MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lerc | 2026-01-24 17:12:06+00:00
>the chance to think deeply about the problem, perhaps notice analogies with other processes, or more general or more efficient ways to solve the problem, perhaps even why it was necessary at all. Those are the tasty bits of the work, a little something just for me, not for my employer.

You should be aiming to use AI in a way that the work it does gives you more time to work on these things.

I can see how people could end up in an environment where management expects AI use is expected to simply increase the speed of exactly what you do right now. That's when people expect the automobile to behave like a faster horse. I do not envy people placed in that position. I don't think that is how AI should be used though.

I have been working on test projects using AI. These are projects where there is essentially no penalty for failure, and I can explore the bounds of what they offer. They are no panacea, people will be writing code for a long while yet, but the bounds of their capability are certainly growing. Working on ideas with them I have been able to think more deeply about what the code was doing and what it was should do. Quite often a lot of the deep thinking in programming is gaining a greater understanding of what the problem really is. You can gain a benefit from using AI to ask for a quick solution simply to get a better understanding of why a naive implementation will not work. You don't need to use any of that code at all, but it can easily show you why something is not as simple as it seems at first glance.

I might post a show HN in a bit of a test project I started over the Christmas break. It's a good example of what I mean. I did it in Claude Artifacts instead of using Claude Code just to see how well I can develop something non-trivial in this manner. There have been certainly been periods of frustration trying to get Claude to understand particular points, but some of those areas of confusion came from my presumptions of what the problem was and how it differed to what the problem actually was. That is exactly the insight that you refer to as the tasty bits.

I think there is some adaptation needed to how you feel about the process of working on a solution. When you are stuck on a problem and are trying things that should make it work, the work can absorb you in the process. AI can diminish this, but I think some of that is precisely because it is giving you more time to think about the hard stuff, and that hard stuff is, well, hard.
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-24 17:12:22+00:00
SQLite emphatically warns against concurrent writes. It is not designed for that.

I'm seeing these numbers on my current scratch benchmark:

- Events append to a 10M+ record table (~4+ GiB database).

- Reads are fetched from a separate computed table, which is trigger-updated from the append-only table.

- WAL-mode ON, Auto-vacuum ON

{:dbtype "sqlite",
:auto_vacuum "INCREMENTAL",
:connectionTestQuery "PRAGMA journal_mode;",
:preferredTestQuery "PRAGMA journal_mode;",
:dataSourceProperties
{:journal_mode "WAL",
:limit_worker_threads 4,
:page_size 4096,
:busy_timeout 5000,
:enable_load_extension true,
:foreign_keys "ON",
:journal_size_limit 0,
:cache_size 15625,
:maximumPoolSize 1,
:synchronous "NORMAL"}},

- 1,600 sequential (in a single process) read-after-write transactions, append-only, no batching.

- With a separate writer process (sequential), and concurrently, two reader processes, I'm seeing 400+ append transactions/second (into the append-only table, no batching), and a total of 41,000 reads per second, doing `select *` on the trigger-updated table.

My schema is (deliberately) poor --- most of it is TEXT.

(edit: add clarifying text)
by cxr | 2026-01-24 17:12:46+00:00
Your argument is bad, and you should feel, if not bad, then at least very silly. There is an HTML5 standard.

It was developed by browser makers with input from the community, published by WHATWG, and begrudgingly accepted by W3C in 2014. That's a fact. The HTML5 Recommendation exists.

That those people went on to continue to develop the standards further, as standards bodies are wont to do, and that they call their current work the "Living Standard" doesn't erase that fact, any more than the W3C's publication of the third edition of the PNG standard last summer means that earlier editions "don't exist".
by orian | 2026-01-24 17:13:49+00:00
I’ve once got a contract to write tiny system that had to integrate with 20-30y old system, then written in some version of c# / Microsoft framework, it was only speaking xml. I had problem with timestamp, cause depending on some internal state, it was returned different way. I had to go and read over 100pages of date+time in xml spec and implement it. Also, found that a lib they were using had bugs, so my lib had to deal with it.

