MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BSDobelix | 2026-01-04 15:54:40+00:00
>I'm sorry to tell you, but the world is actually larger than the US

Yes i know, but let me tell you since you think i am from the US let me tell you i am not.

>France and The UK would stop being allies to the US

No they don't because there's one other choice and that's china, the right of Denmark to keep Greenland is simply not important enough in a multi-polar world.

>bureaucratic center being in Belgium, and military headquarters also being in Brussels

Yes and you can bet that Belgium would rater lick Donald's boots then help Denmark and most important loose access to those shiny diamonds.
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-04 15:55:09+00:00
> the entire Unity engine set of games written in garbage-collected C#, including a freaking BAFTA winner in Outer Wilds.

Some of those games (though not all of them, unfortunately) try to work around C#'s garbage collector for performance reasons using essentially adhoc memory allocators via object pools and similar approaches. This is probably what this part...

---
And if you ever do think about these, it’s usually because you are trying to do something performance-oriented and you have to pretend you are managing your own memory. It is common for many games that have been written with garbage collected languages to try to get around the inadequacies of not being able to manage your own memory
---

...is referring to.

> Casey, meanwhile, has worked on a low-level game development video series for a decade and... never actually shipped a game?

These videos are all around 90-120 minutes long, each posted with gaps between them since the previous (my guess is whenever Casey had time) and the purpose and content of these videos is pedagogical so he spends time explaining what he does - they aren't just screencasts of someone writing code.

If you combine the videos and assuming someone works on it 6h/day with workdays alone it'd take around 8-9 months to write whatever is written there but this also ignores the amount of time spent on explanations (which is the main focus of the videos).

So it is very misleading to use the series as some sort of measure for what it'd take Casey (or anyone else, really) to make a game using "low level" development.
by simonw | 2026-01-04 15:55:23+00:00
Yes!

I've been having a great time prompting "vanilla JavaScript, no react" and building neat things that use browser APIs exclusively (including modern stuff like web audio APIs and Web Components and WASM) because I don't need to learn a bunch of boilerplate stuff first anymore.

Feels like coding in the 200xs and I'm enjoying every minute of it.
by l00sed | 2026-01-04 15:55:30+00:00
Really nicely written and quite thought-provoking. I think about when I die, will anyone be able to use or maintain any of the software I've written? Updates and patches are something so entwined with software that I doubt much of my code would be worth using if it suddenly froze.

It puts a beautiful spotlight on OSS communities and what they do to keep software alive through refactoring, iteration, patching. Also, on well-written documentation— perhaps that's even more important than the code for longterm maintenence and value. A good thesis that encourages someone to write it again, and better?
by TZubiri | 2026-01-04 15:56:13+00:00
It's an extremism to get a strong reaction, but the takeaway is that you should aim when possible to make the code understandable without comments, and that a good programmer can make code more understandable than a newbie with comments.

But of course understandeable code with comments simply has much more bandwidth of expression so it will get the best of both worlds.

I see writing commentless code like practicing playing piano only with your left hand, it's a showoff and you can get fascinatingly close to the original piece (See Godowsky's Chopin adaptations for the left hand), but of course when you are done showing off, you will play with both hands.
by elliotbnvl | 2026-01-04 15:56:18+00:00
Yes! I feel like so many people really fail to appreciate this side of things.

Heck, Suno has gotten me to the point where I play so much more piano (the recording -> polished track loop is very rewarding) that not only did I publish an album to Spotify in my favorite genre, of music that I’m really happy with, I’ve also started to produce some polished acoustic recordings with NO AI involvement. That’s just because I’ve been spending so much more time at the piano, because of that reward loop.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-04 15:56:18+00:00
> > Pardoning a different drug dealer can be a way to show Maduro that they were serious about the offer, that they really would have gone easy on him.

Maduro is not a drug dealer and even if it was not directing all the limited resources of its government to stop the drug trade we are talking about allocation of resources which should have happened in order to put Americans Interests first whereas Venezuela has so many other serious problems.

Also even if all that was true we are talking about cocaine, the party (and somewhat productivity) drug.

The fentanyl is produced 10,000 miles away from Venezuela, in CHYNA which used to be a great talking point in 2016 but of course nothing ended up happening
by maccard | 2026-01-04 15:56:35+00:00
> How do you know AI did the right thing then?

Because I tested it, and I read the code. It was only like 40 lines of python.

> Why would this take you 2-3 hours?

