MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by James_K | 2026-01-22 16:51:39+00:00
> Polanski also worked as a hypnotherapist. In 2013, a journalist for The Sun requested a hypnotherapy session from him to increase her breast size and body image self-confidence for an article in the paper. Polanski featured in the published article, in which the journalist claimed that her breast size had increased. Polanski has apologised for his involvement, saying that the idea came from the client, that he did not charge for the session, that the therapy was meant to help with bodily self-image rather than physical enlargement, and that the article did not accurately reflect the situation.

You really just have to read this to see that what you're saying is inaccurate.
by cannoneyed | 2026-01-22 16:52:35+00:00
Hey HN!

I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents.

I didn't write a single line of code.

Of course no-code doesn't mean no-engineering. This project took a lot more manual labor than I'd hoped!

I wrote a deep dive on the workflow and some thoughts about the future of AI coding and creativity:

http://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
by RodgerTheGreat | 2026-01-22 16:52:36+00:00
Yep. J has a small userbase, but it isn't fragmented into dialects like K or even APL, J uses ASCII characters instead of requiring a custom font/keyboard layout, J is FOSS, J has extensive learning materials, and J is reasonably batteries-included and suitable for making practical nontrivial programs.

I like K better than J aesthetically, but it's harder to recommend to beginners due to the fragmentation of the ecosystem.
by arrrg | 2026-01-22 16:52:42+00:00
It worked until it didn’t. That’s how it goes. Peace is always hard work and irrational actors (in terms of: well being of people, not necessarily aspirations of empire) can muck everything up.

Economical co-dependency is a good tool for increasing the price of going to war and making it irrational. It’s also not a zero sum game and tends to profit both sides. However, it can suck if you do it with non-democratic regimes and autocratic rulers who trample human rights.

So between France, Germany, Poland and all the other EU members it‘s keeping the continent at peace and generally does not suck because it‘s between broadly democratic nations. It also benefits each one massively and makes things possible like a common electric grid that increases reliability in general. So nearly all upside.

I do think economic cooperation with the Soviet Union and later Russia - much, much more limited than between EU members - was helpful in cooling tensions and making the world a bit safer, sure, but Russia has clearly behaved in a way that makes that no longer a good idea.
by kranner | 2026-01-22 16:52:57+00:00
But a human developer, even a not so great one, might know something about the characteristics of the actual data a particular program is expected to encounter that is more efficient than this AI-coded hybrid sort for this particular application. This is assuming the AI can't deduce the characteristics of the expected data from the specs, even if a particular time and space complexity is mandated.

I encountered something like this recently. I had to replace an exact data comparison operation (using a simple memcmp) with a function that would compare data and allow differences within a specified tolerance. The AI generated beautiful code using chunking and all kinds of bit twiddling that I don't understand.

But what it couldn't know was that most of the time the two data ranges would match exactly, thus taking the slowest path through the comparison by comparing every chunk in the two ranges. I had to stick a memcmp early in the function to exit early for the most common case, because it only occurred to me during profiling that most of the time the data doesn't change. There was no way I could have figured this out early enough to put it in a spec for an AI.
by kieranmaine | 2026-01-22 16:53:17+00:00
Regarding the affect of EV adoption on electricity consumption the site https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/ has some interesting data. I'd recommend looking at the following graphs:

* Distance travelled by passenger cars in Norway

* EV electricity consumption and total power generation in Norway

EVs now make up approximately 1/3 of miles travelled, but the increase in total electrcity consumption is fairly small.
by vidarh | 2026-01-22 16:53:26+00:00
> Ever thought that there might be people under skyscraper that is your ego?

I do, which is exactly why I found the presumption that not spending your time doing the coding is equivalent to a disability both gross and arrogant.

> Where are they supposed to learn good design when slop takes over?

You're not learning good architecture and systems design from code. You learn good architecture and systems design from doing architecture and systems design. It's a very different discipline.