I hate xml.
by servercobra | 2026-01-24 17:14:13+00:00
Same, it's so good for these little things. And once you start adding rules and context for the "how to add the change/feature flags", etc you get that 3 paragraphs down. Now our head of product is able to fire off small changes instead of asking a dev, making them context switch, etc. Devs still review but the loop is so much shorter.
by renewiltord | 2026-01-24 17:14:26+00:00
Something I found disappointing is discovering what plagiarists the ancient greats were. Take Paradise Lost for instance. The entire thing is unoriginal and fan fiction derivative work of the Bible (itself questionable)

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste…

Ummm, excuse me. This is literally the garden of Eden. In fact this idiot plagiarizes the name too. He actually calls this Eden. wtf. Fake as fuck. And people call this copy-paste artist who cites literally zero of his sources a “poet”.
by jtbayly | 2026-01-24 17:14:49+00:00
Actually, you're allowing a much higher percentage of cheaters if you read the paper. They optimized to avoid false accusations. It's only ~45-75% accurate at detecting AI writing. It's closer to 90% accurate at detecting human writing. Half the cheaters get through, and you still fail 10 percent of the people who didn't cheat.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-24 17:15:05+00:00
I don't understand this, it's actually baffling. Why was the question being asked to begin with let along a whole post being made about this? If they have a legal request from a law enforcement agency of any country they operate in, they either comply or see executives in prison.

Is how bitlocker works not well known perhaps? I don't think it's a secret. The whole schtick is that you get to manage windows computers in a corporate fleet remotely, that includes being able to lock-out or unlock volumes. The only other way to do that would be for the person using the device to store the keys somewhere locally, but the whole point is you don't trust the people using the computers, they're employees. If they get fired, or if they lose the laptop, them being the only people who can unlock the bitlocker volume is a very bad situation. Even that aside, the logistics of people switching laptops, help desk getting a laptop and needing to access the volume and similar scenarios have to be addressed. Nothing about this and how bitlocker works is new.

Even in the safer political climates of pre-2025, you're still looking at prosecution if you resist a lawful order. You can fight gag-orders, or the legality of a request, but without a court order to countermand the feds request, you have to comply.

Microsoft would do the same in China, Europe, middle east,etc.. the FBI isn't special.
by davkan | 2026-01-24 17:15:18+00:00
I was able to find a decade old video via llm with the prompt “YouTube video of a french band on a radio station with a girl wearing orange jumpsuit”. I had tried many google searches without success trying to remember the video but the llm came right out with the correct video of The Dø on KEXP first try. 99 times out of 100 I prefer normal search though.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-24 17:15:39+00:00
Because we haven't flexed out power authority in forever doesn't mean we did have it, just that we were too apathetic to be willing to use it. We picked this route, and yet your response it 'but politicians did politician things'. Weak sauce. Politicians don't hold themselves responsible, we do. Or in the case of the USA for the last forever, we no longer do. If it's because the politicians convinced us we are powerless, or some other reason, it doesn't matter. WE CHOSE to give up our power.
by rekabis | 2026-01-24 17:15:42+00:00
> the _perception_ that they can/will replace developers is causing a major disruption in hiring practices.

Bingo.

And it’s causing the careers of a majority of juniors to experience fatal delays. Juniors need to leap into their careers and build up a good head of steam by demonstrating acquired experience, or they will wander off into other industries and fail to acquire said experience.

And when others who haven’t even gone through training yet see how juniors have an abysmally hard time finding a job, this will discourage them from even considering the industry before they ever begin to learn how to code.

But when no-one is hiring such that even students reconsider their career choice, this “failure to launch” will cause a massive developer shortage in the next 5-15 years, to the point where I believe entire governments will have this as a policy pain point.

After all, when companies are loathe to actually conduct any kind of on-the-job training, and demand 2-5 years of experience in an whole IT department’s worth of skills for “entry level” jobs, an entire generation of potential applicants with a fraction of that (or none at all) will cause the industry to have figurative kittens.

