MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trollbridge | 2026-01-14 13:22:50+00:00
Yet it is rare someone ever needs to write a PNG decoder.

In the unlikely event you did, you would be doing something quite special to not be using an off-the-shelf library. Would an LLM be able to do whatever that special thing would be?

It's true that quality doesn't matter for code that doesn't matter. If you're writing code that isn't important, then quality can slip, and it's true an LLM is good candidate for generating that code.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-14 13:22:57+00:00
The retaliation against individual government members is a new thing. This got started against Russia, where various individuals were sanctioned for financial crimes and then more recently over the war in Ukraine. But it's not something that historically one government has done to another in the past, pressure individual lawmakers over their votes.

It is however a massive alarm that the UK cannot afford to use US cloud services for anything governmental, and especially should not be signing any contracts with Palantir. Perhaps revoking the Palantir one should be used as leverage here? Or do we just admit to being a sort of damp version of Puerto Rico, not a state but subject to US governance?

Then there's the F35s, the ""independent"" (not) nuclear deterrent, and so on.
by nkurz | 2026-01-14 13:23:44+00:00
Welcome to HN! Your submission was dead, so I vouched for it. The topic seemed really interesting, so I upvoted it. And then I realized it was just a teaser. This doesn't break any rules, but was disappointing.

I clicked on it because I just tried an excellent Quebec Black Currant wine, Orsis by Domaine Ives Hill. Any chance you know what their particular technique is? https://iveshill.ca/en/product/orsis-2/
by ubermonkey | 2026-01-14 13:23:47+00:00
My favorite thing about Mornington Crescent is that, if you're not careful, you could end up "in spoon."

This post is 2/3 of the way through naming my three favorite fictional games! The 3rd member is, of course, 43-Man Squamish, the rules of which I cannot read without laughing so hard I weep.

https://madcoversite.com/quiz_olympics.html
by apublicfrog | 2026-01-14 13:23:49+00:00
As an Australian, I'm disappointed this isn't an article about the amount of fuel, margins, cars, etc at a servo (yanks call them "gas stations").

For anyone else confused (as the linked page doesn't describe it at all:

> Servo aims to empower developers with a lightweight, high-performance alternative for embedding web technologies in applications.

It appears to be a browser engine embeddable in other applications, I assume for delivering content designed to run in a browser for some reason.
by jvanderbot | 2026-01-14 13:23:52+00:00
Whoa whoa whoa let's not bring the accountants in!

Code isn't a liability b/c it costs money (though it does). Code is a liability like an unsafe / unproven bridge is a liability. It works fine until it doesn't - and at that point you're in trouble. Just b/c you can build lots of bridges now, doesn't mean each new bridge isn't also a risk. But if you gotta get somewhere now, conjuring bridges might be the way to go. Doesn't make each bridge not a liability (risky thing to rely on) or an asset (thing you can sell, use to build value)
by jellyotsiro | 2026-01-14 13:24:19+00:00
Thanks for testing this. The Bannon email from June 30, 2019 is in there (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029622). Good stress test idea.

Couple things happening:

Semantic search limitation: Less-famous names don't have strong embeddings, so it defaults to general connections rather than specific mentions
Keyword search gap: You're right — raw grep can catch exact names I'm missing
by wat10000 | 2026-01-14 13:24:55+00:00
Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?

If they do it, why don’t they preemptively block it instead? I know they don’t have anywhere near the manpower to find this stuff manually so it would have to be automated. If it’s automated then they could detect it as it’s happening and prevent it from being made in the first place.
by Zababa | 2026-01-14 13:25:17+00:00
I don't think appreciating art separated from the author is solipsistic, in fact I'd argue the opposite. Needing a human presence to engage with art is very human-centric. Or maybe that's due to your definition of art? I can be stunned by how beautiful a sunset is, the same way that I am by a painting, even if no human had a hand in that sunset. I can appreciate the cleverness of a gull stealing some bread from a duck the same way I can appreciate the cleverness of a specific music being used at a specific point in a movie. I can shiver at the brutality of humanity watching Night and Fog, just like I can shiver at the brutality of a praying mantis, eating alive a roach.

>Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe.

I think this is a good description of the process of how some art is created, but not all? Some art is a pursuit of "what is beautiful" rather than "what it means to be human" ie a sensory experience, some art is accidental, some art just is. For some art knowing the person behind is important, to me; for some not; for some it adds to the experience; for some it removes from it.

I would also highlight some small contradiction:

>I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?

>Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.

That seems to me a case of "the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel".
by throw0101d | 2026-01-14 13:25:35+00:00
>> The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to […]

> "Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?

