MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SirensOfTitan | 2026-01-05 02:25:06+00:00
> Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?

Yeah, this feels right. It's like a process of condensing: new ideas brought to life condense metaphors into more compact forms and so make language more dense and expressive. This idea reminds me of Julian Jaynes's description of metaphor condensation in Origin of Consciousness.

A lot of hard work goes into novel products, but once that work has been proven, it is substantially more trivial for human or machine to copy. Groping around in the darkness of new, at the edge of what-could-be is difficult work that looks simple in hindsight to others who consider that edge a given now.

> The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?

Yeah, I think that naming and grouping things, then condensing them (through portmanteau construction or other means) is an underrated way to learn. I call this "personal taxonomy," and it's an idea I've been working on for a little bit. There is just tremendous value in naming patterns you personally notice, not taking another person's or group's name for things, and most importantly: allow those names to move, condense, fall away, and the like.

I left out a piece of my fragment above wherein I posit that a more constrained form of natural language to LLMs would likely lead to better results. Constraining interaction with LLM to a series of domain-specific metaphors, potentially even project specific givens, might allow for better outcomes. A lot of language is unspecific, and the technical documents that would truly detail a novel approach to an LLM require a particularly constrained kind of language to be successful where ambiguity is minimized and expressiveness maximalized (legal documents attempt at minimal ambiguity). I won't go into details there, I'm likely poorly reiterating a lot of the arguments that Dijkstra made here:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
by huali | 2026-01-05 02:25:11+00:00
Most AI coding tools fail at large-scale refactoring because they lack a structural understanding of the code's "gravity."

I've been experimenting with applying the Label Propagation Algorithm (LPA) to AST dependency graphs. By treating variables and functions as nodes, we can identify communities (clusters) within a single file.

I integrated this into a tool for Claude Code called VHO. It helps dismantle monolithic React/Vue hooks by grounded mathematical analysis rather than just LLM prediction.

Technical breakdown:

AST Parsing: To build the reference graph.
LPA: To find the optimal boundaries for extraction.
Agentic Execution: Using Claude Code to perform the actual file I/O and refactoring.
Is graph-theory-assisted refactoring the future of AI coding? I'd love to discuss the methodology.

Link: https://github.com/zcf0508/vue-hook-optimizer
by siliconc0w | 2026-01-05 02:25:23+00:00
Software is a perfect public good. Once it is created, unlimited copies can be given away for free and everyone benefits.

Public goods have a free rider problem. One way to solve this is to turn a public good into a private good through a legal fiction called "intellectual property". While this is one way to solve this, it does so with tremendous societal cost - effectively denying a useful tool to the vast majority so that a small number have an incentive to pay for it.

So yes you can charge for software and people do but it's probably not the optimal way to organize a society.
by Marsymars | 2026-01-05 02:25:41+00:00
> I think EVs have hit that saturation point where everyone who wanted one has bought one

I don't think so. In my immediate family we've got a combined six cars and one EVs. If we all had to replace our cars today we'd probably be looking at 4/6 EVs. But cars have long lives, and none of our cars are slated for imminent replacement.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-05 02:26:02+00:00
> This also means that, when an era changes, the Gregorian year will have two imperial year designations, for example 1989 is both Showa 64 and Heisei 1, depending whether the day of the year is before or after the imperial transition.

This isn't unusual. For example, the American calendar year 2024 belongs to both the school year "2023-2024" and the school year "2024-2025".

The general phenomenon here is "sometimes things begin when it isn't calendar New Year's Day", which is universal to all cultures.
by mothballed | 2026-01-05 02:26:05+00:00
They banned a website as a gun:

https://rcmp.ca/sites/default/files/dam/pfl-1229-a.pdf

#144117 on page 30 -- "AR15.com" "ARFCOM" listed as a 5.56mm semi-auto rifle.

That's a website. There is no such firearm, and arf15.com an American run organization does not hold a manufacturer FFL. Arfcom is a common short name for the message board.
by spankibalt | 2026-01-05 02:26:12+00:00
> "It’s possible to be someone who’s very good at writing quality programs but still enjoy delegating as much of that as possible to AI to focus on other things."

That's true, Jimbo. And besides the point, because:

1. It wasn't about someone who's very good at writing quality programs, but someone who perceives themselves as someone who "is not the man who can build working programs". Do you comprehend the difference?

2. The enjoyment of using slopware wasn't part of the argument (see my answer to the question). That's not something I remotely care about. For the question my answer referred to, please see the cited text before the question mark. <3

3. People who define the very solution to the problem as "isn't super useful" do at least two things:

They misunderstood, or misunderstand, their capabilities in problem solving/solutions, and most likely (have) delude(d) themselves, and...

