MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandv | 2026-01-06 14:54:29+00:00
I don't know. You may as well say that after reading Uncle Bob's Clean Code and adding 50 layers of indirection, you are now writing at "enterprise scale." Perhaps you even hired an Agile SCUM consultant, and now look at your velocity (at least they're measuring something)!

Use my abstract factory factories and inversion of control containers. With Haskell your entire solution is just a 20-line mapreduce in a monad transformer stack over IO. In J, it's 20 characters.

I don't see how AI differs. Rather, the last study of significance found that devs were gaslighting themselves into believing they were more productive, when the data actually bore the opposite conclusion [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772
by aglavine | 2026-01-06 14:54:52+00:00
I don't know why I was downvoted for just asking a question.

I don't get it. Suppose this scenario:

- Instead of big formations, replace each wagon with an electric minibus.
- Instead of stopping in all stations, each minibus stops in, lets say 3 or 4.
- Each passenger checks into the bus dinamically assigned to their stop.
- Minibuses can surpass each other.

You have less dwell time, each ride is reduced to one third of the time.
by svat | 2026-01-06 14:54:52+00:00
For what it's worth, the article posted here is not from 2024, but from this week: "Published : Jan. 4, 2026", and contains original reporting (quotes from the researcher).

The mention of "Scientific American" in this article refers to something more recent:

> US magazine Scientific American named the research by Baek Jin-eon among its top 10 mathematical breakthroughs of 2025

This is a reference presumably to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-top-10-math-d... "The 10 Biggest Math Breakthroughs of 2025"
(dated December 19, 2025). It's more recent than your link https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-so... "Mathematicians Solve Infamous ‘Moving Sofa Problem’" (dated February 4, 2025).

November 2024 is when he posted the preprint on the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.19826 "Optimality of Gerver's Sofa" (submitted on 29 Nov 2024).

There has been other reporting since then, such as in Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-largest-sofa-you-can-move... "The Largest Sofa You Can Move Around a Corner" (dated February 14, 2025).

The paper is still under review at the Annals of Mathematics, so there will be likely be another round of reporting when it has finished peer review and is published.
by general1465 | 2026-01-06 14:55:15+00:00
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

No we don't. In Eastern Block during communism everything was either expensive or unavailable to the point that picking up broken TV on the side of the road and dismantling it for parts was making complete sense and you could actually learn something.

Today it is much easier. You can visit eBay or AliExpress and buy old server crap from 2016 - i.e. Xeon E3 + X99 board + 32GB DDR4 RAM = 150EUR or just buying older laptops, computers from eBay. That's where consumer market is heading.

The fact that hardware is going to be computationally constrained will finally force software developers to stop wasting resources. Having application which is able to run on old Windows 10 with i3 and 4GB of RAM without being sluggish will become competing advantage.
Show HN: PonderTTT – Training-free adaptive compute for LLMs via TTT gating
by deveworld | 2026-01-06 14:55:35+00:00
Hi HN,

This is my first project/paper (independent work; I’m a high school student in Korea).

PonderTTT explores when to run Test-Time Training (TTT) updates instead of updating on every segment.

The gate is training-free: it uses the TTT layer's self-supervised reconstruction loss to decide UPDATE vs SKIP.

A single threshold is calibrated on unlabeled data and adapted online via EMA to maintain a target update rate.

In GPT-2 code language modeling experiments (124M–1.5B), this reached 82–89% Oracle Recovery and improved over Random Skip baselines on some OOD languages (up to 16% lower loss).

Note: v1 experiments are JAX/Flax on GPUs. I'm working on a v2 scale-up to Gemma 3 (TPU).

I'd really appreciate feedback on:

1) whether reconstruction loss is a sensible gating signal in practice,

2) evaluation/baselines you think are important for this setting.
by titzer | 2026-01-06 14:55:53+00:00
C was my first language, more than thirty years ago. I've heard (and probably myself made) the same arguments over and over and over. But those arguments are lame and wrong.

