, better get rich now or you're screwed!". What's the point in getting rich if there will be no work left? Money is merely a means to an end; in this world with no work everyone will have the ends (goods and services) for free, or else goods and services will still have value and therefore jobs will still exist.

Another equally silly argument "only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable".

I've never seen completely verifiable software, but let's presume it exists! If software engineering can be replaced (or some large part of it) I will simply say to my LLM "please make me a piece of software that replaces my accountant/lawyer/...", for that matter I could just as equally say "please make me manufacturing software for a perfect humanoid robot and a plumber/bricklayer/electrician protocol". LLMs cannot do this? Then software engineers will move to solving these problems. If LLMs can do it, then the entire economy will be meaningless and Dario/Sam/Elon/etc... will be no richer than you or I.

But, as you say, LLMs are not close to being able to do any of this (and yes... I use Claude Code)