I mean, it will be the industry’s own footgun that has hurt them so badly. I would posit it may even become a leggun. The schadenfreude will be copious and well-deserved. But it’s going to produce massive amounts of economic pain.
by acoustics | 2026-01-24 17:15:50+00:00
It seems that many people lean into the "community" aspect of open source. In real communities there are webs of mutual responsibility. If you use open source to fill the role of community in your life, it makes sense psychologically that you would project moral stakes or obligation onto the maintainers. But this is really not fair to the maintainers who don't view their work that way.
by Leftium | 2026-01-24 17:16:29+00:00
Svelte used to have compile-time reactivity, but switched to runtime reactivity via signals: https://svelte.dev/blog/runes

I'm curious if Coi will also suffer from the drawbacks of compile-time reactivity. Or as its own language that doesn't have to "fit" into JS, can Coi side-step the disadvantages via syntax?

Runes allowed simpler Svelte syntax while making it more clear, consistent, flexible, and composable.

Support for signals may help in terms of interop with native browser JS and other frameworks: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-signals
by tromp | 2026-01-24 17:16:44+00:00
A maze generator in the shape of a maze whose corridors spell a 4-letter word:

char*M,A,Z,E=40,J[40],T[40];main(C){for(*J=A=scanf(M="%d",&C);
-- E; J[ E] =T
[E ]= E) printf("._"); for(;(A-=Z=!Z) || (printf("\n|"
) , A = 39 ,C --
) ; Z || printf (M ))M[Z]=Z[A-(E =A[J-Z])&&!C
& A == T[ A]
|6<<27<rand()||!C&!Z?J[T[E]=T[A]]=E,J[T[A]=A-Z]=A,"_.":" |"];}

Generates a maze on the fly after entering the desired height of the maze. This compiled fine back in 1988 when I submitted it to the IOCCC (having rediscovered Eller's algorithm). Modern C compilers don't allow constant strings to be overwritten, which can be avoided by changing the first line to

char M[3],A,Z,E=40,J[40],T[40];main(C){for(*J=A=scanf("%d",&C);

The code is explained in detail at https://tromp.github.io/maze.html
by dev_at | 2026-01-24 17:16:50+00:00
I built it since I was tired of spending too much time on my phone.
This app is unique since when the time is up, you are locked out for the rest of the day.
The only way out is to watch an ad or pay, and who wants to do that, right?

Price: Free
IAP: Unlock single app ($0,99), Unlock all apps ($9,99)
by bee_rider | 2026-01-24 17:17:11+00:00
I don’t like “AI is useless” as an argument because

* it is basically invalidated by somebody saying “well I find it useful”

* it is easy to believe it’s on a path toward usefulness

OTOH it is worth keeping in mind that we haven’t seen what a profitable AI company looks like. If nothing else this technology has massive potential for enshittification…
by bendmorris | 2026-01-24 17:17:24+00:00
Nothing that is possible is "too hard" if you're willing to put in some effort. The only question is whether you will learn to do it, or press a button, hope the LLM did it well, and let it forever remain "too hard."

Honestly, without judgment, I think this is just a fundamental difference in how people approach their craft. You either want to be capable yourself or you just want the results.
by mvdtnz | 2026-01-24 17:17:25+00:00
"Cultural appropriation" is a totally separate issue to intellectual property and copyright. You're muddying the waters by conflating the two.

Cultural appropriation was a term popularised in the heady days of woke excesses when white liberals were desperate to find reasons to be mad at one another for perceived impurity. It's a ludicrous concept from top to bottom.

Intellectual property laws, in my opinion, have a place in our society.
by huslage | 2026-01-24 17:17:28+00:00
This is highly ridiculous. It's missing entire categories of costs, not to mention selling 1000bu of corn is not easy and you won't get that price for it.

The real question isn't "Can AI do x thing?" but "SHOULD AI do x thing". We know how to grow and sell corn. There is zero that AI can do to make it more "efficient" than it already is.

Come on.
by Expurple | 2026-01-24 17:17:32+00:00
> you can still ignore the return value

Only when you don't need the Ok value from the Result (in other words, only when you have Result<(), E>). You can't get any other Ok(T) out of thin air in the Err case. You must handle (exclude) the Err case in order to unwrap the T and proceed with it.

> It also litters your code with branches, so not ideal for either I-cache or performance.