They look down on people who actually have done, do, and will do the legwork to solve these very problems ("Your work isn't super useful"). Back in the day we called 'em lamers and/or posers.

I hope that clears things up.
by Matheus28 | 2026-01-05 02:26:24+00:00
Client-server multiplayer games are already kind of a very specialized type of video playback if you squint a bit (you're transmitting entities rather than pixels).

This method of multiplayer you propose is inferior in basically every way: you can't do client-side prediction to make inputs feel smoother, and non-trivial scenes will surely take up more bandwidth than just transmitting entity deltas.
by ehnto | 2026-01-05 02:26:36+00:00
I worked on some software that provided results to some calculations to general web users, not experts. The calcs were done in miliseconds.

We had to introduce an artificial delay of ~30 seconds to make it seem like it was taking a while to calculate, because users were complaining that it was too fast. They either didn't believe we really did the calcs, or they thought the system must have broken so they didn't trust the results.
by dwaltrip | 2026-01-05 02:27:13+00:00
You gotta give yourself a bit more slack. We all deserve to rest and go slow now and then. What's the point of living if you can't take a break?

We are chaotic and beautiful bundles of dozens of trillions of cells that evolved over 4 billion years. We breath. We feel. We are alive. We aren't math problems that need to be "solved" or "optimized".

> Which, to me, makes sense because you’re supposed to always be pushing yourself. You’re not supposed to ever feel comfortable or feel better from it. You should always feel shitty because if it doesn’t hurt then you’re probably not making optimal development.

You are way too demanding of yourself my friend :(
by wilg | 2026-01-05 02:28:40+00:00
I'm trying to understand if it's actually true that he did not "opt in" to OneDrive and that his files "one day appeared" there, which seems unlikely. I'm not here to say Microsoft is capable of designing or engineering anything properly, but I'm trying to understand if this is a bug, dark pattern, "user error", or what.

Backups of course would have helped.
by safety1st | 2026-01-05 02:29:25+00:00
Stillness isn't only enjoyable (for some), it's incredibly valuable. Stoicism and Buddhism both talk a lot about it and they're not the only ones. I make a point of sitting comfortably and doing nothing with no stimuli for 5-10 minutes every morning.

Inevitably when you're still with no distractions, your subconscious starts surfacing various thoughts. There is a random element to what pops into your head, but there will also be patterns. Just sitting there and observing, and maybe asking yourself a few questions about what emerges, is an incredible way to become aware of your emotional state, stay grounded to your goals, and remember what truly matters to you. This exercise frequently reorders my plans for the rest of the day.

There's also value in stillness when you're in public or with other people. Just shutting up and taking in your surroundings for 30-60 seconds is kind of like a mini superpower, you start noticing little things that other people don't see. Many of the little decisions you make automatically throughout the day get better if you just, y'know, sit there and think about them quietly for 1 minute. You end up going to a better restaurant, or remembering to call a loved one, because you simply took a moment to just pause and reflect.

It's the best thing in the world really. All this mindfulness stuff has profound benefits.
by xyzzy123 | 2026-01-05 02:29:44+00:00
All those sorts of protections seem like they make sense for every worker rather than being "tech" specific. I do understand that collective bargaining could help with carving out sector-specific deals, though.

I wonder if there is a difference in context that explains why we might disagree. I'm in Australia where I think it's politically easier to "add" broad top level protections for all workers than it would be in the US.
by spankibalt | 2026-01-05 02:30:37+00:00
One day you actually might discover there's different levels of literacy. Like there's something between 0 and 255!

Here's a pointer: Not being able to read (terminus technicus: analphabet) makes you a non-reader, just as not being able to cobble together a working proggie on your own merits makes you a non-coder. Man alive...
by gamewithnoname | 2026-01-05 02:31:41+00:00
Exactly.

What makes it even more odd for me is they are mostly describing doing nothing when using their agents. I see the "providing important context, setting guardrails, orchestration" bits appended, and it seems like the most shallow, narrowest moat one can imagine. Why do people believe this part is any less tractable for future LLMs? Is it because they spent years gaining that experience? Some imagined fuzziness or other hand-waving while muttering something about the nature of "problem spaces"? That is the case for everything the LLMs are toppling at the moment. What is to say some new pre-training magic, post-training trick, or ingenious harness won't come along and drive some precious block of your engineering identity into obsolescence? The bits about 'the future is the product' are even stranger (the present is already the product?).