While knowing how to code can be helpful, and can even be important in narrow niches, it is a very minor part of understanding good architecture.

And, yes, I stand by the claim the coding is by far the simplest part, on the basis of having done both for longer than most developers have been doing either.
Ask HN: Do you have side income as a software engineer?
by andrewstetsenko | 2026-01-22 16:53:27+00:00
Yesterday, I had a long call with a friend, a tech recruiter with over a decade in the field.

She was tired not from resumes or interviews, but from engineers, still negotiating like it’s 2021.

The “golden bubble”.

Where every frontend engineer was a unicorn and every offer had quadruple-digit equity, that bubble still shapes expectations. But the market today is more like… reality.

It’s not that talent isn’t valued. It’s that value has changed shape.

The engineers who bristle at lower stock grants or extra days in office aren’t wrong to want fairness… they’re just anchoring to a world that no longer exists or might quickly disappear.

I don’t believe in surrender. I believe in recalibration.

What happens when we stop pretending the market is unchanged, and start asking: How do I create a career that isn’t a bubble-dependent bet? What do I build that isn’t tied to a single job title or company’s stock price?

The most interesting people I talk to today are already thinking in parallel streams: mentoring, writing, consulting, advising, building side projects, diversifying, not out of fear, but because the old narrative of one job = stable identity doesn’t hold.

I’m curious: do you have side income as a software engineer? If so, what’s worked (or not) for you?
by spuz | 2026-01-22 16:53:48+00:00
Not sure if it's just Firefox, but a lot of things seem to be rendering incorrectly and very slowly for me. The text for the descriptions is very small compared to the rest of the text which makes it kind of hard to read. Also, on the Spectrum demo, the prism is displayed up and to the left of the light rays. After a few minutes the pages just grind to a halt so I can't really explore the rest.
by mym1990 | 2026-01-22 16:54:31+00:00
This is just "buy low, sell high" but automated. It is no different than what many humans do every single day, just at a much faster clip and with better processing power. Used car dealerships are a great example. If you think its dumb that humans try to find price mismatches in order to make money...well you may hate the idea of capitalism, which is probably a fair take.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-22 16:54:58+00:00
> What is stupid about nuclear? It's a huge amount of clean, secure energy.

It's not the stupidly of the reactor producing. It's the stupidly of how we are small island. Claim what you wish about how safe it is but accidents do happen and if a reactor was to implode we're eff'd. We don't have landmass to facilitate waste in the UK, so it has to be shipped elsewhere, sold again for dark money.

> Would your preference be dependence on Russian/US oil natural gas? Would you feel the same if Russia invaded Finland/Baltics and US took over Greenland?

My preference would be my hand with a gun to the temple and myself pulling the trigger.
by altern8 | 2026-01-22 16:55:40+00:00
I'm not attributing to renewables, but green initiatives.

For instance, the rising prices of carbon permits under the EU emissions trading scheme.

So, my point is that countries that don't ignore the economy just to be green--like the U.S. and specially China--seem to have vastly cheaper electricity and gasoline, which I would guess makes them more competitive/lowers prices.

Over here we have no NG and no oil, and on top of that we tax our companies because of emission limits, while in China they burn coal like there is no tomorrow.

We wanted to outlaw non-electric cars, while the car industry in Europe is huge and we don't have a way to build batteries, etc. etc.

Seems to be a pattern that is hard to understand.
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-22 16:55:58+00:00
>there is still a whole bunch of coal power online in Canada.

Ontario, Quebec, BC and Alberta, the four largest provinces by population and a heady percentage of the land area, have zero coal power generation facilities.

Ontario is mostly nuclear supported by hydro, with an absolute fallback of natural gas. Quebec is overwhelmingly hydro + wind. BC is mostly hydro. Alberta is mostly non-renewables like natural gas, but phased out its last coal plants.