C cannot be made safe (at scale). It's like asbestos. In fact, C is a hazardous material in exactly the same way as asbestos. Naturally occurring, but over industrialized and deployed far too widely before its dangers were known. Still has its uses but it will fuck you up if you do not use industrial-grade PPE.

Stop using C if you can. Stop arguing other people should use it. There have always been alternatives and the opportunity cost of ecosystems continuing to invest in C has massive externalized costs for the entire industry and society as a whole.
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-06 14:55:54+00:00
> The US government recently called on everyone to stop using them and move to memory-safe languages.

The US government also _really_ (no sarcasm) cares about safety-critical code that can be formally verified, depending on program requirements. DO-178, LOR1, el. al.

Developing those toolchains costs tens of millions, getting them certified costs tens of millions, and then buying those products to use costs 500k-1.5m a pop.

Those toolchains do not exist for rust. I am only aware of these toolchains existing for C, and old C at that.

Hell, rust doesn't even have a formal spec, which is a bit of a roadblock.
by toastal | 2026-01-06 14:55:54+00:00
> Free
> Privacy-focused

> GitHub (Microsoft)
> Cloudflare

Which is it? These US megacorporations are respecting neither users’ privacy nor their freedom.

https://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html

https://httptoolkit.com/blog/public-cdn-risks/

Also not to be confused with PRISM Break <https://prism-break.org/>
by catapart | 2026-01-06 14:56:02+00:00
my big gripe with them is that they aren't part of a "developer" package my operating system offers. I wouldn't, personally, consider any of these utilities "bloatware", if they were just on my machine. They do something useful, even if I rarely need to do those things. But even if we say that those apps would be "bloat" for an OS, I should still be able to open the package manager and get a vendor-supplied package that includes a bunch of utilities like this. Not a third-party "if you know, you know" situation. Windows Development Utilities. Ubuntu devutils. DevToolKit on MacOS. Etc. Included as a toggle on the OS install screen, even.

But like... this is the kind of stuff I want an Operating System to provide. Not just paging and networking and file storage, and so on, but also utilities for me to operate the system specifically the way I want to at any given time. Basic text entry, word processing, and - yes - text manipulation utilities. Color space utilities. Randomizing utilities. Password and cryptographic utilities. All of those with familiar UIs that can be iterated on by the OSes and relied upon by the devs.
by jacobr1 | 2026-01-06 14:56:24+00:00
Depends on the service, and timeframes. For geforcenow, you also need to consider the upgrade cycle - how often would you need to upgrade to play a newer game? I'm not sure but probably at least once within that 8 years. Buying a new car, or almost new car, and driving it until it falls apart is a better financial option than leasing. But if you want a new car every year or two, leasing is more affordable - for that scenario. Also it depends on usage. My brother in law probably plays a video game once every other month. At that point, on demand pricing (or borrowing for me) is much better than purchase or consistent subscription. You need to run the numbers.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-06 14:56:56+00:00
Not really, no.

The main difference is that you don't know how many code points you have in the prefix as they use variable encoding so it can be up to four but as little as one. I imagine the choice of four bytes for the prefix was actually done specifically for this reason. That's the maximum length of a UTF-8 code point.

The length is not the number of characters anymore but just the size of the string.

Apart from that, it should work exactly the same.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-06 14:57:32+00:00
> Vertically integrated companies evade profit caps on their insurance division by shifting money to their unregulated provider, PBM, or labs divisions. It's pretty simple: the insurance arm overpays its own subsidiary doctors and clinics and records these internal transfers as mandatory "medical care" which is recorded as loss on the insurance side. The parent company then pockets the excess money as unrestricted profit on the provider/PBM/lab side, effectively bypassing the legal limit on how much insurance revenue they can keep and completely destroying the incentive to manage costs through their insurance division, at least when those costs originate from their own providers, which given that e.g. UHG is now the largest employer of doctors in the US, is increasingly often!

Yes, UNH does better than the other managed care organizations because their healthcare business has higher margins than their insurance business. But it’s certainly not arbitrary, and it’s apparently not enough to make their shares worth buying.