To paraphrase theophite on Bluesky, people seem to believe that if there is a well free for all to draw from, that there will still exist a substantial market willing to pay them to draw from this well.
by vunderba | 2026-01-05 02:32:54+00:00
Unless you’ve got an eidetic memory, the only things that will really make them stick long-term are consistent reinforcement either through practical application (e.g., immersion) or spaced repetition (SRS).

I personally take the time to create visual and often highly inappropriate mnemonics for each new vocabulary word I learn, connecting the foreign language’s sound to an English homophone.

The upfront cost is significantly higher, but it pays off since my long-term retention rate significantly improves though you won't see me publishing a shared Anki deck for the public any time soon.

Quick SFW Example: The Russian word for "bed" is "кровать" which sounds a bit like cravat which is a kind of scarf.

Then a sample story might be, "A distinguished and dapper gentleman with a luxuriously thick fur cravat lays down in his bed. He proceeds to unroll the cravat to fashion a comforter blanket to keep him warm before going to sleep."
by abex3000 | 2026-01-05 02:33:25+00:00
>What I learned was:

>• Almost nobody else in engineering did this.

>• I was considered weird for doing it.

>• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees.

>• An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic.

>• The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring

Sincerely, thank you for confirming my anecdotal but long-standing observations. My go-to joke about this is that Google employees are officially banned from even visiting user forums. Because otherwise, there is no other logical explanation why there are 10+ years old threads where uses are reporting the same issue over and over again, etc.

Good engineering in big tech companies (I work for one, too) has evaporated and turned into Promotion Driven Development.

In my case: write shitty code, cut corners, accumulate tech debt, ship fast, get promo, move on.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2026-01-05 02:34:21+00:00
>To save free speech we must stop funding people who theorize in bad faith

To believe this in a meaningful, rational way would require one to constantly call out administrations and propagandists, after months and years of debunking evidences the methods to serially operate in bad faith.

In the absence of any calling out: We can reasonably surmise they are either captured by political cultists and not processing rationally - or that they are simply operating in bad faith.

Granting, however, that some percent of folks simply get off on bad actors and the harm they do to those who never earned that. For them, cruelty brings it's own buzz and that is enough.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-05 02:35:51+00:00
> What the other commenters are discussing is doing it on the record. That's the whole point of the thread

Okay, take the workflow that I presented. I'm a private citizen. I'm not creating a log-in to some government git. I'm literally saying I think this law has this problem, and then I'm being asked to fix it. So I try to fix it, collecting the input I need to so, and then send back my recommendation. This simply isn't a flow that survives being overly formalised.

> that's different from pretending not to understand how it would work if it were implemented

I'm not pretending, I literally don't see it. We already have official committee versions, et cetera. What are you going to do, make it a prosecutable offense for two staffers to discuss a bill over coffee?

The top of this thread claims it's difficult to impossible to determine who made these contributions to this North Dakota bill. Maybe it is. I don't know enough about their legislative process to refute that. But I'm going to guess it probably isn't, at least to the point that you can figure out which LegCo version first contained these fake minerals, and who submitted that.
by ehnto | 2026-01-05 02:36:12+00:00
I don't disagree with you, except that a career can stagnate. Maybe you are already working in your ideal role, solving cool problems every day. Maybe moving up the ladder nets you more money but less of what you actually want in life.

Less a comment for yourself and more for the reader by the way. It is important to know what you want and strive for that.
by brunoborges | 2026-01-05 02:36:54+00:00
Indeed, how documentation is written is key. But funny enough, I have been a strong advocate that documentation should always be written in Reference Docs style, and optionally with additional Scenario Docs.

The former is to be consumed by engineers (and now LLMs), while the later is to be consumed by humans.

Scenario Docs, or use case docs, are what millions of blog articles were made of in the early days, then we turned to Stack Overflow questions/answers, then companies started writing documentation in this format too. Lots of Quick Starts for X, Y, and Z scenarios using technology K. Some companies gave away completely on writing reference documentation, which would allow engineers to understand the fundamentals of technology K and then be able to apply to X, Y, and Z.

But now with LLMs, we can certainly go back to writing Reference docs only, and let LLMs do the extra work on Scenario based docs. Can they hallucinate still? Sure. But they will likely get most beyond-basic-maybe-not-too-advanced scenarios right in the first shot.