That's simply an implementation/ABI issue. See https://github.com/iex-rs/iex/
by Sharlin | 2026-01-24 17:17:42+00:00
Java has so few features that there's not much to ban. Nevertheless Java definitely has language features (in addition to deprecated library APIs, which are many) that aren't recommended today. Off the top of my mind:

* `synchronized` blocks

* raw types

* anonymous inner classes

* checked exceptions

as well as specific uses of otherwise fine language features:

* "AbstractX" style abstract classes when static and default interface methods suffice

* old-style POJO classes when records are a better choice
by plutodev | 2026-01-24 17:18:04+00:00
You’re absolutely right and your point actually highlights where infrastructure choices start to matter. Bit-exact reproducibility across CPU and GPU isn’t just a software problem; it’s also about how and where workloads run. Most cloud GPU setups optimize for throughput, not determinism, and schedulers will happily reorder or fuse ops if you don’t explicitly constrain them. That’s where having more control over the execution environment helps. Running on configurable, bare-metal–style GPU setups (like what io.net provides) makes it easier to lock down kernels, pin versions, and remove hidden sources of nondeterminism that hyperscale platforms abstract away. Standard tools don’t guarantee this today, so building something like LuxiEdge makes sense if determinism is the requirement, not an optimization.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-24 17:18:22+00:00
Tbh, thought this will be just another proto (where proto:=9p in this case) implementation without a use-case in mind. Pleasantly surprised this isn't the case.

As per #Reasoning section, author made this to provide* a procfs-like API for Erlang. If only think of Erlang as programming language, this may sound odd. What it means for a programming language to have procfs? Well, Erlang VM is more like a tiny operating system than a typical runtime. It has its own processes, scheduler, supervisor, and message parsing. Exposing these "system objects" via a fs API is just like /proc exposes kernel state on Linux.

*A similar FUSE-based NIF-implemented project is mentioned but author bring up cross-compilation as problem. Perhaps more important, libraries used through NIF may degrade performance or even crash the entire VM. So in Erlangland re-implementing protocols in pure-Erlang is quite common.
by lynndotpy | 2026-01-24 17:19:00+00:00
For those who can't access the link, this is the United States DHS with the quote

> The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.

featuring an illustration of an oldsmobile at a tropical sunny beach with the text "America After 100 Million Deportations".

The implication is that a white ethnostate will be paradise.

Notably, 100M is not the number of non-citizens in the United States, it's roughly the number of non-White people (90M, per https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045224)
by bdangubic | 2026-01-24 17:19:06+00:00
> The most useful, accurate, and honest LLM information I've gathered comes from spaces where neither extreme prevails. You have to find people who have put in the time and are realistic about what can and cannot be accomplished. That's when you start learning the techniques for using these tools for maximum effect and where to apply them.

This requires the level of professionalism that 97.56% of SWEs do not have
by Anniediamond | 2026-01-24 17:19:06+00:00
Snail Tales is a thoughtfully designed app that combines fun, learning, and relaxation for children. With engaging videos and educational songs, it makes early learning enjoyable and easy to follow. The intuitive interface ensures that kids can explore independently, while parents and teachers appreciate its simplicity and reliability.
Beyond learning, Snail Tales offers a calming bedtime experience with soothing visuals and gentle music. Families can choose between instrumental lullabies or soft vocal tracks, creating the perfect atmosphere for restful sleep. Whether used in the classroom or at home, Snail Tales supports both playful discovery and peaceful routines, making it a trusted companion for growing minds.
by gewing | 2026-01-24 17:19:12+00:00
We've been asked by others, what problem does Stratis solve. Here's what's driving us.

We highly value strong and diverse advisor input. Human advisors’ time is limited, not available 24/7, and can be chilled by fear of or actual negative judgment. Generic AI systems optimize the average without ethical memory or any effort to draw out your unique perspective. Stratis is an AI advisory of historic characters customized to your strengths and weaknesses who help flight-test ideas, brainstorm solutions, and analyze problems in a 24/7, judgment free environment.
by bri3d | 2026-01-24 17:19:26+00:00
The OOBE (out of box experience) uploads the key by default (it tells you it’s doing it, but it’s a bit challenging to figure out how to avoid it) but any other setup method specifically asks where to back up your key, and you can choose not to. The way to avoid enrollment is to enable Bitlocker later than OOBE.