If the GP wants to hold to his logic, then the US would be "extremely dependent" on Canada, given that 25% of all crude oil refined in the US comes from their northern neighbour:

* https://www.afpm.org/newsroom/blog/how-much-oil-does-united-...
by stephen_g | 2026-01-14 13:25:36+00:00
Probably the best way to get a feel short of actually trying it is to read the monthly reports on their blog [1], it still seems to be not ready to be a daily driver but I still follow blogs and videos about Servo and Ladybird because I’m hopeful we will have some more browser engine diversity someday!

1. https://servo.org/blog/
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-14 13:25:59+00:00
A good question.

As the ACLU notes, Obamas use of ICE is similar to Trumps. I believe if people are sincere, they should condemn either neither or both.

If they refuse to condemn Obama, but do condemn Trump, I do not believe they can make a good argument about compassion. That may change the conversation, which I think would lead to a more logical discussion.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-14 13:26:11+00:00
Huh? Who cares if the script is .sh, .bash, Makefile, Justfile, .py, .js or even .php? If it works it works, as long as you can run it locally, it'll be good enough, and sometimes it's an even better idea to keep it in the same language the rest of the project is. It all depends and what language a script is made in shouldn't be considered a "smell".
by conradfr | 2026-01-14 13:26:29+00:00
The minimum wage thing in France is true but it's so low for developers that it doesn't play any role in salary négociation.

Never seen any upper threshold except just what the company décides.

By law people with the same job and same qualification etc in a company must earn the same thing but that's theory more than practice, except maybe large companies.

Also being in an union or not does not change anything.
by mukulmunjal | 2026-01-14 13:27:02+00:00
I’m building an AI tool that conducts first-round interviews automatically to reduce manual screening for hiring teams.

Before taking this further, I’d really appreciate honest feedback on a short demo video of the product.

Things I’m hoping to learn:
• Is the problem and value clear?
• Does the solution make sense?
• Anything confusing or missing?

Demo video: https://www.tella.tv/video/interview-flow-ai-automating-cand...

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to share feedback.
by pixelpoet | 2026-01-14 13:27:05+00:00
Infamous means famous but for a bad reason, basically notorious. I've noticed a lot of people making this mistake recently, as well as people using ignorant to mean stupid. But I digress...

Many of us have that mode 13h stuff memorised too, including the 0x3c8 and 0x3c9 palette registers etc. And since 320x200 bytes is less than 65536 you don't need to do any segment stuff to access the full frame buffer.
by steveklabnik | 2026-01-14 13:27:21+00:00
That’s not how I would summarize what I wrote, for what it’s worth. My summary would be “the question is malformed, you need to first state what the boundaries are for comparison before you can make any conclusions.” I think this is an interesting thing to discuss because many people assume that the answer to “is x faster than C?” to be “no” for all values of X.
by apublicfrog | 2026-01-14 13:27:31+00:00
I think this is a very capitalistic lens you're viewing through. Open source projects (and the web in general) are traditionally not paid work or often seen as "work" at all. The web was built by people who just wanted to do a cool thing, and motivation of profit was much less common.

I challenge the concept of "paying people for the work that they do is a good thing", at least in this context. I don't think everything needs to be profitable and paid, people can just make cool things for love and passion.
by nicoburns | 2026-01-14 13:27:31+00:00
Night and day better than 3 years ago. Website like github work properly now. But still a ways to go to catch up with top-tier browsers in both compatibility and performance.

(if testing make sure you enable the "experimental features" using the button in the top-right
- the project is far too conservative about this and lots of stuff doesn't work without them)
by billy99k | 2026-01-14 13:28:13+00:00
This wasn't when he got dropped. He got dropped in 2016 when he said he supported Trump. In an interview on CNN shortly after this, he talks about how all of his corporate gigs dried up and newspapers tried to cancel him. He also later talked about Venture capitalists dropping him as well because of this.

"it was due to DEI (in the 80s!)"

DEI used to be known as affirmative action in those days. I see so many people try to claim that it never happened, when many of us around during this time experienced it.

"The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white"."

While I don't see a problem with this, this was a fuck you to corporations and newspapers that dropped him merely because of his political opinions, an inhumane and bigoted tactic by liberals. This is one of the reasons why I always respected him. He was willing to fight for his beliefs and never backed down.
by skajsjshs | 2026-01-14 13:28:24+00:00
My companies been pretty turbulent since COVID so I’ve had to do a lot of near shore and off shore hiring. “You get what you pay for” still mostly holds true. There’s a lot of arbitrage in junior devs, but good senior talent has mostly realized they can get a lot more.