It's multiple systems that I am a _user_ of, not a professional developer of. I know how to use Jira, I'm not able to offhand tell you how to update specific fields using python - and then repeat for Jenkins, perforce, slack. Getting credentials in (Claude saw how the credentials were being read in other scripts and mirrored that) is another thing.

> This is fine for throwaway work, but if you have to put your name behind it that’s pretty risky, since you don’t actually understand why AI did what it did.

As I said above, it's 30 lines of code. I did put my name beind it, it's been running on our codebase on every single checkin for 6 months, and has failed 0 times in that time (we have a separate report that we check in a weekly meeting for issues that were being missed by this process). Again, this isn't some massive complicated system - it's just glueing together 3/4 APIs in a tiny script in 1/10 of the time that it took me to do it. Worst case scenario is it does exactly what it did before - nothing.
by po84 | 2026-01-04 15:56:52+00:00
This matches my experience. A recent anecdote:

I took time during a holiday to write an Obsidian plugin 4 years ago to scratch a personal itch as it were. I promptly forgot most of the detail, the Obsidian plugin API and ecosystem have naturally changed since then, and Typescript isn't in my day-to-day lingo.

I've been collecting ideas for new plugins since then while dreading the investment needed to get back up to speed on how to implement them.

I took a couple hours over a recent winter holiday with Claude and cranked out two new plugins plus improvements to the 4 year old bit-rotting original. Claude handled much of the accidental complexity of ramping up that would have bogged me down in the past--suggesting appropriate API methods to use, writing idiomatic TS, addressing linter findings, ...
by dagmx | 2026-01-04 15:57:01+00:00
I too share your sense of incongruity .

But then I try and focus on what each author thinks is important to them and it’s often wildly different than what’s important to me.

But a lot of internet discussion turns into very ego-centric debate including on here, where a lot of folks who are very gung-ho on the adoption of something (let’s say Linux, but could be anything) don’t adequately try and understand that people have different needs and push the idea of adoption very hard in the hopes that once you’re over the hump you might not care about what you lost.
by yoz-y | 2026-01-04 15:57:07+00:00
AI makes finishing projects easier. But I would steer away from starting them.

In order for me to be comfortable with a code base and consider it mine I need to have written the foundation, not merely reviewed in. Once the pillars are there, LLMs do make further development faster and I can concentrate on fun details (like tinkering with CSS or thinking about some very specific details).
by regenschutz | 2026-01-04 15:57:08+00:00
I can't seem to click on any of the "gems". All /gem/* links just redirect back to /browse for me.

Also, the markdown doesn't seem to be rendering properly in the thumbnail cards.

Looking at the TikTok page, all of the posts seem... Frankly, low-effort? They're basically just a TTS-voice saying "look at this cool monument, btw join us at gemvoyage.net". They're not really offering any interesting cultural or historical information about the monuments. Which makes me wonder, who is this for?

I presume all of the text is AI-generated, as I doubt you've personally been to all of these places yourself? What's the value for me, as a user, to use your website? Why can't I just ask ChatGPT "what are some cool monuments in <city>"?
by timenotwasted | 2026-01-04 15:57:20+00:00
As someone that only has sporadic pockets of deep time in my free time the thing that has been immensely helpful from an LLM coding point of view is mental model building. I can now much more easily get "into the flow" after being away from a codebase for a period of time by asking questions. For example, remind me where all the integration points for that API route is located. Or give me a rundown on this file. Etc.. It gets me back up to speed so much more quickly and makes me productive with limited amounts of time. It also means I don't have to try to carry this context around with me or I'll forget it.
by susam | 2026-01-04 15:57:31+00:00
> How do you handle comments in a "static blog"?

The comment form is implemented as a server-side program using Common Lisp and Hunchentoot. So this is the only part of the website that is not static. The server-side program accepts each comment and writes to a text file for manual review, which means I do not have to worry about spam, cross site scripting payloads or irrelevant comments being published automatically. I usually review the comments on weekends and add them to my blog.

In the end, the comments live like normal content files in my source code directory just like the other blog posts and HTML pages do. My static site generator renders the comment pages along with the rest of the website. So in a way, my static site generator also has a static comment pages generator within it.
by 1dom | 2026-01-04 15:57:46+00:00
Yes, SSG pipeline + 1 or 2 small self-hosted OSS tools is way simpler than Drupal.

But all you've done in bought on all the pain and compromise of having to think from an SSG perspective, and that created problems which you've already identified you'll figure out in future

I'm suggesting 2 or 3 small self-hosted OSS tools, where one is a small hand crafted server that basically takes a markdown file, renders it, and serves it as plain HTML with a header/footer.