I really think that enabling BitLocker with an escrowed key during OOBE is the right choice, the protection to risk balance for a “normal” user is good. Power users who are worried about government compulsion can still set up their system to be more hardened.
by FractalParadigm | 2026-01-24 17:19:26+00:00
I feel like an easier solution to having six different email addresses is to use Gmail aliases - I've caught a few less-than-honest companies either selling my email address, or been breached without disclosing such, simply by using an alias along the lines of '+service_name'. If any alias starts to receive spam you can setup rules to automatically delete everything that comes in with that. You also get the added benefit of significantly easier and more accurate search.
by michaelt | 2026-01-24 17:19:56+00:00
> I’m surprised to see these comments in conjunction, 90% is pretty good, and much higher than i expected.

What standard of proof is appropriate to expel someone from college? After they've taken on, say, $40,000 of debt to attend?

Assuming you had a class of 100 students, "90% effective" would mean expelling 10 students wrongly - personally I'd expect a higher standard of proof.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-24 17:19:58+00:00
I use Gmail since the beta (I got invite from a googler) and I don't remember when they began adding spam control but in my experience the GMail spam check works usually exceptionally well: I very rarely need to add a custom filter.

My email, over two decades+ (2004?), hasn't been in a many public leaks (only one on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ ) but obviously has made its way to various spammy actors but thankfully nearly everything is caught by GMail's spam filter.

If anything I'd say GMail's spam filter works too well: I get more legit emails in my spam folder than spam in my regular inbox. As in: one in a rare while vs about zero spam in my regular inbox.
by em-bee | 2026-01-24 17:20:20+00:00
i was self employed for most of my life, and that freedom was always the primary reason. to be able to simply not work when i didn't feel like it, without having to ask for permission, to be able to take time off whenever the family needed it, travel whenever i want, work where i want, etc. these are all things i would not want to miss. you get a lot of that from remote work too, which is why it is so appealing.

but i combined that with a low budget lifestyle. i don't need to work 80 hours. depending on the rate, 10 or 20 billable hours are enough. with family. it's a lifestyle. and you choose how to live it.
by cobbal | 2026-01-24 17:20:34+00:00
That's essentially correct. Extraction is a term in roqc. A rocq program contains both a computational part, and proofs about that computation, all mixed together in the type system. Extraction is the automated process of discarding the proofs and writing out the computational component to a more conventional (and probably more efficient) programming language.

The original extractor was to ocaml, and this is a new extractor to c++.
by digiown | 2026-01-24 17:20:38+00:00
I'm puzzled why there is so little emphasis on prioritizing bikes and other means of non-licensed transport among libertarians. Driving consents you to various things like forced ID checks, drug tests, and sometimes searches, and cars are relatively easy to track down compared to humans. In effect, car-centrism reduces civil liberties as it necessitates licensing for participating in society. And no, privatizing everything will not improve it. It will just make it worse since you'd be forced to allow insurance companies to track you to be allowed into private roads, etc.
by bambax | 2026-01-24 17:20:52+00:00
> they are incredible help

Yes.

I use LLMs for coding in the exact opposite way as described in the video. The video says that most people start big, then the LLM fails, then they reduce the scope more and more until they're actually doing most of the work while thinking it's all the machine's work.

I use AI in two ways. With Python I ask it to write micro functions and I do all of the general architecture. This saves a lot of time, but I could do without AI if needed be.

But recently I also started making small C utilities that each do exactly one thing and for those, the LLMs write most if not all of the code. I start very small with a tiny proof of concept and iterate over it, adding functionalities here and there until I'm satisfied. I still inspect the code and suggest refactorizations, or putting things into independent, reusable modules for static linking, etc.

But I'm not a C coder and I couldn't make any of these apps without AI.

Since the beginning of the year, I made four of them. The code is probably subpar but they all work great! and never crash, and I use them every day.