I can’t imagine ever working with India, etc again though. If you’re already eating the time zone cost Eastern Europe is much better.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-14 13:28:38+00:00
> So why then does the bank of England have and need the right to print as many USD as they need, whenever they want.*

The BoE does not even "print" the GBP (except paper/coins through the mint), never mind the USD. Money in the UK, like most countries, is created by banks through credit issuance (loans, mortgages):

* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...
by miohtama | 2026-01-14 13:28:43+00:00
Also what has changed is that European countries came up with extraterritorial laws and started to fine the US companies and want to have saying how they run their business. GDPR was the first step, and was still reasonable, but now there are several censorship laws. Most notable UK and Italy, where the latter wants to nuke anything they say from global DNS in 15 minutes without due process.
by ben_w | 2026-01-14 13:28:44+00:00
Depends on the context; if you are presently using x kWh of electricity for non-heating plus 2x kWh of gas for heating, your options for electrical heating are either to 3x your electricity demand by "upgrading" to resistive, or 1.5x (or whatever) your demand by upgrading to a heatpump.

There's other stuff you can also do, but costs are all over the place, e.g. my 110 ish sqm house in Berlin is so well insulated (and has heat pump) that even while it's snowing outside it's hot enough indoors to be naked, for an electricity bill that's lower than that of my 37 square meter apartment in the UK, despite German electricity prices being much higher.
by bodge5000 | 2026-01-14 13:28:50+00:00
Thats assuming a near 100% success rate from the agent, meaning it's not something he needs to supervise at all. It also assumes that the agent is able to take on the task completely, meaning he can go do something else which would normally occupy the time of another engineer, rather than simply doing something else within the same task (from the sounds of things, it was helping with debugging, not necessarily actually solving the bug). Finally, and most importantly, the 20% reduction in workforce assumes it can do this consistently well across any task. Saving 10h on one task is very different from saving 10h on every task.

Assuming all the stars align though and all these things come true, a 20% reduction in workforce costs is significant, but again, you have to compare that to the cost of investment, which is reported to be close to a trillion. They'll want to see returns on that investment, and I'm not sure a 20% cut (which, as above, is looking like a best case scenario) in workforce lives up to that.
by stavarotti | 2026-01-14 13:29:25+00:00
Most of what I've been reading on either side of the argument is reductive. It's possible to have a take based on one's perspective and experience but it's impossible (at this time) to generalize things more broadly. I think what most people feel is multi-faceted: efficiency expectations from "leaders", job change inevitability (perceived or real), economic impact (should things not go well), loss of identity (am I a programmer, engineer, manager of things?), and several others. The discussions on the multiplicative effect of LLMs are being framed as a false dichotomy when it's far more complicated and nuanced.
by pron | 2026-01-14 13:29:28+00:00
The question is what do we mean by "a fast language"? We could mean it to be how fast the fastest code that a performance expert in that language, with no resource constraints, could write. Or, we can restrict it to "idiomatic" code. Or we can say that a fast language is the one where an average programmer is most likely to produce fast code with a given budget (in which case probably none of the languages mentioned here are among the fastest).
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-14 13:29:31+00:00
Read this.

https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/border-patrol-wa...

Then google ‘Obama ICE ACLU’.

The search results alone will show you that Obama did indeed act very much like Trump. The cited paper alone tells you this.

If you are sincere about this, I urge you to look at it and give it fair consideration. You simply cannot excuse Obama while condemning Trump.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2026-01-14 13:29:32+00:00
> Oh, I see.

No, you don't.

Because of the SMI/ACPI/Intel Management Engine/AMD Secure Technology/UEFI, and optionally AMT-complex, where usually only parts of can be deactivated partially, but never all of it.

It's actually more bad than the above mentioned ARM-stuff, which is misinformed(maybe because of raspberry piish broadcomisms, or locked down dumbphones), because on ARM, you either can disable that stuff, or even can run your own instead.

https://www.trustedfirmware.org/projects/op-tee/

https://github.com/OP-TEE

https://docs.kernel.org/next/tee/op-tee.html
by lompad | 2026-01-14 13:29:33+00:00
Generally, with the regular in-IDE agents you have the ability to easily intervene, correct and live-check. Considering the high fail rate of agents (depending on software complexity of course), that's required if you want to get anything done and not be slowed down by it.

Otherwise you'd always have to context switch, consider which git state it's actually working from, etc. - rather than just letting the code directly before you change in your IDE.

It's significantly lower cognitive load and has a higher success rate, in my experience.

But, of course: Highly depends on the software being written and the general code infrastructure.
by ajross | 2026-01-14 13:30:34+00:00
> struct field alignment/padding isn't part of the C spec iirc

It's part of the ABI spec. It's true that C evolved in an ad hoc way and so the formal rigor got spread around to a bunch of different stakeholders. It's not true that C is a lawless wasteland where all behavior is subject to capricious and random whims, which is an attitude I see a lot in some communities.