As for using LLMs to write docs: engineers should be reviewing that as much as they should be reviewing the code generated by AI.
by mothballed | 2026-01-05 02:39:04+00:00
>ut when I try to find the judge's order exactly copying the proposed order I'm not seeing it

You'll have to sift through them because it happens some of the time not all of the time. The example I gave was how they did it, if you wanted a 1:1 example in that case of the judge just signing off verbatim below ought to fit:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.589...

and

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.589...

look identical to me, and if not damn near it.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-05 02:39:59+00:00
They tried fixing that by creating widgets, but effectively had the same problem. Then they tried fixing that by making them always present, but then you just lose desktop space. I guess it makes sense if you have two monitors, but at that point, why not just have the full apps open in those same spots? Widgets are a great idea that I wish we could make useful somehow.
by scoofy | 2026-01-05 02:41:04+00:00
This is exactly the type of unhelpful response I’d have gotten on stack overflow. Yes, if I’d not been worse at coding a decade ago, I wouldn’t be revisiting the code in the first place.

The point of the redundancy of very clear, descriptive variable names, is that the code is going to suck tomorrow, even if it is good today. Future me is always going to look down on today me. The difference is that I planing for that, so maybe I can help out future me by being verbose, even if it isn’t necessary for much of the code that ends up being fine.

When I have a nasty bug, I don’t want to waste a day on something that could have been clear if I’d just explained it properly.
by jagged-chisel | 2026-01-05 02:41:08+00:00
If there’s any amount of irony in your comment, I’m missing it - and I apologize for that.

That said, people have built this without LLMs years, even decades, ago. But UX has fallen by the wayside for quite some time in the companies that used to build IDEs. Then some fresher devs come along and begin a project without the benefit of experience in a codebase with a given feature … and after some time someone writes a plugin for VSCode to provide documentation tooltips generated by LLM because “there is just no other way it can be done.”

We have language servers for most programming languages. Those language servers provide the tokens one needs to use when referencing the documentation. And it would be so much faster than waiting for an LLM to get back to you.

TBH, if anyone’s excuse is “an LLM is the only way to implement feature Q,” then they’re definitely in need of some experience in software creation.
by dmitrygr | 2026-01-05 02:41:20+00:00
“Why don’t we do $thing_that_decisively_failed instead of $thing_that_evolved_to_beat_all_other_approaches?” Usually this sort of question comes from a lack of understanding of the history of the failure of the first and the success of the second.

The fence principle always applies “don’t tear down a fence till you understand why it was built”

Linear address spaces allow for how computers actually operate - layers. Objects are hard to deal with by layers who don’t know about them. Bytes aren’t. They are just bytes. How do you page out “an object”? Do I now need to solve the knapsack problem to efficiently tile them on disk based on their most recent use time and size? …1000 other things…
by jcranmer | 2026-01-05 02:42:22+00:00
There is a bigger underlying point, which is there is no trump weapon that defeats everything in war [1]. Everything has a counter, and if you're basing your entire strategy on saying that this weapon doesn't have a counter that we know of yet, well, you'll find that counters quickly get developed (see, e.g., the evolution of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War).

Ripper's argument that his tactics "won" the Millennium Challenge strike me as rather similar to the thoughts behind the Jeune École school of naval warfare, which argued for the use of massed small ships (torpedo boats) to counter battleships... except that had an easy counter in the form of the (torpedo boat) destroyer, and most naval theorists generally agree that the French Navy's embrace of Jeune École ended up doing more harm than good to their navy.

[1] The closest thing to a counterexample here is nuclear bombs, for which there isn't really a meaningful defense. Except that the use of nuclear bombs is predicated on the theory of strategic air bombing, which has been promising an easy-win button for wars for a century now, has been tried in every major conflict since then, and whose could-even-be-argued-as-maybe-a-successes in that timeframe can be counted on one hand, with some fingers missing. I'm galled that you still have military personnel and advisors today who advocate for its success, given its track record of the complete opposite.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-05 02:43:05+00:00
For one, this is not really a whitepaper. For two, this C code doesn't pass the most cursory of smell checks. And three, your commit messages seem to confirm that most of this is LLM-generated.

You might have some good research here, but it's buried under LLM slop. This style of writeup is not likely to grab Nvidia's attention, I think.
by _wire_ | 2026-01-05 02:43:41+00:00
tl;dr summary:

visible light cameras are typical sensors for lane occupancy.

Car position at light has an effect on vehicle sensing but sensor areas are designed to account for normal traffic patterns.

Certain visibility situations can cause a vehicle to be overlooked during lane queue attention. Headlights help ensure attention. If you're being overlooked turn on lights.

The queueing network may penalize individual traffic that outlies herd; rushing or dilly-dallying is only helpful to rejoin the herd. Following the posted speeds and keeping with the herd is optimal.

A considerable degree of config deals will failsafe for equipment problems or loss of networking.

A strobe system fitted to emergency vehicles allow emergency traffic to be prioritized.

The controller being presented runs on a linux. Siemens makes key modules in the controller cabinet.