>Is it fraudulent, corrupt, or collusive for a health insurer to employ doctors who deliver care? Not per se, but it gives insurers the ability to more or less arbitrarily convert premium dollars into profit while still getting people to defend them with claims like "they've been underperforming the SP500 for more than a decade."

The silly claim is stating managed care organizations are booking outsize profits, yet they don’t show up in 10-Ks or even shateholders’ pockets.

Underperformance relative to SP500 is a factual claim. 2% to 3% profit margin (objectively a tiny profit margin is a factual claim for 7 different businesses.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-01-06 14:57:40+00:00
There is something slightly with the system if people are actually even thinking about posts in terms like this. "The other guy stole my spotlight?" Do people somehow make money from their HN post stats? I guess somehwere some how some people probably do.

I do obvioulsy recognize that at a low level it's fundamental human nature to apply those kinds of game/competition thoughts to literally everything in life, but still it seems like this would be a case where the act of thinking about it consciously enough to write it down, is enough to make one realize it sounds silly.
by nostrademons | 2026-01-06 14:57:53+00:00
The problem is the precedent that sets. Russia launches a nuke on Ukraine, and there are no repercussions. That will teach every nuclear-armed state that they can freely nuke non-nuclear-armed states without consequence. But then what happens when somebody makes a mistake? China nukes Japan, but maybe Japan had a secret nuclear program and actually does have a retaliatory capability and nukes China back? Or China invades Taiwan (doesn't even have to nuke it), but the U.S. decides that the loss of Taiwanese semiconductor is actually an unacceptable red line and nukes the invasion fleet? Pakistan nukes India, but China misjudges the trajectory of the nuke and thinks it's actually under attack. Israel nukes Iran, but winds carry the fallout over Pakistan and India.

Game theory works when players know the payout matrix. When the assumed payout matrix is shown to be false, you get very chaotic, almost random results, because you can't assume that your opponents will correctly choose the rational choice. With WMDs, the consequences of that can be deadly. That's why both nuclear proliferation and "limited" nuclear war are such fraught choices, and why the major nuclear powers have worked so hard to avoid them. They've run the game theoretic simulations and understand that it doesn't lead anywhere good.
by dspillett | 2026-01-06 14:58:05+00:00
Unless your government is entirely forced upon you, they're is only so far the populace can distance itself from them. The majority of the bad crap this American administration is doing and has done was predicted, heck a lot of it they effectively promised during & before the election, yet nearly two thirds of the population either directly voted for it or sat on their elbows and let it happen.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-06 14:58:12+00:00
You would need to be incredibly careful with compiling old C89 code on a modern compiler. It's not the language changes that would get you, it's a change in how compilers treat undefined behavior.

There has always been undefined behavior in C, but back in the day, compilers were nowhere near as aggressive in taking advantage of it to make your code faster. Most C programmers tended to treat C as portable assembly and not a language with rules that needed to be respected for it to not blow up your code.

I remember this being endlessly groused over by grognard, traditionalist C programmera, and more than a few of them switched to C++ as a result. After all, if the language was going to be a stickler about correctness, they might as well use a language with the features that meant they didn't have to reach into that bag of tricks.
by antirez | 2026-01-06 14:58:15+00:00
It is also worth to note that the Rust design, in its theory, and the recent bug in the Linux kernel Rust code (the message passing abstraction used by Android), makes clear that:

1. With Rust, you may lower the exposure, but the same classes of bug still remain. And of course, all the other non memory related bugs.

2. With C you may, if you wish, develop a big sensibility to race conditions, and stay alert. In general it is possible that C programmers have their "bugs antenna" a bit more developed than other folks.

3. With Rust, to decrease the "unsafe" sections amount, you need often to build abstractions that may be a bit unnatural.

4. Rust may create a false sense of security, and in the unsafe sections the programmer sometimes, when reviewing the code, is falsely convinced by the mandatory SAFETY comment, that, like in the Linux Kernel bug, was hallucinated by a human that sometimes (not sure in this case) may be less incline to do the mental gym (races antennas) C learns to do.