If someone is in Canada, odds are extremely high that there is no coal plant anywhere in their jurisdiction. I also wouldn't say that there is a whole bunch of coal power online -- they're an extreme exception now.
by thramp | 2026-01-22 16:56:10+00:00
(Hi, I’m on the rust-analyzer team, but I’ve been less active for reasons that are clear in my bio.)

> Language servers are powerful because they can hook into the language’s runtime and compiler toolchain to get semantically correct answers to user queries. For example, suppose you have two versions of a pop function, one imported from a stack library, and another from a heap library. If you use a tool like the dumb-jump package in Emacs and you use it to jump to the definition for a call to pop, it might get confused as to where to go because it’s not sure what module is in scope at the point. A language server, on the other hand, should have access to this information and would not get confused.

You are correct that a language server will generally provide correct navigation/autocomplete,
but a language server doesn’t necessarily need to hook into an existing compiler: a language server might be a latency-sensitive re-implementation of an existing compiler toolchain (rust-analyzer is the one I’m most familiar with, but the recent crop of new language servers tend to take this direction if the language’s compiler isn’t query-oriented).

> It is possible to use the language server for syntax highlighting. I am not aware of any particularly strong reasons why one would want to (or not want to) do this.

Since I spent a lot of time in Rust, I’ll use Rust as an example: you can highlight a binding if it’s mutable or style an enum/struct differently. It’s one of those small things that makes a big impact once you get used to it: editors without semantic syntax highlighting (as it is called in the LSP specification) feel like they’re naked to me.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-22 16:56:18+00:00
I guess there are probably better worfklows, but I went from raw-dogging it to more structure frameworks like Get Shit Done (GSD) back to raw-dogging it but with lots of use of planning mode.

Initially I thought the structure of a framework would be nice. Tracking state, breaking things down into milestones, phases, etc. But ultimately I felt like it was all an illusion. Im not sure it's possible to track and provide Claude with the current state of the project at all times and it's just going to have to re-grok a lot of things all the time, whether you use one of these frameworks or not.

IDK, maybe there are better ways. But it feels like it increases the time and effort by a lot without any real improvement other than briefly making me feel more organized.
by godelski | 2026-01-22 16:56:51+00:00
> How often do you load it

A few dozen times a day?

I live in the terminal and opening files with vim is the primary way I interact with them.

> Do you not just open the project once at the start of the day and then continue working?

I mean I do this too

> projects which take minimum 40 minutes to build

This sounds problematic and a whole different category of problems.

Don't you have partial compiles? Parallel compiling? Upgrade your machine?

But it's not just startup time. I use less RAM, less CPU resources, jumping through tags is instant, working through the debugger is instant, opening new files is instant, fuzzy searching my system is instant. It sounds like the program you're working on and your editor are fighting for resources and I've never faced that problem with vim
by philipkglass | 2026-01-22 16:56:53+00:00
It's mostly due to "soft costs" such as complicated/slow permitting and high customer acquisition costs. Australia has a higher minimum wage but much lower costs to get a rooftop system installed.

"How to cut U.S. residential solar costs in half"

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/11/how-to-cut-u-s-reside...

Birch points to Australia, where he said the average 7 kW solar array with a 7 kW battery costs $14,000. That equates to $2.02 per W, with batteries included.

“You can sell it on Tuesday and install it on Wednesday, there’s no red tape, no permitting delays,” said Birch.

As a result, Australian homeowners are saving roughly 50% or more on their electricity bills with rooftop solar, said Birch. In just 10 years, rooftop solar jumped from 7% to 33% of rooftops in Australia nationwide, he said.

In the United States, that same solar and battery installation averages $36,000, said Birch. Permitting alone can take two to six months, and the cost per watt of a solar plus storage installation is up to 2.5 times the Australian price, landing at $5.18 per W.
by ufmace | 2026-01-22 16:57:05+00:00
I get what you're saying, but I don't think punishing bad behavior is practical here. It's like a "enumerating badness" problem - there's way more bad actors with nothing to lose and not much practical way to punish them. There's too many of them and they all have no reputation to damage.