This is more homogenous, fewer unique parts/processes, and doesn't have the constraint of dealing with an SSG.

I remember my own personal pain from 2010 - 2016ish of managing Drupal and Joomla. I did exactly the same as you in 2016 and went all in on SSGs and in 2024, I realised all of the above. I feel like I wasted years of potential development time reinventing basic personal website features to try and work with an SSG and you literally have a ticket to do just that: https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/167. 1 of your 3 solutions involves letting someone else host your comments:(

A custom framework/server is the end destination for all nerdy personal websites - I can't wait to see what you make when you realise this:)

edit/p.s. I love you and all your work. Sorry for sounding disagreeable, I'm excited to see what you learn from you SSG journey, I hope you prove me wrong!
by d--b | 2026-01-04 15:58:56+00:00
This is a highly romanticized view imo.

I sit alone in cafes all the time, for many reasons. I don’t feel particularly joyful about it nor weird. I just do it to take a break and have something to drink, or wait for someone or something. Often I don’t look at my phone at all. That doesn’t feel weird either, or rebellious, or whatever the author experiences.

I don’t understand the post at all.

I’d have gone to Japan. I’ve been to Japan, it’s awesome.
by senfiaj | 2026-01-04 15:59:01+00:00
It's fast, but, it has negative implications for debuggability. V8 team decided that it's not worth it, since proper stack traces (such as Error.stack) are essential for some libraries, such as Sentry (!). Removing some stack trace info can break some code. Also, imagine you have missing info from the error stack trace in production code running on NodeJS. that's not good. If you need TCO, you can compile that code in WASM. V8 does TCO in WASM.
by krapp | 2026-01-04 15:59:33+00:00
> If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did "cook" it.

The person who actually cooked it cooked it. Being the "catalyst" doesn't make you the creator, nor does it mean you get to claim that you did the work.

Otherwise you could say you "cooked a meal" every time you went to MacDonald's.
by mihirnaik | 2026-01-04 15:59:41+00:00
Over the last few years, I’ve been very active on LinkedIn, sharing observations from the front lines of enterprise SEO. I’ve spent a large part of my career building and managing SEO programs on the enterprise side where scale, complexity, and cross-functional execution are unavoidable realities.

More recently, I moved to seoClarity, where I’m responsible for building our AI Search Visibility Monitoring and Optimization Platform, ArcAI. That shift from running SEO programs to building tooling for the next generation of search has given me a unique vantage point.

Sharing my thoughts here.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-04 15:59:41+00:00
There aren’t any. Evidence shows, from China, that agrivoltaics can rejuvenate land that was previously desert (link in the article). Families get to keep their family farm land they’d otherwise lose, from lease payments. California almost doubles its utility solar generation capacity. And in the future, all of this solar could be removed to put the land back into production if possible, which would never happen if the land was developed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
by andy99 | 2026-01-04 15:59:47+00:00
The “sycophantic sugar” part - “that’s exactly right”, “what an insightful observation” etc. is the most outwardly annoying part of the problem but is only part of it. The bigger issue is the real sycophancy, going along with the user’s premise even when it’s questionable or wrong. I don’t see it as just being uncritical - there’s something more to it than that, like reinforcement. It’s one thing to not question what you write, it’s another to subtly play it back as if you’re onto something smart or doing great work.

There are tons of extant examples now of people using LLMs that think they’ve some something smart or produced something of value, that haven’t, and the reinforcement they get is a big reason for this.
by Xmd5a | 2026-01-04 15:59:51+00:00
I’m not claiming a 100% faithful physical recreation in the strict scientific sense.

If you look at my other comment in this thread, my project is about designing proprioceptive touch sensors (robot skin) using a soft-body simulator largely built with the help of an AI. At this stage, absolute physical accuracy isn’t really the point. By design, the system already includes a neural model in the loop (via EIT), so the notion of “accuracy” is ultimately evaluated through that learned representation rather than against raw physical equations alone.

What I need instead is a model that is faithful to my constraints: very cheap, easily accessible materials, with properties that are usually considered undesirable for sensing—instability, high hysteresis, low gauge factor. My bet is that these constraints can be compensated for by a more circular system design, where the geometry of the sensor is optimized to work with them.

Bridging the gap to reality is intentionally simple: 3D-print whatever geometry the simulator converges to, run the same strain/stress tests on the physical samples, and use that data to fine-tune the sensor model.