5. With Rust, in case of a bug, the fix could no longer be the one-liner usually you see in C fixes, and can make the time window larger.

6. With C, if there was the same amount of effort in creating wrappers to make kernel programming safer at the cost of other things, the surface of attack could also be lowered in a significant way (see for instance Redis use of sds.c: how direct string / pointers manipulation we avoid? The same for other stuff of course).

So, is Rust an interesting language for certain features it has? Yes. Is Rust a silver bullet? No. So should Rust be "pushed" to others, Hell, no, and I suggest you to reply in the most firm way to people stressing you out to adopt Rust at all the costs.
by gordian-mind | 2026-01-06 14:58:32+00:00
I think the main issue with this article is that their author is misguided in what overall creates peace and prosperity on Earth, and what creates misery and poverty. Western-style billionaires do the former, as their wealth is created by providing services to people. If the author does not see this, I don't think their global vendetta concerns me.

Also, I don't care about jailbreaking. It was a fun activity when I was a teen, but it feels more like an ego-trip than anything by this point.
by MaxHoppersGhost | 2026-01-06 14:58:47+00:00
Canada has a strong army and can defend itself. Greenland on the other hand is not well defended and I doubt Denmark really cares (e.g., if they’re willing to send tens of thousands of troops to die for it) if it was occupied by China or Russia in the event of a war.

Greenland is a massive strategic liability for the US and Europe (although the EU still has its head in the sand they are starting to wake up some).
by rimunroe | 2026-01-06 14:58:55+00:00
I'm in Massachusetts and have been doing the same thing with our lawn in the five years since becoming a homeowner. We rake leaves away from the house a few times in the fall to make our house less attractive to mice and then run the mower around to mulch those piles and whatever else is in the yard. I let the leaves sit where the mower drops them, although I occasionally put the hopper on the mower and collect a few to throw into garden beds to help our plants overwinter. A lot of the trees around our property are oaks, which have leaves which take a while to break down, but when they're cut into tiny bits they seem to go away quickly enough. Overall it's worked quite well. It's low effort and is far less disruptive than blowing leaves around, especially with an electric mower.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-06 14:58:56+00:00
Every serious project should be able to justify its choice of tools. "Because I feel like it" is fine for hobby projects or open-source passion projects, but production-worthy software should have reasoning behind its choices. That reasoning can be something like "it's most effective for us because we know it better" but it should be a deliberate, measured choice.

SQLite is an example of an extremely high quality software project. That encompasses not only the quality of the software itself, but the project management around it. That includes explaining various design choices, and this document explaining the choice of language is just one of many such explanations.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-06 14:58:57+00:00
Well these days we are actively avoiding using "helicopters you can shoot down with just about anything" for ANY engagements...I wouldn't count on those showing up anywhere hostile unless we are in a full-scale conventional war. And there were f-22's, f-35s (for the express purpose of drawing fire, which didn't happen) and unknown other aircraft that showed up to the Iran operation as well
by aragoss | 2026-01-06 14:59:11+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the creator of Chaos Proxy.

I built this because debugging HTTP traffic with local proxies (like Charles or Proxyman) has become a bottleneck for me. Getting a GUI app running in CI is painful, and sharing a specific failing request with a colleague usually means sending screenshots or huge export files.

Chaos Proxy is a managed MITM proxy running in the cloud. It solves the "it works on my machine" problem by giving you a shareable URL for your traffic logs.

How it works:

1. You get a dedicated proxy endpoint (e.g., `chaos-proxy.debuggo.app:8080`).

2. Configure your device/simulator to point there and install the CA cert.

3. Traffic flows through an isolated Docker container (running mitmproxy) where we apply chaos rules (latency, 500 errors) or simply inspect JSON.

The Stack:

- Core: Python & mitmproxy scripting API. Custom addons handle the chaos logic (bandwidth throttling, status code injection).

- Orchestration: Next.js 16 (App Router) interacts with Docker Engine to spin up a fresh container for every project.