Not saying I have a better solution, just that it's a hard problem. Maybe dissuading some good people who have genuine security issues but don't feel like paying just has to be a cost of doing business.
by mrks_hy | 2026-01-22 16:57:14+00:00
You have it backwards. At the current cost curve for renewables and storage, Nuclear will never again be able to compete.

See: the overly optimistic SMR plans being predictably scrapped in many places.

What you do have is ample land to build out solar and export eg. Ammonia (made out of Hydrogen) for "free" energy.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-22 16:57:23+00:00
It's easy to miss, but in the middle of the page:

> 4609 remaining items

Seems gemini-cli and gemini-cli didn't understand who themselves were, so they though someone else added/removed the label, which it tried to correct, which the other then tried to correct, which the other...

Considering that that repository has what seems like ~10 longer term contributors, who probably get email notifications, together with a bunch of other people who get notifications about it, wonder how many emails were sent out because of this? If we just assume ten people get the emails, it's already 46K emails going out in under 24 hours...

Also, who pays for the inference of this gemini-cli? Clicking the "user" links to https://github.com/apps/gemini-cli, and it has a random GitHub user under "Developer", doesn't seem like it's a official Google project, so did someone pay for all of these inference calls here? That'd be a pretty sucky bill to pay...
by PeterWhittaker | 2026-01-22 16:58:01+00:00
The article and the comments herein remind me a conversation a few years ago with an ex RAF pilot who had done a few exchanges with the USAF. Among other things, pilot/personnel evaluations in the two organizations were worlds apart. In the RAF, at least during his time, they were what I would expect, more or less factual: Bloggins is good at X, needs to improve Y, excels at P, shouldn't do Q at all.

Meanwhile, in the USAF, anything that could even be perceived as negative was a career killer, so ratings started at mildly superlative and went up from there: Bloggins is an X top gun, is very good at Y, walks on water doing P, and is good with Q.

YMMV, of course, those are my recollections of beery convos with a former Tornado jockey.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-22 16:58:03+00:00
What "classic CI bug" makes bots talk with each other forever? Been doing CI for as long as I've been a professional developer, and not even once I've had that issue.

I've made "reply bots" before, bunch of times, first time on IRC, and pretty much the second or third step is "Huh, probably this shouldn't be able to reply to itself, then it'll get stuck in a loop". But that's hardly a "classic CI bug", so don't think that is what you're referring to right?
by krapp | 2026-01-22 16:58:11+00:00
I'm not the one magical exception, no. But I and Americans like myself are clearly not representative of mainstream culture or politics here. You can't argue for the overall humanism and empathy of mainstream American culture after we voted for Trump twice and while 40% of us still support the administration, ICE and everything that's happening here.

And of course when I say "mainstream" culture I mean "white." The cultures of oppressed people necessarily harbor more empathy than the culture of the oppressors.

And yes I'm white, too. Your attempt at a gotcha didn't work. Fuck off.
by dentemple | 2026-01-22 16:59:14+00:00
Also a counterpoint, but from the other side (from British Speculative fiction): Terry Pratchett's Discworld series

These books, written by a British author, are full of characters with strong wants who are roused into situation-defying action.

These books are also best-sellers on _both_ sides of the pond, and often share shelves with Adams.
by moregrist | 2026-01-22 16:59:47+00:00
You're also free to not use their free software.

You're paying exactly $0 for support for this software. So any support (eg: bug fixes) you get are a gift. That means that if you (1) use their software, (2) don't provide a good bug reports to help them fix their bugs, and (3) complain about how it's not your job to fix them then... you, my dear person, are acting like an entitled ass.