Since everything is ultimately interpreted through a neural network, some physical imprecision upstream may actually be acceptable, or even beneficial, if it makes the eventual transfer and fine-tuning on real-world data easier.
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-04 15:59:51+00:00
I recently realized every hypothesis I tested with an LLM, the LLM agreed with me. And if I wasn't careful about reading its caveats, I could leave thinking my idea was brilliant and would never get pushback.

I tried something in the political realm. Asking to test a hypothesis and its opposite

> Test this hypothesis: the far right in US politics mirrors late 19th century Victorianism as a cultural force

compared to

> Test this hypothesis: The left in US politics mirrors late 19th century Victorianism as a cultural force

It created plausible arguments for both. While giving "caveats" instead of counterarguments.

If I had my brain off, I might leave with some sense of "this hypothesis is correct".

Now I'm not saying this makes LLMs useless. But the LLM didn't act like a human that might tell you your full of shit. It WANTED my hypothesis to be true and constructed a plausible argument for both.

Even with prompting to act like a college professor critiquing a grad student, eventually it devolves back to "helpful / sycophantic".
by dangus | 2026-01-04 15:59:54+00:00
I disagree with your take there.

> It took me a weekend to write the initial Perl script that made this site. It took me another weekend to do the Rust rewrite (although porting all the content took two weeks). These are not complicated programs.

My last Hugo site took 30 minutes to deploy, not a whole weekend. Picked a theme, pasted in content.

> You want free web hosting? Hugo might be the right option.

An extremely good reason to pick Hugo especially if you don’t have the know-how to build your own SSG.
by deaux | 2026-01-04 16:00:12+00:00
Great read. The consumption angle is one I'd never seen before, but very persuasive.

> This framework clarifies a particular hypocrisy in contemporary British politics. The generation that has used its demographic weight to consume the surplus of current producers through triple-locked pensions, healthcare spending that rises inexorably with age, and property wealth accumulated behind exclusionary planning regimes, is the same generation that now drives the populist right’s fixation on migration. Yet the migrant, whatever burden they may place on public services, consumes a fraction of what the pensioner consumes in annual transfers. The young worker paying 40-50% of their income in tax, rent, and student loans is not being impoverished by the asylum seeker or migrant worker as much as they are being disadvantaged by the pensioner who owns their rented flat, by the planning regime that prevents new construction, by the landlord interest that captures housing benefit, and by the financial sector that inflates asset prices while starving productive enterprise of capital.

The only solution to this underlying cause is obvious and one I have been advocating for years now. Votes must be weighted by age, with the minimum voting age getting the maximum weight, down to maybe 20% (exact number is up for calculation) for the oldest person in the country. Otherwise, there is no escaping this problem. The older one gets, the more one is disincentivized to vote for long-term interests for the good of. The youth is the future, and policies are to be for the future.

For what it's worth, I'm nowhere near the minimum voting age, so this isn't a teenager saying "teenagers deserve all the rights". It's an inevitability. I've generally voted against personal interests and for the common good, but the huge majority of people are simply incapable of doing so. Hence if a group whose interest is aligned purely with short-term status-quo maintenance and hoarding becomes too large, there's no recourse. Which is where Europe is at.
by api | 2026-01-04 16:00:16+00:00
PGP is horrible and way overly complicated but this article concludes by trading that for a long list of piecemeal solutions, some of which are cloud based and semi or fully proprietary.

PGP has hung on for a long time because it “works” and is a standard. The same can be said for Unix, which is not actually a great OS. A modern green field OS designed by experienced people with an eye to simplicity and consistency would almost certainly be better. But who’s going to use it?
by NobodyNada | 2026-01-04 16:00:20+00:00
Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions.

Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode.

It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-04 16:01:04+00:00
Every engineer should read this. It's a wonderful collection of heuristics that might seem banal, but which are shimmeringly true.

The two that stand out are

> Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead.

and

> Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.

as a warning against about being too, too clever.
by maccard | 2026-01-04 16:01:19+00:00
I've not found it to be bad for smaller things, but I've found once you start iterating on it quickly devolves into absolute nonsense like what you talked about.

> If it did save me time, would I want that going into my codebase?

Depends - and that's the judgement call. I've managed outsourcers in the pre-LLM days who if you leave them unattended will spew out unimaginable amounts of pure and utter garbage that is just as bad as looping an AI agent with "that's great, please make it more verbose and add more design patterns". I don't use it for anything that I don't want to, but for so many things that just require you to write some code that is just getting in the way of solving the problem you want to solve it's been a boon for me.