- Sync: Redis acts as the bridge. Changing a delay rule in the UI applies it instantly to the running proxy process.

- Storage: Supabase (Postgres) for metadata.

Note on Sign-up: Since each session spins up a real, isolated Docker container, I require a sign-up to prevent abuse. However, no email verification or credit card is required — you can jump straight into the dashboard in 10 seconds.

Privacy: Logs are ephemeral (TTL 24h) and bodies are not stored permanently. This is designed strictly for dev/staging, not production traffic.

Happy to answer questions about the orchestration logic or how we handle the mitmproxy addons!
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-06 14:59:23+00:00
Had to spend ~$200/ea on refurbished EXOS for work (14TB) when I got refurbished 14TB ultra stars for $90/ea a year ago. It’s getting ridiculous. The ram I put in my gaming rig I built earlier this year was $100, now it’s $500. I want to say “it can’t stay this high forever” but who knows?
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-06 14:59:23+00:00
> Sure even if you pay a few thousand in rent, it may be the landlord only has a couple hundred of cash flow. Then, one repair on the home can easily wipe out a year or more of that. One bad tenants can wipe out a decade of it.

I love how this conveniently ignores the equity you acquired in this year and almost certainly the appreciation.

I went from renting for a decade plus to buying four years ago and while I have had to make repairs (replace HVAC, which I knew about at purchase, replace electrical main panel), and things can be expensive, there’s definitely a contingent that likes to act like they need more protections as landlords because to listen to them just owning a home means writing a four digit check or credit card transaction every month if not more.
by dtagames | 2026-01-06 14:59:27+00:00
The current way to address this is through RAG applications or Retrieval Augmented Generation. This means using the LLM side for the natural language non-deterministic portion and using traditional code and databases and files for the deterministic part.

A good example is bank software where you can ask what your balance is and get back the real number. A RAG app won't "make up" your balance or even consult the training the find it. Instead, the traditional code (deterministic) operations are done separately from the LLM calls.
by icegreentea2 | 2026-01-06 14:59:53+00:00
There's a link to product brief PDF from the bottom of the press release. Page 9 and 10 have product tables. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/8713...

P-Core Max Frequency 5.1 on the highest end, and the lowest at 4.4.

There's no hyperthreading: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/now-youve-got-so...

Dunno about AVX and APX. They're not making it easy to find, so... probably not.
by ethin | 2026-01-06 14:59:57+00:00
> This is no longer true. Rust, Zig and likely others satisfy this requirements.

Rust and Zig satisfy this by being C ABI-compatible when explicitly requested. I'm pretty sure that that solution is not actually what the author meant. When you don't explicitly use `extern "C"` in Rust or `export` in Zig, the ABI is completely undefined and undocumented. I would go as far as arguing that the ABI problem, with Rust at least, is even worse than the ABI problem C++ has. Especially since Distros are (if memory serves) starting to ship Rust crates...
Ask HN: What kind of setup do you run for your children?
by mattwdelong | 2026-01-06 15:00:00+00:00
I have a 6 year old daughter I want to get setup with a custom desktop. I am thinking about running a custom Linux distribution on an old iMac (form factor) and lock it down via custom
DNS/keep it offline. Curious what you are running for your kids?
by asveikau | 2026-01-06 15:00:29+00:00
I used to think this way many years ago, then I saw my own code in production hit OOM errors and manage to recover, and even log what was happening so I could read about it later.

After those experiences I agree with the sibling comment that calls your position "bullshit". I think people come to your conclusion when they haven't experienced a system that can handle it, so they're biased to think it's impossible to do.
by ozmodiar | 2026-01-06 15:00:33+00:00
Why stop at international law? It's no different than a lot of civil, financial, criminal law. You just get big enough and now there's nothing the system can do about you. It's become increasingly apparent that having the right friends and enough money is the only 'law' that matters at any level of society, and people will be too disengaged or selfish to do anything about it besides reap the rewards if they're in the right place. Laws only work on the disempowered, and in that sense international law is exactly as powerful as the law of the land in whatever country you live in.