It's not hand-holding to provide a good bug report, it's essential to make the bug report actionable. curl is so widely-used that bugs often come from a combination of the software and the environment (OS, libraries, etc). Without enough details to reproduce a bug, then the bug is often impossible to track down. This means: recreate the environment, the actions that led to the bug, and create the bug itself.
by silisili | 2026-01-22 16:59:53+00:00
Fair! My comment was probably more dramatic than it needed to be, but I was trying to paint a picture as it kinda irks me when a lot people act like farmers are 'welfare queens' just taking money and living the good life. Not that OP did that, but it makes subsidies a 'dirty word.'

Subsidies is a hugely loaded term that would take more than a few comments to even begin to cover, but yes, they do cover those things that you mentioned, but a lot more than that. Heck they even sometimes pay farmers not to grow things at all - we used to get a check not to grow tobacco. I was a child then, I don't remember all the details.

Importantly, subsidies already include a federal crop insurance program that the government pays most of. That would cover most reasons for loss of crops. But there's also payments when say, you had a great year, but prices crashed through no fault of your own. And separate payments for say, farm animals catching disease and dying, or natural disasters. And separate payments for things like the messy situation COVID created. And a lot, lot more.

My comment was mainly with the lens of 'get rid of subsidies and buy your own insurance', and well, we see how well that works with health insurance. "Oh sorry Mr Smith, those cicadas were underground when you bought the farm, pre-existing condition, denied."
by tehryanx | 2026-01-22 16:59:58+00:00
The real problem here is that this is now the only way the maintainer/reporter can reasonably work.

Proving out a security vulnerability from beginning to end is often very difficult for someone who isn't a domain expert or hasn't seen the code. Many times I've been reasonably confident that an issue was exploitable but unable to prove it, and a 10s interaction with the maintainer was enough to uncover something serious.

Exhausting these report channels is making this unfeasible. But the number of issues that will go undetected, that would have been detected with minimal collaboration between the reporter and the maintainer, is going to be high.
by adamrezich | 2026-01-22 17:00:02+00:00
This is a 23-year-old game we're talking about here.

The design work was complete before anyone working on this project was hired by the studio, and proven in the form of a game that shipped several console generations ago. Ubisoft presumably still has all of the original art assets for reference.

All that had to be done was to study the original game code, port it for modern systems, and then polish up the visuals some. Not a trivial amount of work by any means, but much, much easier than starting from scratch and making a game from nothing.

This should've been a layup for any competent studio.

That it wasn't, is undeniable evidence of a AAA game development competency crisis.
by nickdothutton | 2026-01-22 17:00:05+00:00
The British do have a difficult or perhaps just different relationship with heroes vs the US IMO. Some study has been made of this in the past. Even in comic books, where writers have traditionally been afforded more freedom (morally, philosophically, martially/violence, sexually even). Even in pure fantasy/sci-fi (take WH40K as an example). There are many fine US creators/studios, and excellent output, but I don't think the satirical and political elements could have come from there.
by vidarh | 2026-01-22 17:00:06+00:00
> But a human developer, even a not so great one, might know something about the characteristics of the actual data a particular program is expected to encounter that is more efficient than this AI-coded hybrid sort for this particular application.

Sure. But then that belongs in a test case that 1) documents the assumptions, 2) demonstrates if a specialised solution actually improves on the naive implementation, and 3) will catch regressions if/when those assumptions no longer holds.

In my experience in that specific field is that odds are the human are likely making incorrect assumptions, very occasionally are not, and having a proper test harness to benchmark this is essential to validate the assumptions whether or not the human or an AI does the implementation (and not least in case the characteristics of the data end up changing over time)
by ApolloFortyNine | 2026-01-22 17:00:07+00:00
>Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians.
>Canada here. 7.6kw on our roof for $0 out of pocket thanks to $5k grant and $8k interest free loan.

This very well may be true, but taken at face value Canada seems to be paying you around $7k to install solar panels on your roof (that's 8k interest free loan is losing out to inflation + any interest it would have earned).

Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however.