People write low level software to deal with memory layout and alignment every day in C, have for fourty years, and aren't stopping any time soon.
by r_p4rk | 2026-01-14 13:30:47+00:00
What are we doing here bud? Do you think these situations are remotely comparable? The UK legislated against the automated creation of CSAM, and sexual imagery of non-consenting women. You think banning UK officials from entering the USA for that is comparable to stopping a blatant racist (author of "The Great Replacement", rofl) entering the UK? Notably, not a French official btw.

Maybe you have problems with the UK exercising the right to control borders? :)
by ck2 | 2026-01-14 13:30:50+00:00
Not sure if this is possible but it should be known there is a COMPLETE INDEX to the original Epstein Files

(not including the new millions upon millions of documents and photos)

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.47...

from a 2017 FOIA they had to provide it

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-08/here-s...

Might be possible for machine-learning to determine what is missing?

(which is basically 99% missing as we already know less than 1% released)
by wolvesechoes | 2026-01-14 13:31:02+00:00
> You're really out of your depth

Quite funny from someone suggesting that being very into Jungian thought gives you some credibility when it comes down to Nietzsche.

> particularly becoming a child again, rather than living via your children, who will eventually no longer be children and then leave you.

Please, just go and read the original. It should make it clear for you. For now your "interpretation" of Nietzsche is equivalent to New Age take on Buddhism.
by cle | 2026-01-14 13:31:22+00:00
This comes up every time this conversation occurs.

Yes, PG can theoretically handle just about anything with the right configuration, schema, architecture, etc.

Finding that right configuration is not trivial. Even dedicated frameworks like Graphile struggle with it.

My startup had the exact same struggles with PG and did the same migration to BullMQ bc we were sick of fiddling with it instead of solving business problems. We are very glad we migrated off of PG for our work queues.
by saberd | 2026-01-14 13:31:42+00:00
We use pgmq with the pgmq-go client, and it has clients in many different languages, it's amazing.
The queues persist on disk and visualizations of queues can easily be made with grafana or just pure sql requests.
The fact that the queues lives in the same database as all the other data is also a huge benefit if the 5-15ms time penalty is not an issue.
Tell HN: When launching products who/where your audience is matters
by asim | 2026-01-14 13:31:46+00:00
I was recently using a new dev product. Very cool. But when I ran into a problem, I got stuck and no one was awake in my timezone 1. because small west coast team 2. no support on this side of the world. It's inevitable. Fits into the do things that don't scale model. If I was more enthusiastic I'd fix the problem using an LLM and make a PR so they wake up and see it, then seek out a job offer! But I'm not, and I'm too old, and probably not the right audience anymore. But it highlights to me, know where/who your audience are and why it matters. It shouldn't matter if I drop from the product. I'm a developer but maybe I won't pay, or maybe I won't scale, or maybe just being in the wrong timezone is problematic. But the key, don't let that discourage you. Keep fighting your good fight. It's a lesson for us all. Thought I'd share.
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-14 13:32:17+00:00
Correct, this is the problem that the Tories failed to identify when they started to reduce fossil fuel usage. It was a political decision taken to shore up support with people who ended up moving to the Lib Dems anyway (and everything unravelled anyway with Brexit for Cameron, who was probably the biggest proponent of this...Lib Dems incidentally also played a key role in blocking nuclear).

Comparing the prices of these two things does not tell you what the eventual cost is going to be.

To explain the context: the UK had to cap electricity prices because costs have risen so much, government is paying huge subsidies to providers, minister made bombastic claims in the last election that he could fix everything, nothing has worked out, he has now set up a range of quangos to employ his friends (reducing quangos was one of the promises in the election) who are now briefing the press aggressively with other lobbyists that costs are going to drop...despite the government having no political ability to do anything that will reduce costs (the latest briefing is that new gas plants are too expensive, an obviously misleading comparison on many levels).

UK electricity prices are extraordinarily high, the political context is that you have to say this will reduce them. This is obviously not going to lead prices to fall but the context has to be the same.

The other question is why we are doing this if this isn't going to actually cause prices to fall? As with many similar problems in the UK: too many people making too much money. Government is now subsidizing retail electricity prices to pay for private sector investment in high-cost technology that guarantees a high ROI. Most of the people quoted in the government's presser are lobbyists, as I said above a cottage industry of quangos has now sprung up surrounding Miliband. There is no way back.

In terms of macro, it is definitely quite interesting because the last few years of this have essentially made it impossible for the UK to operate as a modern industrial economy. How do you maintain employment with essentially no industrial function? Energy prices are so high commercially that some services businesses are actually struggling too. It is incredible employment and wages are so high in the UK (although the level of economic support the government is providing, particularly in services, is huge).